The Very Best of the Internets

The web promised us a library. Here's where to find it.

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I read this account of a year without an iPhone with a kind of astonishment – not from any wish to imitate it, nor from private guilt, but from the grandeur of the undertaking itself. These slim devices hum at the edges of our hours, stitching together errands and affections, work and wandering thought, until they seem less objects than atmosphere. To lay one down deliberately for a year is to feel the air shift – and to learn again the shape of one’s own days.

In 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he imagined something almost utopian: an open, universal space where anyone, anywhere, could access and share information freely. No central authority. No corporate gatekeeper. No government owning the keys. The web would be decentralised, collaborative, built on open standards – a global library and laboratory, belonging to everyone.

At its best, that vision still flickers. The web remains a place that enables online learning, open research, and global open-source communities – where scientists, students, and developers work together across borders. It supports the free flow of information, giving people access to educational resources and public knowledge once limited by geography or privilege. It strengthens communities, helping individuals organise around social causes and mobilise support for positive change. A place where ideas travel in seconds, where anyone with a connection can publish, learn, create. It is still, astonishingly, open.

But openness was never the whole of it. Berners-Lee imagined the web as fundamentally collaborative and emancipatory – a tool for education, scientific discovery, creativity, and innovation; a system that would enable cooperation at unprecedented scale. Crucially, he believed individuals should retain authority over their own data, with privacy and transparency treated as principles, not afterthoughts. The web, in this view, was a public good – built not for profit or power, but for humanity's collective advancement.

Yet Berners-Lee has been equally clear about what troubles him. The web’s architecture may be open, but many of its dominant platforms are engineered to maximise attention and profit at almost any cost. Algorithms tuned for engagement tend to privilege outrage and extremity over nuance. Business models built on the extraction and sale of personal data steadily erode user control.¹ Misinformation travels faster than correction, and personalised feeds harden into echo chambers. Meanwhile, power has concentrated. A handful of corporations now mediate much of our public discourse, shaping what is seen, shared, and amplified. The same infrastructure that enables collaboration can, under different incentives, distort it.

So the question is not whether we abandon the internet – few of us can, or would. The question is subtler, and more interesting: how do we find the very best of it? How do we inhabit the web as citizens rather than products? How do we recover its spirit without renouncing its power?

For this reason, this week, I'm dedicating this letter to mapping the best of it – the web not as marketplace, not as theatre of outrage, not as algorithmic carnival, but as library, workshop, observatory, and refuge. Amid the noise, there remain corners that honour Berners-Lee's original vision: places where knowledge is shared freely, where learning requires no subscription, where the web still functions as it was meant to – as a public good, open to all. Corners built for curiosity rather than extraction, for depth rather than dopamine. What follows is a curated map of those places – proof that the better web still exists, waiting for those who seek it. The places that remind you it was always capable of enlarging your mind. You had just stopped looking.