March 25 - 4 of Pentacles

Four of Pentacles, Tim Berners-Lee. His portrait is at the top of the card, surrounded by text: "In favor of net neutrality, human network rights. Working towards the semantic web, machines talking to machines, and Web 3.0, a computer generative knowledge processing web. In 1994 founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT supported by EU Commisson and DARPA. Royalty free technology. In 2009 launched the WWW foundation to advance the web to power humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the web as a medium for positive change. Below this is a flowchart showing how the ideas of computer conferencing, hierarchical systems, hypertext, hypermedia, linked information, document views and CERN are connected in early conceptions of the web. The bottom caption reads 1989, CERN - proposal for world wide web.

This card can represent protecting the spoils of a great success, but also possibly becoming possessive, greedy or overly rigid.

Obviously the web was a transformative idea that became a foundational aspect of many of our individual lives, not to mention how communication, logistics, research and so on are now carried out around the world. It's also become resource-hungry, fragmented by social media platforms, more gigantic and serving more varied purposes than I think even its most aggressive boosters would have predicted.

On the other hand, when "move fast and break things" is the mantra of the platforms, who would love to have more ways to create walled gardens and company towns, sticking to your slow moving, tedious principles may have some benefits...

Though of course a lot of people let DARPA or similar institutional figures with money to throw around in the back door in the name of "stability," but what possibilities or positions of strength do you lose, when you sell yourself off like that, or become a part of the institutions?

I know I'm at the very bottom level of this, not sure how significant changes to these protocols would impact posting online and managing my own simple homepages. Yet I'm still kind of a "nerd" in that sphere-- these processes are so much more opaque to many, many more people.