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H.G. Wells’ “World Brain” is now here—what have we learned since?

#1
C C Offline
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/...n-society/

EXCERPTS: Between November 1936 and November 1937, H.G. Wells gave a series of lectures in Great Britain, France, and the US about the world's impending problems and how to solve them. The lectures were first published under the title World Brain in 1938, and they are sweeping in scope. Wells argued for rearranging both education and the distribution of knowledge and thought we should probably get rid of nationalism while we're at it.

MIT Press has just issued a compendium of these lectures, along with related material Wells presented as magazine articles and radio addresses. The collection also includes a foreword by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling and an introduction by Joseph Reagle, an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern who writes and teaches about popular culture, digital communication, and online communities.

[...] If only everyone had the same education, the same knowledge, the same understanding of what was important, his thinking went—if only everyone knew the truth—it was inevitable that we'd form a productive, peaceful, global society. Conversely, without his educational reforms, Wells felt there was no way we'd transcend the mess of grubby, meaningless insularities that is our civilization.

Wells was promoting a Permanent World Encyclopedia to collate, standardize, assess, and continually revise the bulk of human knowledge. He wanted knowledge and its dissemination to be centralized—"a World Brain which will replace our multitude of unco-ordinated ganglia... a memory and a perception of current reality for the entire human race."

[...] The notion that granting everyone access to the same teachings could save society was not idle speculation on Wells' part. He was 70 at this point and had become rich, famous, and influential by introducing people to radical new ideas through his writing. He was so influential that, during World War I, the British government appointed him "Director of Enemy Propaganda Against Germany." So he was well aware of the power of words—particularly his words—to change minds and change lives. (Even though the incontrovertible proof of that power provided by Orson Welles' radio adaptation of his War of the Worlds was still a year in the future).

If a top-down global education system and curriculum sounds a touch Orwellian to you, it sounded that way to George Orwell as well. In 1941, he published "Wells, Hitler and the World State," in which he argued that Germany hewed much closer to a well-run society in which everyone thinks similarly and along scientific lines than England ever has. But it was run by a "criminal lunatic," so that didn't work out quite as Wells thought it would. Orwell also noted that patriotism, which Wells thought of as civilization-destroying, was the primary force inducing Russians and Britons to fight against Hitler. Thirty-eight-year-old Orwell saw, in a way that 75-year-old Wells couldn't, that technology and information would hardly lead directly to world peace and harmony.

[...] Between the two World Wars, Wells ... thought that a Permanent World Encyclopedia couldn't help but lead to world peace. What Wells promoted actually sounds a lot like Wikipedia. But when we finally had the ability to make his dream into reality, we made the whole rest of the Internet alongside it, which grants everyone access to at least as many lies as it does truth.

A mere three years after he proposed the encyclopedia, Orwell looked at the world around him and concluded that it couldn't help but lead to authoritarian regimes, which were by nature barbaric. Eighty-four years later, we walk around with a Permanent World Encyclopedia in our pockets, but it has neither brought humanity together in harmony nor created some groupthink dystopia à la Camazotz. It has done a little of both.

Instant access to the sum of human knowledge has allowed far-flung, like-minded people to find each other and coalesce into supportive communities. But it has also enabled people to retreat deeper into their own ideological silos... (MORE - details)
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R. Brager: "Naïve socialists seduce the public via their fame and idealism; more practical socialists adjust and implement their proposals; and the most worldly and self-serving socialists seize control of the outcome."

R. Brager: "The problem with a non-stratified society, it's radical and universal elimination of rank and merit, is that once the Western program ventures down that narrow road of an ever-evolving and ever-refining classless tradition, the new 'knowledge' and priority which the West acquires is one of guilt and overwhelming need for redemption. Thus, via an internal collapse and relinquishing of its own privileged epistemological status, it allows the return on equal footing of the very specious beliefs, ignorance, paranoia and barbarism of the pre-scientific and pre-reasoning world that it originally sought to abate."
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#2
Syne Offline
(Aug 2, 2021 05:56 PM)C C Wrote: [...] If only everyone had the same education, the same knowledge, the same understanding of what was important, his thinking went—if only everyone knew the truth—it was inevitable that we'd form a productive, peaceful, global society. Conversely, without his educational reforms, Wells felt there was no way we'd transcend the mess of grubby, meaningless insularities that is our civilization.

That kind of naive idealism is so cute.
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