UU.html 12.2 KB

Raw Blame History Permalink

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <link href="general.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
  <title>Tim Berners-Lee: WWW and UU and I</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" lang="en">
<p><a href="Overview.html">Tim Berners-Lee</a></p>

<h2>The World Wide Web and the "Web of Life"</h2>

<p>1998</p>

<p>People have often asked me whether the Web design was influenced by
Unitarian Universalist philosophy. I have to say that it wasn't explicitly,
as I developed the Web well before I came across Unitarian Universalism at
all. But looking back on it, I suppose that there are some parallels between
the philosophies.</p>

<h3>Where I'm coming from</h3>

<p>Like many people, I had a religious upbringing which I rejected as a
teenager: in my case it was a protestant Christian (Church of England)
upbringing. I rejected it just after being "confirmed" and told how essential
it was to believe in all kinds of unbelievable things. Since then I have
discovered that many of the people around me who were "Christians" in fact
used a sort of loose interpretation of some of that stuff, but it relieved a
great tension just to say no. In fact, confirmation is when you say "yes",
and well, we all make mistakes. In fact the need for the basis for Christian
philosophy but without the dogma was a vacuum for many years.</p>

<p>If you're used to other religions you might be confused by UUism being
called a religion, but it qualifies I think. Like many people, I came back to
religion when we had children. Why does everybody do this? Is it just that
one feels that values and things are important for kids though one wouldn't
have time for it otherwise? I hope not. Or is it that having kids is such a
direct, strong, stark experience that it brings thoughts of life and love
again bubbling up through the turgid morass which otherwise clogs our
thinking? Or is it that it gives us an excuse? But for whatever, happenstance
had our family living in the Boston area, where UU churches abound, and we
were lucky enough to hit on a great one, with a great minister.</p>

<p>Unitarian Universalists are people who are concerned about all the things
which your favorite religion is concerned about, but allow or even require
their belief to be compatible with reason. They are hugely tolerant and
decidedly liberal. The fundamental value and dignity of every human being is
a core philosophy, and they have a healthy respect for those whose beliefs
differ. They meet in churches instead of wired hotels, and discuss justice,
peace, conflict, and morality rather than protocols and data formats, but in
other ways the peer respect is very similar to that of the Internet
Engineering Task Force. Both are communities which I really appreciate.</p>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.uua.org/">The Unitarian Universality
  Association</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet Engineering Task
  Force</a></li>
</ul>

<h3>Can you compare?</h3>

<p>And in fact, when you look at the way Unitarians feel society works, and
the way a lot of the Internet and the Web works, it might be fun to draw some
comparisons. Let's take this all with a pinch of salt. People, after all, are
people, and machines are machines. Unitarians do not have a peer respect for
machines! But let's do it as an exercise.</p>

<h3>Decentralization</h3>

<p>The Internet community always used to be decentralized as the Internet
itself. Newsgroups have no central server, and no central authority to
determine what is and what isn't a new group. When I was developing the Web
in 1990, the Internet development community was largely academic in
membership and had a very academic style. People were and are judged on what
they say rather than who they are. As Dave Clark said,</p>

<blockquote>
  "We have no kings or presidents. We believe in rough consensus and running
  code."</blockquote>

<p>There is very little structure. There is the idea that society can run
without a hierarchical bureaucratic government being involved at every step,
if only we can hit on the right set of rules for peer-peer interaction. So
where design of the Internet and the Web is a search for set of rules which
will allow computers to work together in harmony, so our spiritual and social
quest is for a set of rules which allow people to work work together in
harmony.</p>

<p>It used to be the case that internet protocols were designed with some
clear vision of the final harmonious interworking in mind, whereas laws and
rules of behaviour tended to be put together without a clear common
understanding of what tomorrow's world would look like. Nowadays, even Web
developments happen because of our gut feeling that certain properties of the
Web will lead to great things, but we often expect the results to be amazing
and good, but unpredictable.</p>

<h3>Tolerance</h3>

<p>In this decentralized world, the first common principle is of tolerance.
The general principle struck me very strongly when I was logging on to the
mainframe system at CERN many years ago, before CERN had internetworking. In
those days terminals were all connected up by to terminal concentrators which
switch you if you were lucky to a free port on the hallowed mainframe. If
there wasn't a free port, it would keep you in a queue. You could wait for
typically 35 minutes and then it would suddenly ask you whether you were
there. You had a few seconds in which to hit a key to be connected, and if
you missed it you would be dropped from the queue. This ratio of 35 minutes
to 20 seconds I called the tolerance ratio - in that case, intolerance ratio!
It was some indication that the system considered its time about 100 times
more valuable than yours. The market pressure for terminal lines had
increased their "value" to the level that to deserve one you had to nervously
hover over a silent terminal waiting for that special moment. It makes you
think about your own tolerance ratio. How much are you prepared to go out of
your way, compared with the extent you require to go out of theirs?</p>

<p>I don't know who formulated the principle of tolerance in Internet circles
first as "Be conservative in what you do and liberal in what you expect". I
have heard Vint Cerf quote it. It is a guiding rule in internet protocol
design. Always say "http:"in lower case, but in practice understand "HTTP:"
too.</p>

<p>Unitarian Universalism is famous for its tolerance. UU people don't
generally go around trying to convert other people. They respect those who
believe in some sort of a God different from theirs (if they use the term).
Recently I heard a UU remark (I paraphrase from memory - it was not written
down),</p>

<blockquote>
  "I have always been an argumentative type - always tending to play devils
  advocate and skeptical of everything. I was quite expecting to be thrown
  out of this church like I've been thrown out of everywhere else. I was
  staggered to be accepted. I was even more surprised to find that in fact,
  the place was full of people just as argumentative as me!"</blockquote>

<p>UUs perhaps share the view that "If there is one thing I can't stand -
it's intolerance!". They fight racism and inequality. They get really upset
when people are killed and tortured because they don't belief in the One True
God or the One True Anything.</p>

<p>UUs actually believe in love. But that doesn't seem to bear analogy with
computers!</p>

<h3>The Test of Independent Invention</h3>

<p>There's a test I use for technology which the Consortium is thinking of
adopting, and I'll call it the Independent Invention test. Just suppose that
someone had invented exactly the same system somewhere else, but made all the
arbitrary decisions differently. Suppose after many years of development and
adoption, the two systems came together. Would they work together?</p>

<p>Take the Web. I tried to make it pass the test. Suppose someone had (and
it was quite likely) invented a World Wide Web system somewhere else with the
same principles. Suppose they called it the Multi Media Mesh <sup>(tm)</sup>
and based it on Media Resource Identifiers<sup>(tm)</sup>, the MultiMedia
Transport Protocol<sup>(tm)</sup>, and a Multi Media Markup
Language<sup>(tm)</sup>. After a few years, the Web and the Mesh meet. What
is the damage?</p>
<ul>
  <li>A huge battle, involving the abandonment of projects, conversion or
    loss of data?</li>
  <li>Division of the world by a border commission into two separate
    communities?</li>
  <li>Smooth integration with only incremental effort?</li>
</ul>

<p>Obviously we are looking for the latter option. Fortunately, we could
immediately extend URIs to include "mmtp://" and extend MRIs to include
"http;\\". We could make gateways, and on the better browsers immediately
configure them to go through a gateway when finding a URI of the new type.
The URI space is universal: it covers all addresses of all accessible
objects. But it does not have to be the only universal space. Universal, but
not unique.</p>

<p>Imagine a Virtue and Veracity church growing up independently, with the
same UU principles but none of the same history of vocabulary. What would
happen when one of the VV members strolled by accident into a UU church? An
enlightened smile of recognition, the same warm feeling which someone who has
really unknowingly been a UU all their life feels when walking into a
congregation of UUs.</p>

<p>It's not the same when the followers of divine prophet1 meet the followers
of divine prophet2. Divine prophets(often!)  know who they are and know they
are the only ones. The One True Churches worships the One True Gods and in
many cases convince others of their Oneness and Trueness with swords and fire
and destruction. The philosophies fail the test of Independent Invention. The
result of this interoperability failure is not an error code or an unreadable
Web page but hatred and jealousy, war and persecution.</p>

<p>Don't get me wrong. I believe that much of the philosophy of life
associated with many religions is much more sound than the dogma which comes
along with it. So I do respect them, and you if you belong to one. UUism has
looks for its philosophy to contributions and writings from many religions,
western and eastern.</p>

<h3>Truth</h3>

<p>A lot of people ask me whether I am disappointed that the Web has taken on
such a lot of commercial material, rather than being a pure academic space.
In fact, I know it could not be universal if it did not allow any form of
communication. It must be able to represent any thought, any datum, any idea,
that one might have. So in this way the Web and the UU concept of faith are
similar in that both serve as a place for thought, and the importance of the
quest for truth, but without labelling any one true solution.  The quest for
the truth is always accompanied by skepticism of anyone claiming to have
found it.</p>

<h3>Hope</h3>

<p>The is one other thing that comes to mind as common between the Internet
folks and the UUs. The whole spread of the Web happened not because of a
decision and a mandate from any authority, but because a whole bunch of
people across the 'Net picked it up and brought up Web clients and servers,
it actually happened. The actual explosion of creativity, and the coming into
being of the Web was the result of thousands of individuals playing a small
part. In the first couple of years, often this was not for a direct gain, but
because they had an inkling that it was the right way to go, and a gleam of
an exciting future. It is necessary to UU philosophy that such things can
happen, that we will get to a better state in the end by each playing our
small part. UUism is full of hope, and the fact that the Web happens is an
example of a dream coming true and an encouragement to all who hope.</p>

<p>1998</p>

<p></p>
<hr>
<a href="Overview.html">Back to main Bio</a>

<p>See also:</p>
<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.uufb.net/sermon.html">Why you should not be a
    Unitarian Universalist</a> By Rev. Dr. Tony Larsen</li>
  <li>"<a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1958.txt">Architectural Principles
    of the Internet</a>", RFC 1958, for principle of tolerance"Be strict when
    sending and tolerant when receiving, section 3.9</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>