The future had humble beginnings. The first public web page went online 25 years ago today, on August 6, 1991. It was not much of a page by today’s standards: all text and a summary overview of a project to make Internet resources linkable with hypertext. But that single little web page, written by Tim Berners-Lee, heralded the rise of one of the greatest public goods ever built: the worldwide web.

We the people have the web and its myriad of services and its almost infinite amount of data at our fingertips. It is non-rival: My usage cannot prevent someone else from using it. It is non-excludable: Nobody can set up a toll or a barrier to prevent me from using it. It is global. It distributes knowledge and information freely.

These two central characteristics, non-rivalry and non-excludability, make it one of the most potent forces on the side of humanity’s progress. The accumulation and exchange of knowledge, culture in all its forms, is our key evolutionary advantage as a species. Culture is what allows us not only to invent but also to augment and to improve on past inventions.

Culture is our killer app. Make the entirety of human culture, past and present, free and available to anyone through computer networks, and watch what happens. It has been 25 years since the first web page went live: we’ve only just begun.