Who would have thought to impose the values of the lab on the world, anyhow? That person was Frederick Terman, Stanford’s ambitious provost who didn’t understand why his university and its students and faculty shouldn’t profit from their brilliant ideas. He promoted the idea that engineers should become rich and powerful, starting with two of his early students, William Hewlett and David Packard. Stanford benefited. Shareholders benefited. Society benefited. If engineers set the agenda for the country, and the world, then at last we would be certain that the brightest would be in charge, as his father, Lewis, the student of “gifted children,” had dreamed. Ordinary folks wouldn’t need to be weighed down by questions they couldn’t understand, anyhow. On efficiency grounds, Terman’s vision might make sense. On humanitarian grounds, less so. Do we really want engineers—and their hyperrational comrades—to determine how we live? Democracy, for all its faults, is the best way to ensure that the public is being served by its leaders. No one can look out for your interests as diligently as yourself and no engineer is so unemotional as to be acting purely rationally without bias or self-preservation.

But rather than offer a set of policy proposals, I would repeat a prescription for a just society that begins with “a commitment to the local, the plural, the small scale and the active.” Those are the qualities the Web must have, even if it means cutting off the flow of revenues to giant companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay. We can’t tolerate an Internet, or a society, led by a few self-proclaimed geniuses claiming to serve mankind. The Internet can and must work for us, instead of the other way around, through a diversity of voices and platforms free to organize and collaborate on their own rather than through a few centralized services. This way the Internet can help build the social connective tissue we so desperately need, as Berners-Lee originally intended.