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Berners-Lee is not easy to read, not prone to self-disclosure. Ask him if he's a sociable guy, and he tells you that on the Myers-Briggs test, "I rate pretty much in the middle on introversion vs. extroversion." Ask about his wife, and he'll tell you that she is an American he met in Europe while she was working for the World Health Organization, after which details get sketchy. "Work is work, and home is home," he says. And when you cross the border between them, his turbocharged gesticulation subsides.
Other sources volunteer that Berners-Lee met his wife Nancy Carlson at an acting workshop; he turns out to have an artistic, piano-playing, festive side. "He is both British and the life of the party, and that's not a contradiction," says Rohit Khare, who recently left the Web consortium. "He can be the life of the party without making the party about him."
Berners-Lee, standing at a blackboard, draws a graph, as he's prone to do. It arrays social groups by size. Families, workplace groups, schools, towns, companies, the nation, the planet. The Web could in theory make things work smoothly at all of these levels, as well as between them. That, indeed, was the original idea--an organic expanse of collaboration. But the Web can pull the other way. And Berners-Lee worries about whether it will "allow cranks and nut cases to find in the world 20 or 30 other cranks and nut cases who are absolutely convinced of the same things. Allow them to set up filters around themselves ... and develop a pothole of culture out of which they can't climb." Will we "end up with a world which is full of very, very disparate cultures which don't talk to each other?"
Berners-Lee doesn't kid himself. Even if the Web had followed the technological lines he envisioned (which it is finally starting to do, as software evolves), it couldn't force people to nurture the global interest, or even their neighborhood's interest. Technology can't make us good. "At the end of the day, it's up to us: how we actually react, and how we teach our children, and the values we instill." He points back to the graph. "I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this."
On Sundays Berners-Lee packs his family into the car and heads for a Unitarian-Universalist church. As a teenager he rejected the Anglican teachings of his parents; he can't bring himself to worship a particular prophet, a particular book. But "I do in fact believe that people's spiritual side is very important," and that it's "more than just biology."
He likes the minimalist Unitarian dogma--theologically vague but believing in "the inherent dignity of people and in working together to achieve harmony and understanding." He can accept the notion of divinity so long as it is couched abstractly--as the "asymptote" of goodness that we strive toward--and doesn't involve "characters with beards." He hopes the Web will move the world closer to the divine asymptote.