“Our minds are all threaded collectively,” the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary within the first years of the 20 th century, “& all the world is mind.” A world warfare, an airplane, and a radio later, almost half a century earlier than the delivery of the true Internet and eight years earlier than Vannevar Bush imagined the personal computer, one other far-seeing thoughts envisioned the revolutionary actuality past Woolf’s metaphor.
On August 20, 1937 — whereas the Nice Despair was savaging a world on the point of its second international warfare — H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866–August 13, 1946) addressed the archivists, librarians, and bibliographers gathered on the World Congress on Common Documentation in Paris, the place the encyclopedia had been invented two centuries earlier.
Wells made a daring proposition: Saving humanity from itself requires the creation of a brand new system for “common organisation and clarification of data and concepts.” He referred to as it a “World Mind” — a “everlasting central Encyclopaedic organisation with an area habitat and a world-wide vary,” decentralizing and democratizing that supreme antidote to propaganda and manipulation: information.
The World Mind can be available to each human being, irrespective of their revenue degree or the political rule of their society. Solely such a World Mind may totally shut the abyssal hole between the small share of human beings whose training has empowered the complete use of their pure human potential — the folks now disparagingly termed “elites,” with that trendy recrimination that falsely equates an mental situation (the results of excellent training) with an ethical situation (the stance of superiority) — and the huge international majority who’ve been denied such honing of their pure presents underneath the industrialism-warped panorama of fabric chance. Wells instructed his viewers:
It’s dawning upon us, we lay observers, that this [is] the start of a world mind, a standard world mind… a type of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which (when it’s totally developed) will represent a reminiscence and a notion of present actuality for the whole human race.
He even envisioned the cloud:
In as of late of destruction, violence and basic insecurity, it’s comforting to assume that the mind of mankind, the race mind, can exist in quite a few replicas all through the world.
However Wells — one of many keenest and most nuance-capable intellects of his time, and a mannequin for ours — was no hole techno-utopian. He noticed this not simply as a technological community of data, however “a strategy of psychological organisation all through the world.” He acknowledged that the only decisive think about making such a World Mind not solely doable however salutary for humanity quite than harmful was the cultivation of what he referred to as the “Competent Receiver” — the one who engages with the output of the World Mind with thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and important pondering. (Isn’t “Competent Receiver” an infinitely lovelier and extra beneficiant time period for the “consumer” Silicon Valley has perpetrated on our language and our consciousness?)
Wells continued growing these concepts in varied papers and lectures, finally publishing them within the slender 1938 gem World Brain (public library). In a sentiment that makes the fashionable coronary heart sigh with recognition, he writes within the preface:
The human particular person is born now to dwell in a society for which his elementary instincts are altogether insufficient… in a world of fluctuating and usually increasing communities and ranges of response.
To be made “ample,” we have to be educated into our social roles, rendering our social selves the “manufactured product” of our pure selves that stay on the nucleus of our being. However for the World Mind to work, Wells cautions, we should even be educated into being Competent Receivers, which might require a deliberate transcendence of our reflexive reactions. In a passage of extraordinary prophecy towards the web-powered social actuality of the 2020s, he writes:
Man* displays earlier than he acts, however not very a lot; he’s nonetheless by nature intellectually impatient. No sooner does he apprehend, in entire or partially, the necessity of a brand new world, than, with out additional plans or estimates, he will get right into a state of passionate aggressiveness and suspicion and units about making an attempt to vary the current order… with something that comes helpful, violently, disastrously, making the discordances worse as a substitute of higher, and quarrelling bitterly with anybody who will not be in full accordance together with his explicit spasmodic conception of the change needful. He’s unable to understand that when the time comes I to behave, that is also the time to assume quick and exhausting. He won’t assume sufficient.
There was, subsequently, an infinite waste of human psychological, ethical and bodily assets in untimely revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, basically unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, through the previous hundred years. This was the inevitable first results of the discrediting of these outdated and outmoded psychological variations which have been embodied within the establishments and training of the previous. They discredited themselves and left the world filled with issues.
Such hasty destructiveness, Wells acknowledges, is the primary and most instinctual response to the popularity that change is required. However actual change — lasting change, change that reconstitutes society quite than merely dismantling the outdated order and leaving the world ashambles, the type of change Octavia Butler wrote about — requires one thing else totally, or else all we find yourself with are “psychological storms which give gangster dictators their alternatives.” He writes:
It’s turning into obvious that the actual clue to that reconciliation of freedom and sustained initiative with the extra elaborate social organisation which is being demanded from us, lies in elevating and unifying, and so implementing and making simpler, the overall intelligence companies of the world.
Solely such a shift, Wells argues, would guarantee “a reconditioned and extra highly effective Public Opinion,” which is humanity’s most strong protection towards these “gangster dictators.” (Mere months after Wells revealed this imaginative and prescient far forward of its time, one such dictator plunged humanity into its darkest hour.) He envisions the World Mind as the trail to freedom, peace, and a harmonious humanity:
A World Mind, working by an enhanced instructional system by way of the entire physique of mankind… will exchange our multitude of uncoordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, analysis establishments, literatures with a function, nationwide instructional techniques and the like; in that and in that alone, it’s maintained, is there any clear hope of a extremely Competent Receiver for world affairs, any hope of an ample directive management of the current harmful drift of world affairs. We don’t need dictators, we don’t need oligarchic events or class rule, we wish a widespread world intelligence aware of itself. To work out a strategy to that World Mind organisation is subsequently our major want on this age of crucial building.
It’s an immense enterprise however not an unattainable enterprise… There are beneficial situations for it, encouraging precedents and a plainly evident want.
Crowning his imaginative and prescient for the World Mind is a sentiment each buoyant and uncompromising:
The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even because it dies it’s born once more. This synthesis of data is the mandatory starting to the brand new world.
