Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising... We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it... We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI. Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. "We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late." Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

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When I arrived in the US, one of the first things I looked for was an Internet Cafe. I wanted to chat with my family and friends, read about my neighborhood and school, and keep up with the world I'd left behind. But there was one thing that always bothered me in these public spaces: the counter in the bottom right corner of the screen, counting down to let me know how much time I had left.

Today, that world has vanished. Internet access is widely available, and we don't need Internet Cafes anymore. The internet has become invisible, so seamlessly integrated into our lives that we forget how this whole system actually works. When you type a question into your phone, it feels like the entire transaction happens right there in your device. But that answer isn't a product of your phone; it emerges from an invisible ecosystem built on the generosity of countless people you'll never meet.

The Hidden Foundation

Imagine for a second that every time you visited a website, a tiny meter started ticking. Not for the content you're viewing, but for the very software the site runs on. A "Windows Server Tax" here, an "Oracle Database Fee" there. The vibrant, chaotic, creative web we know simply wouldn't exist. The number of blogs, small businesses, niche communities, and personal projects would shrink dramatically. The internet would become a sterile mall of well-funded corporations. (AOL?)

But that's not our reality. Instead, the internet runs on something we often overlook: radical, uncompensated generosity.

Most servers, cloud instances, and even Android phones run on Linux. Linux is freely given to the world. The software that delivers web pages to your browser? Apache and NGINX, both open source. Those AI-generated summaries you see in Google? They often draw from Wikipedia, edited and maintained by volunteers. OpenSSL, as its name suggests, is open source and protects your private data from prying eyes. When you're troubleshooting that coding problem at 2 AM, you're probably reading a blog post written by a developer who shared their solution simply to help others.

Free as in Freedom

This generosity isn't just about getting things for free, it's about freedom itself. When software is "free as in speech," it means you're not the product, your data isn't being harvested, and you have the liberty to use, study, modify, and share these tools. This is the essence of Linux, Wikipedia, and the core protocols that make the internet possible.

People contribute to these projects not primarily for money, but out of passion, the desire to build recognition, and the genuine wish to help others and contribute to the commons. It's a gift economy that creates abundance rather than scarcity.

The Multiplier Effect

This generous foundation is what allows the commercial web to flourish on top of it. A startup doesn't need to spend millions on operating system licenses before writing their first line of code. They can build on Linux, use MySQL for their database, and leverage countless other open-source tools, focusing their capital and energy on their unique idea. Building a website isn't a massive financial decision. It's a creative one. The barrier to entry is nearly zero, and that's a direct result of open-source generosity.

But this entire system rests on something even more fundamental: trust. When you visit my website, you trust me. You trust that the HTTPS lock icon means your data is safe, thanks to the open-source OpenSSL library. You trust that I'm not hosting malware. When you read a Wikipedia article, you trust (with healthy skepticism) that volunteers are aiming for accuracy, not pushing an agenda.

As a developer, I trust that the open-source tools I use are reliable and secure. I trust that the community will help me when I'm stuck. This trust is the currency that keeps the open web functioning. Obligatory Clay Shirky's video on Love, Internet Style.

Keeping the Engine Running

So what does this mean for you and me? We can continue this tradition of generosity that built the foundation we all rely on.

The next time you solve a tricky problem, consider writing a short blog post about it. Your generosity might save someone else hours of frustration. When Wikipedia helps you research that obscure topic, consider making a small donation. It's a tiny price for access to a library of Alexandria. If your company uses open-source software, consider contributing code back or sponsoring a developer. Help maintain the engine you depend on.

The internet is a miracle of collaboration, a testament to the idea that when we give freely, we don't deplete our resources. Instead, we create an ecosystem where everyone can build, learn, and connect. It runs on generosity. The least we can do is acknowledge it and, wherever possible, add our own contribution to the commons.

This time of year, when classes are over, but I haven’t yet graded, I start thinking about what I could have done differently. Inevitably, I think about the students I didn’t quite seem to reach, the ones I could have helped more. Inevitably, those are students at either end of the spectrum, the top and the bottom. Without intending to, I often teach to the middle.

Sure, the students could have done more themselves. They could have come to class more or pushed themselves more, but often, they don’t even know what to do. And that’s where I think I could step in more and offer more guidance….

The top students, I think, are less harmed by my inability to teach to them. They will push themselves anyway, if not in my class, in another class along the way. It’s the students at the bottom that I feel like I’ve let down. And some of them, frankly, are not motivated and would likely balk at my strategies for helping them, or they would do the tasks in a half-hearted way. I could insist and insist, but ultimately, it’s up to them to do the work. And, of course, that’s how I justify not putting forth the extra effort, thinking to myself, well, they wouldn’t do it anyway.

A middle school math teacher wrote this in 2005*. It applies, I believe, to most public school teachers today who face 25-30 students (or more) in an elementary school classroom about six hours a day or secondary school teachers who face about 125-150-plus students daily in five 50-minute segments in math, science, foreign language, or social studies classes.

It surely applied to me in the 14 years that I taught high school history and social studies between the mid-1950s and early-1970s and then in the mid-1990s. That I was doing so in schools where students were tracked by subject area was unclear to me in the early years of making lesson plans for my classes. But it became clear to me by the third or fourth year that I was doing exactly that. I had mentally divided up each class into top-of-the-ladder, middle rungs, and bottom of the ladder students. Sure, I varied my questions, activities, and assignments to get students to participate but my choice of content and skills aimed at the high-middle of my imagined students’ performance in classes.

And this was true for me, as I suspect for others, who teach (or taught) classes tracked for similar abilities and performance. In Washington, D.C. in the 1960s where I served for a decade, the “track system” used group intelligence test scores to sort students into the “Honor,” “College Preparatory,” “General,” and “Basic” tracks.  For example, I would  teach College Preparatory and Basic Track classes and even in these classes, students varied in performance and, yes, I would teach to the middle.

Like the above blogging teacher, she and I did a lot of things to mitigate the thrust of our lessons to the middle. We used small groups, set aside time to work individually with low- and high-performing students, offered extra credit for additional reading and projects, etc., etc. All well and good but within the confines of our limited time with students and having a life outside of school and few additional resources, there was not much more that could be done.

What the teacher and I faced was a dilemma anchored in the DNA of public schools. We prize the historic and pervasive American values of treating all students equitably, encouraging individual excellence, and building classroom communities. But all three values can not be achieved within age-graded schools where teachers teach mixed-ability groups of children and youth for four to six hours daily and where they are required to give letter grades to students.

Recognizing this dilemma, then, I ask: Is teaching to the middle of a class another way of saying that such teaching is mediocre?

My answer: No, it is not.

Mediocrity, as used in describing U.S. schooling means inferior quality of a product and performance. It is a slur slung at those who are “average” or in the middle of a distribution–the C student or the girl who finishes 15th out of 30 runners in the 100-meter dash. Both tried hard but came up short in earning that C or finishing the race in the middle of the pack. It is unfair.

Why unfair? Two reasons.

First, few policymakers, administrators, and practitioners acknowledge, much less recognize, the common dilemma of crafting compromises–you sacrifice some values in order to satisfy other values–to achieve some version of these prized values embedded in the American ethos. A prime example is the value of excellence–creating a meritocratic ranking of excellence (e.g., A-F letter grades, honor roll societies, class valedictorians)–yet parents, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners believe in their heart-of-hearts that only a few grab the high letter grades and achieve excellence as defined by the school while most others fall in the middle and there will always be a few students who perform below the teacher’s standards.

The second reason are iron-clad social beliefs in the bell-shaped curve. Teachers see this graphical distribution of students in classrooms as “natural” and a fact of life anchored in groups of students. Policymakers and practitioners accept this visual distribution of intelligence and performance as true and use it as basis for ability grouping within a class and tracking students within a school. Surely, varied talents (e.g., artistic, athletic, cognitive) are distributed unequally across individuals. In a competitive society where individual performance and equal opportunity are prized everyone cannot get As or win races.  The middle is shunned because “average” and “middling” have become synonyms for mediocrity in American society.

The larger issue of fairness is whether the purpose of the school is to continue reproducing the societal inequalities embedded in the grading system and through ability and tracking policies or embrace a belief that the primary purpose of the school is to reduce–not reproduce– racial, ethnic, and class inequalities through restructuring the age-graded school and its time schedule, grouping policies, letter grades, and other initiatives aimed at breaking the iron cage constructed by locked-in social beliefs in the bell-shaped curve and the existing age-graded school.

But an experienced teacher now faced with the practical issue of evaluating students with varied talents, motivations, interests, and performance–whether it is a class stuck in the bottom quintile, an “average” class or teaching Advanced Placement courses–wants to be fair and equitable to each student. She wants academic excellence while building a classroom community. She wants all students to achieve. But she cannot because of unceasing time demands that require her to follow a rigid daily schedule and contractual obligations inherent to the job of teaching. She requires her students to do homework, take tests, and then issues grades on report cards. She ends up teaching to the middle.

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*When I quoted this middle school math teacher seven years ago in an earlier version of this post, her blog was available. As of September 2025, geekymom.blogspot.com  has disappeared from the Internet. The practice of teaching students in the middle of the bell-shaped curve, however, remains.

A corner store opens to the street. A fourteen-year-old steps on a milk crate behind the counter so he can see over the register. He counts back change to a neighbor he calls by name and later sweeps across the stoop into a metal dustpan. Nothing he does is dramatic. But it is precise, relational, and accountable. The task places him in a web of faces and expectations. He is needed, not merely supervised.

The claim is simple: when it is local, supervised, age-appropriate, and limited, children’s work helps form responsible adults. Somewhere along the way we let the worst abuses of industrial child labor define the whole idea of kids working. We mistook the sweatshop for the shop. The first deserves prohibition; the second deserves protection.

Before the argument goes farther, the bright lines. School comes first. Jobs must be safe, supervised, undertaken with parental guidance and a child’s assent, and bounded by modest hours. Hazardous or industrial tasks are out of bounds. Kids must be paid fairly for real contributions. These guardrails already exist in law and custom, and we should honor them.

For most of human history, children’s work lived inside the household economy: milking before school, stacking split wood, sweeping a shop floor, carrying casseroles through a church kitchen, running a paper route before dawn. The aim wasn’t résumé padding but membership. Work stitched children into the daily fabric of place—into the habits, adults, and neighbors that give shape to a young person’s sense of identity and duty. We once recognized this as apprenticeship to life. It did not compete with learning; it was a form of learning—about time, trust, tools, and other people.

What changed? The entry-level seams in local life thinned. Chain stores replaced counters run by owners who knew your family. Liability worries made even simple junior roles feel risky. Childhood schedules ballooned with the college-application arms race. And some of the most iconic kid jobs simply vanished. By the late 1970s nearly three out of five teens worked—paper routes, grocery shifts, babysitting. Today, it’s closer to one in three. The point isn’t to rewind to 1979; it’s to notice how ordinary, steady work lost its on-ramps.

Ask any employer what’s missing and you’ll hear the same refrain: young people struggle to show up on time, talk to strangers, take correction, finish what they start. Those aren’t mysteries. They’re habits learned in small jobs. Standing where you said you would. Greeting people you do not know. Sweeping a floor until it shines. Light, face-to-face work teaches these things because the task itself requires them. In its absence, it is no wonder that schools are increasingly focused on developing the competencies which we have come to refer to as executive functioning skills.

When children’s work is done right, the benefits are immediate and plain: cash-handling trains numeracy and trust; stocking to a checklist breeds order and persistence; greeting customers builds courage and neighborliness. There is also an intergenerational kindness at work. A barber can show a high schooler how to sweep, greet, book the next appointment, and keep a register square without ever touching a blade. In a church kitchen, an elder can teach teens to stack chairs and run a dish line with steady rhythm. In a thrift shop, a volunteer with a label maker can teach back-room inventory and first-in, first-out rotation. Places become classrooms; adults become mentors; teenagers become known by name for more than their test scores.

Fair objections deserve answers.

Kids need rest and free play. Agreed. That is why hours must be modest during school weeks and end early. The point is not to cram another achievement into a teenager’s schedule but to trade a few abstract obligations for a few concrete responsibilities that bind them to real people. With sane limits, work complements rest rather than cannibalizes it.

School is already demanding. Yes—especially for students with long commutes or heavy coursework. That is why a child’s off-ramp must be real and why parents or guardians, not just employers, decide whether a role is appropriate in a given season. If sleep and grades slip, the job pauses.

Won’t this widen inequities or invite coercion? It could, if we forget the words voluntary and local. Opportunities should be additive, not primary; a teenager’s hours must never substitute for childcare or adult wages. Kids should never be pressed into jobs out of family desperation, and no teen should feel trapped. But forbidding all junior roles heals nothing. What helps is opening dignified on-ramps so work becomes a teacher rather than a punishment.

Recent headlines about illegal child labor in dangerous settings are rightly alarming. But the answer is not to bar all work—it is to distinguish: keep strict prohibitions on hazardous labor while recovering small, relational apprenticeships that happen within sight of adults, under clear limits, and alongside school.

So what would recovery look like—something small, sane, and doable this semester?

Households can tie real chores to real outcomes. Not tokenism, but contributions that actually change the home: dinner on Tuesdays, lawn on Saturdays, younger sibling pickup on choir nights. A small stipend can teach budgeting without turning the household into bureaucracy. The object isn’t to monetize family life; it is to make it clear that a home is a shared enterprise and that children participate in its real work.

Congregations and civic groups can post a “Neighbors Hire Teens” board with brief, screened listings: a few hours shelving each week at a thrift shop; a Saturday morning bike-repair table; nursery help during the early service alongside a certified lead. They can host “Skill Saturdays”—cash-register basics with a borrowed till drawer, food safety 101, customer-welcome practice with a smile and a sentence. The point is not to merely simulate work but to lower the first rung so kids can step onto it without embarrassment or fear.

If the argument still sounds quaint, it may be because we have grown used to abstraction. Screens will instruct, but they will not correct your change. Coursework will elevate, but it will not require you to look a stranger in the eye and say, “How can I help you?”

Picture again the boy perched on the milk crate. He is learning to stand where he said he would, to greet a neighbor by name, to sweep a stoop with pride. That is not exploitation. It is apprenticeship—small, local, bounded, and humane. It is one way children are apprenticed to adulthood, not in theory but in practice, in place, and in the company of others.

Image Credit: Camille Pissarro, “Apple Harvest” (1888) via rawpixel.

In southwest Bolivia, near the border with Chile, lies what is commonly referred to as “the world’s largest natural mirror.” When it rains on the massive salt flat called Salar de Uyuni, tourists flock from around the world to pose for photos, hoping to capture themselves, their vehicles, and the surrounding mountains, clouds, and sky perfectly reflected in dreamlike mirror scenes. 

Although it might not actually be a perfect mirror. This, according to researchers who studied the area using satellite imagery, ground-based measurements, and drone data. They reported their mirror-shattering findings in Communications Earth & Environment recently.

The scientists found that while the ephemeral, shallow lake that forms at Salar de Uyuni is exceptionally smooth and calm, it does not behave like a mirror would, according to satellite data. Particularly in the interior parts that tourists can’t reach. For a surface to behave like a mirror, variations in its surface must generally be smaller than a wavelength of visible light. The research team analyzed more than 390,000 radar measurements—where satellites shoot radio signals at the water in the salt flat and measure the smoothness of the signal that bounces off of it—collected over the course of about 8 years. The scientists concluded that the salt flat’s smoothness and reflectiveness vary over time and across the extent of the surface. 

To confirm their remote sensing measurements, the scientists collected data on the ground last year at Salar de Uyuni. They used an optical tool to characterize the lake’s surface, pairing that measurement with similar optical data from drones flying overhead.

It turns out that the lake’s surface is less than uniform. Across its 3,800 square mile surface, some patches wrinkle based on environmental conditions. Remarkably, though, few waves form on the gigantic lake, even though winds do push water around. The researchers suggest that the shallowness of the temporary lake—it averages less than an inch deep—and the presence of salt crystals at the surface help to keep the water so calm.

While its perfect mirrorness failed to stand up to strict scientific scrutiny, Salar de Uyuni is still a marvel. After a good rain, its a dazzling reflection of Earth’s capacity to inspire and surprise.

Lead image: Desizned / Shutterstock