The alternative to despair is to build an ark

H. G. Wells's “world encyclopedia” has merit beyond its seeming similarities to Wikipedia Between 1936 and 1938, H. G. Wells delivered a series of lectures first published under the title World Brain in 1938. The standard reading of that text over the past few decades has framed Wells as the utopian futurist projecting from microfilm, radio, and telephone a world encyclopedia freely available to all. Predicting, various authors have written, the World Wide Web or Wikipedia, World Brain naïvely imagined that such a facility would provide the global community with the knowledge base we would need to create world peace. After 5 years of research on propaganda and misinformation, Yochai Benkler reads World Brain very differently.