Hey, did you hear they’ve figured out how to fix the Internet?

Turns out it wasn’t even all that hard. In fact, all we need to change is one thing:

We need to to stop giving our personal data away to strangers.

We actually want to do the opposite. We each need to keep our personal data ourselves.

This simple but profound insight is driving a technological insurgency under the banner of the Decentralized Web. It provides every person with a private, secure, permanent place to keep all our digital stuff, with tools to manage it, and with control over…

It was a raw April morning in Rye, New Hampshire, the kind of day when the wind whips straight onshore from the Atlantic, so that even a mile inland you can smell the pungent sea, and all the dead and living creatures within.

At exactly 7 AM, Officer Michael Cooney was turning into the driveway of the Worker house. The call came over the police radio:

“All units, 10–67, Report of Death, 1125 Washington Road. Worker house.”

Cooney chuckled — not making light of human suffering; his Irish mother back in South Boston would’ve given any of her boys a…

Perhaps you’ve heard about a movement to fix the internet. A solution is being developed that eliminates virtually all the problems we suffer today, while making the internet itself better in every meaningful way. Permanently.

And perhaps best of all, it requires only one simple change…

Instead of giving your personal data away, you keep it.

This simple yet transformative idea is being embraced by a growing wave of technologists under the banner of the decentralized web. Its most notable proponent is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the original World Wide Web in 1989. His new open standards project out…

The internet’s amazing and all, but it’s missing one really important piece: a tool designed to empower the people who use the internet. There’s no solution that enables each of us to proactively manage our own affairs online; no way to promote your own interests in the basic process of connecting to the internet.

And that’s a big hole. Because the way everything works now, we’re completely reliant on the corporations and governments that run the internet. …

Introduction

It’s true: the Internet has forever changed our world. It has empowered us in ways we could never have imagined — ways we now probably couldn’t imagine giving up. What would we do without the global enabling technology for our new digital lives, the backbone system supporting our universe of gadgets and apps?

Unfortunately, the Internet has also spawned a world where we are digitally subjugated, simply by participating. Using the Internet today means suffering continuous privacy abuse, and its noxious offspring: surveillance, censorship and cybercrime. And sure everybody hates it, but it just gets worse.

But imagine that…