The digital revolution has rapidly transformed the world. Along the move from whale-sized computers to plankton-sized chips, our lives have been impacted in countless ways and as evident from our plunge into the next wave — AI, IoT and automation — the surge is ongoing. And yet, the technology that has largely powered this evolution has not paralleled this progression in its own maturation.

Today, we still use the archaic internet infrastructure that was devised at the energetic end of the previous millennium; moreover, operating systems even now approach the internet as an application rather than considering connectivity a core component alongside processing and storage. Consequently, we find ourselves vulnerable to hackers and bad actors, big tech and large corporations, and invasive regimes.

To ensure our safety, to bring the power of data back into the hands of its rightful owners and to lay the foundation for a transparent platform that will enable numerous new economies to emerge and flourish (and established ones to evolve), massive modifications are being made.

There is a pair of frontrunners in this era-defining movement toward digital liberation: Solid and Elastos. Two open-source projects, sparked by passionate leaders driven by an extraordinary vision, that will be developed for and by the people to change the world (wide web).

A SILK PATCH

One of these visionaries is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web as well as founder and director of the W3C: the consortium composed of multiple member organisations collaborating in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.

Over the years, Berners-Lee has shared his views on the polarity of his invention and in a recent post the knighted professor penned that “for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.”

The technology that brought us bold memes and “Nigerian prince” schemes rode the road to adoption with such velocity that we’ve deviated from the web as he envisaged it and moved into a place where underworking overbearing middlemen spy on and profit off our every action.

It is for these and many other substantial reasons that Berners-Lee and his peers have spent a decade and a half working on a solution, culminating in an exciting new project built to change the way we interact with applications: Solid.