Book Review – ReMarkable

When it comes to any discussion of the Web, a good place to start would be with Tim Berners-Lee. Working at CERN during the 1980’s, Tim was part of a team working on writing computer code for the operation/management of the large hadron collider. It turned out there was a lot of data to keep track of. The problem was that data from different teams were siloed within each team and within each team, some data may have been stored on magnetic tape, some data printed out on reams of paper, some data might be saved on an 8-inch IBM floppy disk. And so on. To make matters even worse, CERN hosted scientists from more than twenty countries, with everyone pursuing a common scientific goal but without a common language. Data management-wise, it was a mess.

Tim’s flash of inspiration was to develop a set of protocols and standards (HTTP, HTML and URL, primarily) that allowed computers (and their users) to talk to each other, regardless of document type, document language, format, etc. And in a nutshell, there you have the World Wide Web.

In a stroke generosity, Tim put the ownership of the new web standards under the control of a non-profit and shared the foundational blocks of the web with the entire world, for free. Ever since then, he has been in a running battle with the Facebooks, Microsofts, Xs, Amazons, and SnapChats of the world to keep the web open and free.

To that end, Tim’s current efforts focus on the data sovereignty of individuals. When someone likes, comments, or posts on Facebook, that activity and data should belong to the individual, not Facebook. Facebook should not be allowed to gather and package user data and auction it off to the highest bidder. Also, why am I not able to see my Facebook activity in the same space as my LinkedIn activity? And why do I currently have four different airline apps on my phone, where I had to enter the exact same security information into each one individually? Why can’t I have a centralized data repository, like a wallet, whereby I grant access to third parties so that all of my data is both under my control and in one place? This is what Tim is aiming for with his Social Linked Data (Solid) set of protocols. Untenable? Maybe. There is a massive headwind blowing in a different direction. And yet, the entire population of Flanders (the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium) has been set up with a data pod/wallet, sponsored by their government. Shocking! Especially if you are a good American who believes that the government (and not Facebook and X and Microsoft) is the ultimate enemy.

To that end, I’ve been plinkalating around with setting up by own Solid pod, but with limited success so far. I still need to do more exploring, but do feel free to bop around on Inrupt (Berners-Lee’s jab at everything “innovate” and “disrupt” based): https://www.inrupt.com/wallets/data-wallets

Even though it looks like an uphill trudge, I am firmly in the camp that we, as citizens and consumers, should stop paying some of the world’s largest companies to steal our information. Radical, I know, but there it is.

I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of this title. Given my listening habits, it took me the better part of a year to make it through the 21 hours. Normally, if I take such long breaks from a book, that means I’m not going to finish it. Not the case with this one. Demon, the protagonist, had a way of fading away for a few weeks at a time but then he would bubble to the surface of m’brain and I’d feel the urge to check back in on his story.

Part of the reason it took me so long to get through this one was that I felt the middle 1/3 of the book slipped into a repetitive and depressing cycle of Demon — an Appalachian middle-schooler thrust into the foster system when his single mom OD’ed — having some horribly tragic event befall him, only for him to somehow cobble a life together and a path forward… until the next tragedy or piece of crappy luck struck. I remember thinking “Dang. How much bad luck can one kid endure?” but I guess resilience is a requirement of both the reader and the character.

Set largely in the heyday of Purdue Pharma’s and the Sackler family’s ravaging of Appalachian culture via bottles of hydrocodone, Demon Copperhead is the deep dive, 21 hour version of The Matt Mitchell Music Company’s song, Bootstrap Nation. Side note: while we’re on the topic, if anyone wants to subject themselves to a sickening and sobering peek behind the source of America’s opioid epidemic, check out Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain.

I’ll steer clear of spoilers here but I will say this about the way Kingsolver wrapped up the novel: it was worth the effort. Go grab yourself a copy and settle in for a swirling eddy of neglect, abuse, bad luck, and bad choices splashing against the occasional rocks of kindness, compassion, and connection.