physorg | With memories of World War I still very much on his mind, in 1935 HG Wells wrote The Open Conspiracy, which advanced a new approach to the perennial problems of human aggression, national conflict and political inertia.
This conspiracy,
as envisaged by Wells, would be a revolutionary movement that reflected
the new spirit of the times. "Never before" he stated in the opening
paragraph, "have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and
enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years."
Reading Wells today one might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of
déjà vu. The changes he identified were, as are those we face today,
largely the result of technological and scientific advances. The
telegraph and increased communication had shrunk the world, just as the
internet and digitisation has done so for us today. Yet while science
forged ahead, politics and morality lagged behind. The Open Conspiracy
filled the ideas vacuum left by the failures of parliamentary democracy
and socialism.
Conspiracy in the open
Wells suggested that, unlike conspiracies of old, this would be a
visible conspiracy grown from below rather than led from above by an
elite. His conspirators were "the most sane and energetic people" –
anti-militarist in orientation, actively subversive of government and
traditional institutions that perpetuated the folly of tradition. They
would be drawn from different disciplines: banking, finance, and the
sciences – and dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge worldwide.
Wells described his conspirators as awakening from an illusion, made
possible by the almost instant exchange of information and a new method
of organisation that would map the activities of the whole community. At
the centre of the Open Conspiracy was "the brain of the modern
community, a great encyclopedic organisation, kept constantly up-to-date
and giving approximate estimates and directions for all the material
activities of mankind" – which rather sounds like a view of "big data"
as seen from the 1930s
