The Information - James Gleick [200]
H. G. Wells was known for his science fiction, but it was as a purposeful social critic that he published a little book in 1938, late in his life, with the title World Brain. There was nothing fanciful about what he wanted to promote: an improved educational system throughout the whole “body” of humanity. Out with the hodgepodge of local fiefdoms: “our multitude of unco-ordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose.”♦ In with “a reconditioned and more powerful Public Opinion.” His World Brain would rule the globe. “We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.” Wells believed that a new technology was poised to revolutionize the production and distribution of information: microfilm. Tiny pictures of printed materials could be made for less than a penny per page, and librarians from Europe and the United States met to discuss the possibilities in Paris in 1937 for a World Congress of Universal Documentation. New ways of indexing the literature would be needed, they realized. The British Museum embarked on a program of microfilming four thousand of its oldest books. Wells made this prediction: “In a few score years there will be thousands of workers at this business of ordering and digesting knowledge where now you have one.”♦ He admitted that he meant to be controversial and provocative. Attending the congress himself on behalf of England, he foresaw a “sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the whole human race.”♦ Yet he was imagining something mundane, as well as utopian: an encyclopedia. It would be a successor to the great national encyclopedias—the French encyclopedia of Diderot, the Britannica, the German Konversations-Lexikon (he did not mention China’s Four Great Books of Song)—which had stabilized and equipped “the general intelligence.”
This new world encyclopedia would transcend the static form of the book, printed in volumes, said Wells. Under the direction of a wise professional staff (“very important and distinguished men in the new world”), it would be in a state of constant change—“a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.” Who knows whether Wells would recognize his vision in Wikipedia? The hurly-burly of competing ideas did not enter into it. His world brain was to be authoritative, but not centralized.
It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa.… It can have at once the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.
For that matter, he said, “It might have the form of a network.”
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness. When Wells used the word network—a word he liked very much—it retained its original, physical meaning for him, as it would for anyone in his time. He visualized threads or wires interlacing: “A network of marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and blossoms”; “an intricate network of wires and cables.”♦ For us that sense is almost lost; a network is an abstract object, and its domain is information.
The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose. Introducing The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon had to be blunt. He simply declared meaning to be “irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Forget human psychology; abandon subjectivity.