Book Discussion with Peter Kaufman: THIS IS FOR EVERYONE by Tim Berners-Lee

Join MIT scholar Peter B. Kaufman to discuss Timothy Berners-Lee’s new book, This is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (2025). 

We’ll examine how the World Wide Web's original vision of openness is being challenged by modern digital monopolies. We’ll also discuss the urgent need to defend the Web as a global public good and a collaborative, democratic space.

Participants are encouraged to read Berners-Lee’s book. A limited number of copies are available for loan at the Library near the circulation desk.

This is For Everyone is "an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives …. Berners-Lee is still fighting to preserve the web’s original promise, which, he argues, has been despoiled by malign users, rapacious corporations and authoritarian governments.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times

Peter B. Kaufman is Associate Director of Development at MIT Open Learning.  Educated at Cornell and Columbia, he is the author of The Moving Image: A User’s Manual (MIT Press, 2025) and The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021).   He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, where he is now completing a new book about the sociology of knowledge. He is a resident of Lakeville, CT.

This program is supported by the Friends of the Scoville Library and by library friends like you.