"Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves"
About this Quote
Berners-Lee’s line lands like a quiet warning disguised as a compliment. Calling data “precious” flatters the modern instinct to hoard it, but the second clause snaps the frame into place: the real story isn’t how valuable data is, it’s how disposable everything built to contain it tends to be. Servers get decommissioned, formats go obsolete, startups vanish, governments change procurement cycles, and suddenly your “permanent” record is trapped in a dead database or a proprietary file no one can open. The sentence is a cultural critique of our faith in infrastructure.
The intent comes straight out of the Web’s origin myth. Berners-Lee built the Web to make information portable across machines and institutions; here he’s arguing that portability isn’t a feature, it’s an ethical obligation. Systems are transient by design because they’re tied to budgets, vendors, and fashion. Data, by contrast, accrues meaning over time: scientific datasets become baselines, medical records become lifelines, public documents become evidence. If the system dies, the stakes don’t.
There’s also a sharper subtext about power. Whoever controls the system can control access to the data, even if they didn’t create it. By emphasizing data’s longer lifespan, Berners-Lee implicitly pushes for open standards, interoperability, and stewardship over mere “innovation.” It’s a rebuke to platform lock-in and a reminder that the future will judge us less by the apps we ship than by what we preserve, and who can reach it when the shiny interfaces are gone.
The intent comes straight out of the Web’s origin myth. Berners-Lee built the Web to make information portable across machines and institutions; here he’s arguing that portability isn’t a feature, it’s an ethical obligation. Systems are transient by design because they’re tied to budgets, vendors, and fashion. Data, by contrast, accrues meaning over time: scientific datasets become baselines, medical records become lifelines, public documents become evidence. If the system dies, the stakes don’t.
There’s also a sharper subtext about power. Whoever controls the system can control access to the data, even if they didn’t create it. By emphasizing data’s longer lifespan, Berners-Lee implicitly pushes for open standards, interoperability, and stewardship over mere “innovation.” It’s a rebuke to platform lock-in and a reminder that the future will judge us less by the apps we ship than by what we preserve, and who can reach it when the shiny interfaces are gone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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