The Internet

Early twentieth-century writers did not foresee packet-switching or Wi-Fi, but several of them sketched intellectual architectures that resemble today’s internet. Their ideas circulated for decades and helped shape later technical and cultural projects.

The key strands

• Vannevar Bush’s “Memex” (1945) – an electromechanical desk with microfilm, associative links, and sharing functions. Bush imagined scholars “conjointly” creating trails of knowledge and sending them to one another, thereby forming “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” [1].
• H. G. Wells’s “World Encyclopaedia” (1938) – a continually updated, universally accessible repository that any knowledgeable person could help curate. Wells called it a “mental clearing house” that would “link all minds” and strengthen world peace [2].
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” (1920s–1950s) – a planetary layer of thought produced when human minds interconnect and share information. Teilhard spoke of “a sort of ‘planetary mind’” that would arise once “each individual becomes a center of a system of instantaneous communications” [3].
• David Ronfeldt’s historical synthesis (2020) – reviews these earlier notions, noting how each supplied “precursors to the internet and to today’s concepts of collective intelligence” [4].

Where they agree – and differ

Agreement

• All three primary authors assumed that better communication technology would knit humanity into a single, knowledge-sharing web.
• They each framed the project as a public good rather than a commercial product.

Differences

• Bush stayed closest to engineering reality, describing specific hardware; Wells emphasized institutional governance and librarianship; Teilhard cast the idea in evolutionary and spiritual terms.
• Bush worried about information overload and stressed personal control; Wells focused on expert curation; Teilhard celebrated an inevitable convergence of minds.

Conflicting perspectives Ronfeldt observes that Wells distrusted centralized propaganda whereas Teilhard saw convergence as an almost mystical destiny; thus they disagreed on whether the new medium should be tightly managed by experts (Wells) or would self-organize (Teilhard) [4].

Public discourse over time

1930–1938: Wells publishes articles and then the book “World Brain”, giving radio talks and lectures at universities and PEN meetings. Librarians debate feasibility; some fear a monopoly of knowledge [2].

1945: Bush’s “As We May Think” appears in The Atlantic. It is widely reprinted; Life magazine illustrates the Memex, stirring excitement among scientists returning from WWII [1].

1950s: Teilhard’s writings circulate privately (he was barred from publishing by his Jesuit superiors); after his death the English translation of “The Phenomenon of Man” (1959) triggers discussion among theologians and cyberneticians about a “thinking earth” [3].

1960s–1970s: ARPANET designers cite Bush explicitly; Wells and Teilhard are referenced mostly in humanities circles. The term “noosphere” begins to appear in ecological and New Age literature.

1980s–1990s: Popularizers such as Stewart Brand and Timothy Leary juxtapose Teilhard’s noosphere with the emerging internet; librarians recall Wells during debates on the “digital library”.

2000s–2020: Scholars like Ronfeldt reassess all three authors as “proto-internet” thinkers, noting both their prescience and their blind spots concerning commercialization, inequality, and surveillance [4].

How accurately did they “predict” the internet?

• Conceptual accuracy: They correctly anticipated hyperlinking (Bush), crowdsourced encyclopedias (Wells), and global real-time connectivity (Teilhard).
• Technical specifics: None foresaw packet switching, layered protocols, or the economics of digital advertising.
• Social dynamics: Their forecasts were largely utopian; the darker possibilities of disinformation, corporate monopolies, and state surveillance received little attention (Wells touched on propaganda but still assumed benevolent oversight).

Legacy

Memex inspired hypertext pioneers like Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart; World Brain is often credited as a spiritual ancestor of Wikipedia; the noosphere remains a touchstone in discussions of collective intelligence and planetary computing [1][2][3][4].

— Written by WikleBot. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources below.

Sources

1. https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
2. https://archive.org/stream/worldbrain00wells/worldbrain00wells_djvu.txt
3. https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin_djvu.txt
4. https://www.thewikle.com/resources/RONFELDT-OriginsAttributesNoosphere-2020.pdf
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Question

How did earlier thinkers predict the internet?