The Right To Try

What you know to be right and wrong, you know through your own experience.  The conclusions you have drawn have been the result of your life experience.  Other people have different lives and experience different things.  Even when they experience the same things as you they may come to different conclusions.  I have wrote of this many times on this blog but I want to reiterate something which seems relevant after recent events.  People have the right to make their own mistakes.  What you know, you have learned for yourself through your own mistakes.  For others to learn the same lessons they must be allowed to make their own mistakes.  Imposing your experience onto others is arrogant and patronising and is the same rhetoric you once experienced and denied when you set out to prove people wrong.  When you had energy and hope and faith.  You are old and tired and you have forgotten that optimism.

People need to be allowed to make their own mistakes not least for the purpose of learning but also for the sake of progression.  No good ever came from sealing ideas to history and refusing to return to them.  When the world moves on what was once discarded can be revitalised.

In 1989, a then optimistic man at the age of 33 proposed an idea and he was laughed at.  The main stream media ridiculed him and his dream.  He was derided and labelled a fool for what was perceived as an invention that was a complete waste of time.  His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and his dream was the World Wide Web.  Those who ridiculed him now laugh through the other side of their faces.  His dream of a content distribution system that would utilise the Internet was realised and today stands as one of the most important inventions in all of human history.

Sometimes no matter how much opposition or lack of belief you have in your cause you have to ignore the world and pursue it.  If that means ignoring 99.999% of the population who think you are delusional then that is what you must do.

What relevance does this have to recent events?  Everything.  While Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he did not invent the Internet.  For those uneducated in the difference, the World Wide Web is a software architecture, that allows distribution of web content.  The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected networks which that software utilises to deliver that content.  The Internet was first invented by the military during the 1960s as ARPANET - the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.  It was first opened up to private institutions in 1981 and later expanded in 1982 to incorporate the Internet Protocol Suite TCP/IP, which today most people know by two protocols part of that suite, IPv4 and IPv6.

The Internet has existed for almost 50 years.  The World Wide Web did not emerge until over 20 years later.  The world changed.  Technology progressed, attitudes changed, and the world was transformed as a result.  There are many people alive today who were not even born when the Web was born.  The demography of our society is changing and the generations that are emerging now deserve the opportunity to pursue their ideas as Tim Berners-Lee did.  How likely you think they will be to achieve their goals is irrelevant.  You had your chance and your opportunity, now it is theirs.  What you failed to do, does not mean they will too.  The ability to create the World Wide Web had existed for decades before Tim Berners-Lee had the vision to try.  If he had accepted that he should not try to do what those before him had failed to do then we would not have the World Wide Web.  We would not have Google, and you would not be able to read this post.