World Brain by H.G. Wells

(MIT Press, 2021)

Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

As I began to draft this review, I read a newsletter with a section titled “Can the world computer save the world?”, excerpting three essays by a tenacious technologist (who I shall decline to name) which advance a hand-wringing “what went wrong?” critique of cryptocurrency in order to conclude that—shock, horror, &c.—the particular flavour of imaginary money they work with (and in which they are presumably well-supplied) is the One True Coin that can “out-perform current models of capitalism”. (The newsletter’s curator, to his credit, notes that this bit “goes a bit too ‘computers can do anything’ for me”, which may explain his header’s implicit invocation of Betteridge’s Law.)

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Review from BSFA Review 16 - Download your copy here.