Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s Laboratory | Shutterstock Editorial License

CONFINING FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER

Can The Internet’s Creator Stop Big Data With His Manifesto?

Tim Berners-Lee, Winner of the Turing Award for “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.”

Dial F For Frankenstein was one of the inspirations for the world wide web.

When he was but a boy, Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, read a story in Playboy. He was astounded. Not only by the naked women. But by a science-fiction story, Dial F For Frankenstein, written by futurist-prophet, Arthur C. Clarke, about a bunch of telephones that take over the world.

In the story, telephones start talking to one another in an unusual code-speak. One day, the phones make crank calls to freak out housewives. The next day, the telephones make mischievous calls to the offices of businessmen. Soon enough, the telephones form a collective brain, creating a network of telephones so robust, the world plunges into chaos of destruction.

“I think I can claim to be the godfather (with the good and bad implications that has) of the Web,” said Arthur C. Clarke in a interview. Imagine: adolescence, Playboy, science fiction . . . chaos! That’s the creative bottle-rocket that launched young Tim to begin to construct other kinds of networks in his…