The World Brain: H.G. Wells’s Prophetic 1930s Vision for the Internet and How to Fix Its Ugliest Present Breaking Point

“The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even as it dies it is born again.”

“Our minds are all threaded together,” the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the first years of the twentieth century, “& all the world is mind.” A world war, an airplane, and a radio later, nearly half a century before the birth of the true Internet and eight years before Vannevar Bush imagined the personal computer, another far-seeing mind envisioned the revolutionary reality beyond Wo...