In 1908 A British Man Predicted Both World Wars The Internet And Something That Hasnt Happened Yet

In 1908, a man in Britain sat down at a battered writing desk in a rented house in Sandgate, Kent and wrote a book that should not have been possible to write. He was not a general. He was not a politician. He was not a scientist employed by any government or a spy with access to classified intelligence or a prophet living on a mountain top receiving visions from the divine. He was a short, pale, barrel-chested man who had grown up desperately poor who had survived tuberculosis twice who had been a draper’s apprentice and a school teacher before he became a writer and who had a habit of thinking about the future so precisely so clinically so stubbornly that the future apparently had no choice but to eventually agree with him. The book he wrote in 1908 was called The War in the Air. It described a global conflict triggered by a sudden aerial assault on New York City. It described the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge. It described German airships crossing the Atlantic and firebombing civilian populations. It described the collapse of global financial systems within weeks of the fighting beginning. It described the end of the world as anyone in 1908 understood it. And then, with the war still burning, it described a prolonged age of confusion and fragmented civilization. A world that had broken itself so completely that it could not easily be put back together. Six years after he wrote that book, the First World War began. 25 years after he wrote that book, he published a second book a fictional future history called The Shape of Things to Come. In that book, he predicted a second global war starting in 1940 ignited by a territorial dispute over a city called Danzig carried out primarily through aerial bombardment of civilian populations and resulting in a near total collapse of the global order. He also described in considerable detail a contagion of violence spreading across the Middle East in the war’s aftermath, refugee crises of an unprecedented scale, the rise of stateless populations, and a world struggling to agree on a new framework for human governance. Five years after he published that book, the Second World War began. It started in September 1939 over Danzig. The city is now called Gdansk. But those two predictions, extraordinary as they are, are not even the strangest things about this man. Because somewhere between writing about the First War and writing about the Second War, he also wrote, in a series of essays and lectures that received almost no attention at the time, a detailed description of a global information network that would allow any human being on Earth to access the entirety of human knowledge from any location at any time through a system of linked, continuously universally accessible documents. He called it a world brain. He described it in 1937. The internet would not be invented for another 50 years. Wikipedia would not exist for another 64. And then there is the final prediction, the one that has not happened yet, the one that, depending on how you read it, either means he was wrong for the first and only major time in his prophetic career, or means we are currently living through the early stages of the thing he warned us about and simply have not recognized it yet. His name was Herbert George Wells. He was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, into a family that had no money and very little expectation of acquiring any. His father was a professional cricketer, which sounds glamorous and until you understand that professional cricket in Victorian England was barely above manual labor in terms of social status and significantly below it in terms of income. His mother worked as a domestic servant. The house they lived in was cold, cramped, and perpetually on the edge of financial ruin. When Wells was 7 years old, he broke his leg badly. And while he was confined to bed during his recovery, his father brought him books from the local lending library. It was the first time in his short life that he had unlimited access to reading material. And something happened to him during those weeks of enforced stillness that would define everything that came after. He read obsessively. He read about science and history and exploration and biology. He read accounts of geological time, of the vast stretches of deep history before human beings existed, of the incomprehensible future that stretched out beyond the present moment. He became, at the age of 7, a person who could not stop thinking about time, about where things were going, about what came next. That quality, the ability and the compulsion to think rigorously about the future, to follow chains of cause and effect forward through decades and centuries with the same discipline a mathematician applies to a proof, would eventually produce a body of predictive work that remains, more than a century later, almost entirely without parallel in the history of human thought. This documentary is about what he saw. It is about how he saw it. It is about what the mechanism was, what the method was, how a man with no special access to secret information consistently and specifically predicted the shape of events that were decades away. And it is about the final prediction, the one we are still waiting on, the one he was most certain about, the one he called, in his quieter moments, the only possible outcome. We are I’m to spend some time with Herbert George Wells tonight. Not just with his predictions, but with the man himself, because the predictions cannot be separated from the person who made them. The precision of what he saw, the specific operational details, the dates, the mechanisms, the social consequences, all of it comes from a particular way of thinking that he developed deliberately, consciously, as a method. Understanding the method is the only way to understand why what he produced was not luck. It was not luck. What Herbert George Wells did, repeatedly, across 60 years of writing, was something closer to applied science. And the implications of that, when you sit with them long enough, are genuinely unsettling. Because if it was a method, and if the method worked for everything he applied it to, then the final prediction, the one that has not resolved yet, deserves the same level of serious attention as the ones that already came true. We will get there. But first, we need to go back to a house in Kent in 1908 and understand what a man with a battered writing desk and a ferocious, disciplined imagination could see from where he was standing. Chapter 1, the education of a prophet. Herbert Wells did not have the childhood that produces comfortable men. He had the childhood that produces men who need to understand everything, because understanding everything is the only form of safety available to people who grew up without any other kind. His father, Joseph Wells, played cricket at the professional level, which in the latter half of the 19th century in England, meant that he spent a significant portion of every year away from home, traveling between county grounds, earning barely enough to cover the family’s expenses, and supplementing his income by running a crockery shop in Bromley that never quite succeeded. The shop was called Atlas House, which was either an aspirational name or a joke, depending on how generously you read Victorian shopkeepers. Either way, Atlas House sat on the High Street in Bromley with all the grandeur of a name that meant very little. And the Wells family lived above and behind it in conditions that Herbert would later describe with a novelist’s precision. Damp walls, a kitchen that doubled as a washing room, a father who was frequently absent, and a mother who was present but increasingly overwhelmed by the gap between what she had hoped her life would be and what it had actually become. Sarah Wells, Herbert’s mother, had spent years working as a lady’s maid at Uppark, a grand country house in West Sussex. She had grown up in service, which in the Victorian class system meant she had learned to inhabit the edges of a prosperous world without belonging to it, to polish silver she would never eat from, and dust furniture she would never sit on, and maintain standards of domestic order that served people who had not earned those standards by anything except the accident of birth. When she married Joseph Wells and moved to Bromley, she carried with her a set of values and aspirations that were calibrated to a class she had never actually been part of. This created in the Wells household a particular form of genteel poverty, the poverty of people who know what comfort looks like and cannot stop measuring themselves against it. Herbert was the youngest of three surviving children, and by the time he was old enough to understand anything about the family situation, the situation was visibly deteriorating. The crockery shop struggled. His father had a cricketing accident that effectively ended his playing career. The family’s income sources were drying up, and the response was the response available to Victorian families of limited means. The children would need to become apprentices. They would need to enter the working world as early as possible and contribute to the household survival. Herbert was 13 when his formal education ended. He was sent first to a draper’s shop in Windsor where he was expected to learn the trade and then to another draper’s establishment in Southsea. The work was physical, monotonous, and socially stratifying in a way that felt to the young Wells almost violent in its implications. To become a draper was to accept a ceiling. It was to look at the shape of your life and acknowledge that this was its extent. That the books you had read during your convalescence, the ideas you had chased through those volumes of science and history and exploration would remain the property of people who had the luxury of time and money to pursue them. And that your role was to fold fabric and measure ribbon and say sir and madam to people who would never say anything respectful back to you. He could not accept it. This inability to accept it would turn out to be one of the most consequential refusals in the history of British literature. He wrote a letter to his former headmaster, Thomas Morley, at Midhurst Grammar School asking whether there was any possibility of a teaching position at the school or at least some form of continued education. Morley, recognizing something in the young man, arranged for him to return to Midhurst as a pupil teacher. A role that gave him access to learning in exchange for basic teaching assistance. At Midhurst, Wells discovered chemistry and through chemistry he discovered physics. And through physics he discovered something that would orient the rest of his life. The idea that the physical world was knowable. That it operated according to principles that could be discovered, articulated, and applied. That the universe was not mysterious in in the mystical sense but in the scientific sense. Full of things that were not yet understood but that could in principle be understood given sufficient application of intelligence and method. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, which is now part of Imperial College London, and there he studied under Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was Darwin’s greatest public advocate, the man who had done more than perhaps anyone else to bring evolutionary biology into mainstream Victorian consciousness, the man who had debated Bishop Wilberforce at the Oxford Museum in 1860 and emerged with what many considered a decisive intellectual victory for the idea that life had not been designed, but had evolved. Studying under Huxley was studying at the edge of what was known and what was about to become knowable. It was studying at the frontier. Wells absorbed everything. He absorbed the method of evolutionary biology, which was the method of looking at current forms and tracing them backward to their origins and forward to their probable adaptations. He absorbed the geological timescale, the understanding that the Earth was incomprehensibly old, that what felt like permanent features of the world were actually temporary arrangements in a long process of change. He absorbed the Darwinian understanding that the present was not an endpoint, but a waypoint, that species did not arrive at a final form, but continued to change in response to their environments, and that the pressures shaping that change could be analyzed and understood. And then he took all of that and turned it around. If you could trace the origins of present forms backward through time using evidence, could you not also project forward? If you understood the pressures that were currently acting on a on a system, whether that system was a biological population or a social structure or an economic arrangement, could you not predict with reasonable confidence what that system would look like after those pressures had had time to work? This is the method. This is what he developed and what he would spend the rest of his life applying. He called it, in various essays and lectures, the science of the future. He believed, with complete seriousness, that the future was not unknowable, that it was simply the result of processes currently underway, and that a sufficiently rigorous analyst could trace those processes forward and describe their probable outcomes. He was 24 years old when he arrived at this conviction. He was 65 when he published The Shape of Things to Come. And in the intervening 41 years, virtually everything he predicted using this method came true in sufficient detail to be recognized. The question of why this matters now, a century and a half after his birth, is the question we are going to be sitting with for the rest of this hour, because the method did not stop. He kept applying it until the year he died in 1946 in London, with the Second World War barely over and the atomic age barely begun. And in those final years of application, he arrived at conclusions about what was coming that are not yet resolved. We do not know yet if he was right about the last thing. He had never been wrong before. Chapter 2. The book that should not have been possible. Let us talk about the war in the air because it is important to be precise about what Wells actually wrote in 1908 and not merely to gesturing at it in general terms. Precision is required here because the book’s predictive accuracy is not merely thematic. It is operational. It is specific. It describes not just the general category of aerial warfare, but the particular form it took, the particular consequences it produced, and the particular civilizational disruption it caused in a way that goes well beyond what you would expect from even a very talented speculative fiction writer simply imagining a future war. In 1908, heavier-than-air powered flight had existed for exactly 5 years. The Wright brothers had made their first sustained flight at Kitty Hawk in December 1903 and by 1908, the longest flight anyone had achieved was still measured in hours rather than days and in miles rather than thousands of miles. The idea of a transatlantic crossing by air was not science fiction in 1908. It was closer to fantasy. No aircraft yet built could carry meaningful armament. No aircraft yet built had been used in any military application. The concept of aerial bombardment of civilian populations was not a military doctrine being actively developed by any major power. It was not being discussed in military academies. It was not in the classified papers of general staffs. It And yet, Wells in 1908 described it with enough operational specificity to constitute a practical blueprint. The novel follows a young Englishman named Bert Smallways who becomes accidentally caught up in a German aerial invasion of the United States. This framing device is not what matters. What matters is the framework Wells constructed around it. The war in the novel begins with Germany deploying a fleet of airships, large hydrogen-filled dirigibles capable of crossing the Atlantic and using them to attack New York without warning. The attack comes from the air, bypasses all existing coastal and naval defenses, and causes catastrophic damage to civilian infrastructure before any conventional military response can be organized. Wells understood in 1908 the strategic logic that would take actual militaries another decade to begin grasping. He understood that aircraft fundamentally changed the relationship between geography and defense. Every defensive strategy that had worked for centuries, the fortress, the navy, the fortified border, depended on controlling the ground and the sea. An enemy that could move through the air was an enemy that rendered those defenses irrelevant. There was no fortress wall that stopped an airship. There was no naval blockade that a fleet of dirigibles needed to respect. The concept of a secure home front, which had been central to European military thinking since the Napoleonic era, simply ceased to apply once one side possessed the ability to reach over the front line and strike the cities, the factories, the supply depots, the civilian populations behind it. This insight, which Wells articulated clearly in 1908 as the foundational logic of his fictional war, was articulated with painful clarity by the actual victims of the actual German Zeppelin raids on London, which began in January 1915. The first Zeppelin raid on London killed seven people and injured 35. That sounds modest until you understand what it represented strategically. For the first time since the Norman Conquest, England’s island geography had failed to protect its civilian population. The psychological impact was profound and immediate. People who had grown up understanding that Britain’s insularity was its fundamental defense, that the channel was the moat that made England England, suddenly had to accommodate a new reality. The moat did not stop things that flew. Wells had described exactly this psychological consequence in 1908. In the novel, the moment the airships appear over New York, the psychological transformation is as significant as the physical damage. The characters experience a dissolution of the sense of safety that civilization had always depended on. Home was no longer home in the way it had always been. The sky had become hostile territory. But the 1908 book goes further than the Zeppelin raids. The Zeppelin raids, terrible as they were, were ultimately a limited strategic tool. The airships were slow, vulnerable to improving anti-aircraft technology, and could carry only limited bomb loads. The strategic air war Wells had described in 1908, the systematic aerial bombardment of cities as a primary war-fighting strategy, the deliberate targeting of industrial and civilian infrastructure from the air as a means of breaking an enemy’s capacity and will to continue fighting that came with the Second World War. It came with the Blitz, with the Allied strategic bombing campaign over Germany, with the firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden, with cities being effectively erased from the air. Wells wrote about those firestorms in 1908. He wrote about the peculiar horror of aerial bombardment, the fact that, unlike ground combat, which at least had the dignity of being between people who could see each other, aerial attack arrived without warning, fell on combatants and civilians without distinction, and created a form of mass death that felt different in kind from any previous form of warfare. He wrote about the moral vertigo of pilots dropping bombs on cities full of sleeping people. He wrote about the collapse of the distinction between soldier and civilian that aerial warfare necessarily produced. He wrote about all of this in 1908, when the total inventory of aircraft capable of sustained powered flight in the entire world could probably have been counted on the fingers of two hands. There is also the economic prediction, and this one deserves particular attention because it is less commonly discussed and is in some ways more impressive than the purely military elements. Wells predicted that an aerial war of the type he described would immediately and catastrophically disrupt global financial markets. He wrote about stock exchanges closing, about credit systems seizing up, about supply chains collapsing, about the interlocking dependencies of the global economy proving to be a vulnerability rather than a strength in conditions of sudden widespread warfare. He wrote about governments losing control of economic processes that had previously been manageable during wars because those previous wars had not been capable of striking economic infrastructure directly. The First World War produced exactly this economic crisis. The stock markets of London, New York, Paris, and Berlin all suspended trading within days of the war’s outbreak in August 1914. The Bank of England raised interest rates to 10% to defend sterling. Gold convertibility was suspended. The global financial system, which had been operating with remarkable interconnected efficiency in the years before the war, essentially seized within weeks of the fighting beginning. This was not a prediction that required deep financial expertise. It required the same analytical move Wells had already made. Understanding that modern civilization was a system of interdependencies and that systems of interdependencies were catastrophically vulnerable to sudden widespread shocks. He had written that in 1908. The economists of 1914 were surprised by it. After the war, when the full dimensions of what had happened were becoming clear, a journalist asked Wells what it felt like to have predicted it. His response was characteristically precise. He said he had not predicted it in the sense of having seen it coming up through some form of intuition or foresight. He had predicted it the way a physicist predicts where a thrown ball will land by understanding the forces involved and tracing their probable trajectories. The forces had been visible in 1908 to anyone who was willing to look at them honestly. The trajectory had followed from those forces with the kind of inevitability that in retrospect makes the whole thing seem obvious. But that is always how it looks in retrospect. In prospect, almost nobody else had seen it. There is one more element of the war in the air that deserves to be noted because it points forward to the second prediction and to the final prediction that has not yet resolved. Wells did not end his 1908 book with the end of the aerial war. He continued past it. He described the aftermath, the world that existed once the fighting had stopped. And what he described was not a world that had recovered and rebuilt and returned to something resembling normality. He described a world that had been so thoroughly disrupted, so completely altered in its foundational assumptions and structures that the pre-war world could not simply be reassembled from the pieces that remained. He described a long period of confusion and fragmentation. He described regional conflicts continuing in the spaces where central authority had broken down. He described populations displaced from destroyed cities living in improvised camps. He described governments struggling to reconstitute legitimacy over populations that had experienced the government’s fundamental promise, the promise of security, as comprehensively broken. He described the beginning of a very slow, very painful process by which the world would have to build new institutions capable of managing the forces that had produced the catastrophe. He was describing 1918 to 1939. He was describing the interwar period. He was describing it in 1908. When you have absorbed that fact fully, you are ready to think about the second book. Chapter 3 What he saw before the First World War. It is worth pausing here before we move to the second book to consider the context in which Wells was writing the first one. Because 1908 in Britain was not a year in which most serious, informed, educated people believed a major European war was imminent or even particularly likely. The Edwardian era, named for the king who had ascended following Victoria’s death in 1901, was characterized by a particular form of prosperous complacency. Britain was still the center of the largest empire in human history. London was the financial capital of the world. British naval supremacy was so complete that it had not been meaningfully challenged in nearly a century. The great powers of Europe were linked by trade, by dynastic marriage, by the shared assumption that the costs of a general war would be so catastrophic that no rational leader would initiate one. This was not merely wishful thinking. It had a serious intellectual architecture behind it. Norman Angell, one of the most widely respected commentators of the period, published a book in 1910 called The Great Illusion, which argued through careful economic analysis that a major European war had become essentially impossible because the financial interdependence of the great powers meant that any aggressor would destroy as much of its own economy as its enemies in the process of fighting. The book was a best-seller across Europe. It was translated into multiple languages. It was taken seriously by politicians, academics, and military strategists. Its argument was not silly. It was genuinely sophisticated. Two years after The Great Illusion was published, the First World War began. Norman Angell’s error was not in his analysis of economic interdependency. His analysis was correct. He was right that a European war would be economically catastrophic for all parties, including the aggressor. What his analysis failed to account for was that the decision to go to war would not be made by the economists. It would be made by people operating within institutional frameworks, within alliance obligations, within narratives of national honor and historical grievance that did not respond to economic rationality in the way his model assumed. The forces driving toward war were not economic. They were political, cultural, nationalistic, institutional. And those forces had their own logic, their own momentum, their own trajectory. Wells understood this. He understood it because he had been trained to think in terms of systems, rather than in terms of individual rational actors. The method he had developed under Huxley was evolutionary and ecological, not economic and rationalist. Evolution does not proceed according to rational choice theory. Evolution proceeds according to the pressures acting on organisms, which include not only the pressures of resource competition, but the pressures of accumulated history, of path dependency, of structural features that were adaptive in one environment and persist into environments where they are not. Apply that framework to European politics in 1908, and what do you see? You see a continent of nation-states that had spent the previous century developing increasingly sophisticated military technologies and increasingly elaborate alliance structures, creating a system in which a significant conflict anywhere in the network would pull the entire network into the conflict. You see a Britain whose naval supremacy was being genuinely challenged for the first time in a century by a German naval expansion program, creating competitive pressures that had no obvious peaceful resolution. You see an Austro-Hungarian empire that was structurally vulnerable to exactly the kind of nationalist fragmentation that would eventually trigger its collapse. You see alliance structures so rigid that a single triggering event, the assassination of a single Archduke in a city most Europeans could barely locate on a map, would be sufficient to activate the entire catastrophic mechanism. Wells saw all of this in 1908. He saw it not because he had secret information, but because he was looking at the structural features of the system rather than at the reassuring surface of Edwardian prosperity. The prosperity was real. The structural vulnerabilities were also real. In systems thinking, the surface condition does not negate the structural condition. It merely delays and sometimes amplifies the eventual manifestation of it. There is something almost painful about reading the reaction to The War in the Air when it was published. Most reviews were appreciative, but in the way you appreciate a very vivid fever dream. Wells was acknowledged as one of the most imaginative writers in Britain, and this was understood as a literary judgment rather than a predictive one. The book was read as entertainment, as a particularly dark and inventive entertainment, and very few people who read it in 1908 appear to have thought seriously about the proposition that it was describing something that was actually coming. Wells himself was not under any such illusion. He wrote in letters during this period with a kind of weary clarity about what he thought was happening in Europe. He was not dramatic about it. He did not strike a prophetic pose. He simply stated, with the matter-of-fact tone of a person reading the output of a calculation they have already performed, that the current trajectory of European political and military development seemed to him to lead toward a major conflict. And that when that conflict came, it would be far larger, far more technologically intensive, and far more economically destructive than any previous war in European history. He was right about all three of those predictions. When the First World War ended in November 1918, Wells had been following it closely for four years, writing extensively about its conduct and its implications. His reaction to the armistice was not triumphalism. It was not, I told you so, which would have been understandable given the completeness with which subsequent events had validated his 1908 analysis. It was something more serious and more disturbing. He was looking at the peace settlement, at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, at the institutional framework being constructed at the Paris Peace Conference, and he was performing the same analytical calculation he had performed in 1908. He was tracing the current pressures forward through their probable trajectories. He did not like what he saw. He described the Versailles settlement in terms that were not complimentary and not popular. He argued that it was a punitive settlement that created conditions rather than resolving them. He argued that the map of Europe being drawn by the victorious powers was being drawn in ways that guaranteed future conflicts over the territories being reassigned and the populations being transferred. He argued that the League of Nations, the new international institution being created to manage the post-war world, lacked the actual authority and enforcement mechanisms necessary to perform the functions it was supposed to perform. He argued that the economic terms being imposed on Germany were sufficiently harsh to generate the precise conditions of grievance and resentment that had historically produced political extremism. He wrote all of this between 1918 and 1920. He was, of course, correct about all of it. The Versailles settlement did create the conditions for the rise of the political movements that would produce the Second World War. The League of Nations did prove unable to prevent the aggression of the 1930s. The map of Europe drawn in Paris did generate the territorial disputes that would define the flash points of the next conflict. But at the time, most people were not in the mood for Wells’s analysis. The war had killed 17 million people. The peace had been won. The world wanted to believe the peace would hold. The world wanted to believe that the machinery of international cooperation now being constructed would be sufficient to prevent the catastrophe from recurring. Wells believed none of this, and he said so with the same quiet precision with which he had described the original catastrophe in 1908. He was already working on the second book. Chapter 4, The Shape of Things to Come. In 1933, Herbert George Wells published a book that was structured as a fictional future history written from the perspective of a historian living in the year 2106. Looking back at the catastrophic events of the 20th and 21st centuries, he called it The Shape of Things to Come. The framing conceit was elaborate and deliberate. Wells presented the book as his transcription of the dream notes of a League of Nations diplomat named Philip Raven, who in his dreams had been reading a history of the future that existed in 2106 and had written down what he remembered of it each morning upon waking. This fictional distance, the pretense that the book was a transcription of a dream, was Wells’s way of giving himself permission to be specific, to give dates, to give names, to describe not just the general shape of coming events, but their operational particulars. He used that permission extravagantly and with a precision that when you read it now, knowing what actually happened, produces a particular quality of intellectual vertigo that is difficult to describe and impossible to dismiss. The Second Great War in The Shape of Things to Come begins in 1940. It begins over Danzig. Let us be very specific about this. Wells wrote in 1933 that the war would begin in 1940, ignited by a dispute over the city of Danzig, which was at that time a free city administered by the League of Nations, located at the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic coast, and subject to competing Polish and German claims. He identified in 1933 the specific city, the specific dispute, and the specific approximate year that would trigger the second global conflict of the 20th century. The Second World War began on September 1st, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The immediate trigger was, among other factors, the dispute over Danzig, which Germany demanded be returned to German control, and which Poland and its British and French allies refused to concede without a fight. The city of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, was the trigger Wells had identified 7 years before the war began. He was off by approximately 12 months on the start date. He was not off on the trigger. But the date and the trigger are almost secondary to what Wells described about the character of the war itself. He described a war conducted primarily through aerial bombardment. He described German aircraft systematically targeting British cities. He described the British and their allies responding with a strategic bombing campaign over Germany. He described the deliberate targeting of industrial facilities, transportation infrastructure, and population centers as the primary strategic logic of both sides. He described the war as a war in which the distinction between military and civilian had effectively ceased to exist. This is an accurate description of the Second World War. The Blitz, the bombing of Coventry and Southampton, and Plymouth, and Bristol, and Glasgow, and the endless nights over London. The British and American strategic bombing campaign over Germany that would eventually culminate in the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943, and Dresden in 1945. The destruction of German cities with a thoroughness that shocked even some of those conducting it. Wells had described all of this in 1933. He had described the particular horror of modern aerial war, the way it made total war total in a completely new sense, eliminating the last vestiges of the old distinction between the battle front and the home front. He also described something else about the Second World War that was not obvious in 1933, and that proved to be one of the war’s defining characteristics. He described the war as producing a refugee crisis of an unprecedented scale. He described populations being displaced from their homes, moving across borders in conditions of great suffering, creating a stateless, displaced population that the existing frameworks of international law had not been designed to handle. He described the particular moral and practical problem of people who no longer had a state to which they belonged and therefore had no legal standing within a world whose legal architecture was built on the assumption of state membership. The Second World War produced approximately 60 million displaced persons. It produced the Holocaust, the most systematic attempt to create a stateless, legally unprotected population in human history and to exploit that statelessness for purposes of mass murder. It produced the post-war refugee crisis that was vast enough to require the creation of entirely new international institutions, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, established in 1950, to manage a problem that existing frameworks were not equipped to address. Wells had described this problem in 1933. He had described it not as a humanitarian afterthought, but as a structural consequence of the kind of war he was predicting. A war so total, so geographically comprehensive, so destructive of state authority in the regions it passed through that it would necessarily produce populations whose membership in any functioning state had been destroyed along with everything else. There is a moment in The Shape of Things to Come that I want to draw your attention to specifically because it is the kind of detail that separates this book from merely thematically accurate speculation and places it in a different category of predictive achievement. Wells described in 1933 the particular character of the German leadership that would lead Germany into the Second War. He described a leadership that was nationalist in the narrowest and most exclusive sense that was animated by historical grievances and theories of racial hierarchy that was skilled at mobilizing mass popular enthusiasm through spectacle and rhetoric that was contemptuous of international institutions and legal constraints and that was crucially not subject to the rational cost-benefit calculations that Angell and the economic theorists had assumed would prevent any rational leader from initiating a catastrophic war. He was describing Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist movement. He was describing them in 1933 the year Hitler came to power. He was describing the precise psychological and political profile of the leadership that would lead Germany to war and he was describing it as a structural prediction as the type of leadership that the conditions created by the Versailles settlement would tend to produce rather than as a description of any specific individual. This is the method applied with particular clarity. He was not predicting Hitler as an individual. He was predicting the type. He was predicting that the conditions of post-war Germany, the economic humiliation the territorial grievances the collapse of the Weimar Republic’s institutional legitimacy under the pressure of economic depression would produce a leadership of a particular ideological character with a particular relationship to both domestic politics and international relations. And then that type of leadership operating within those conditions would follow a trajectory toward war that was given the structural features of the situation essentially predictable. He was right. Not because he was lucky because he was following the precious forward with more honesty and more rigor than almost anyone else was willing to apply to the available evidence. After the Second World War ended in 1945, Wells was dying. He was 78 years old. He was exhausted and ill and he had spent nearly 60 years thinking about where human civilization was going with an intensity that most people could not sustain for a decade. In the last book he published before his death, a short, dark essay called Mind at the End of Its Tether, he wrote something that alarmed many of his readers and that has been interpreted in various ways by everyone who has engaged with it since. He wrote that he was no longer certain humanity would survive. This was not the Wells who had spent six decades predicting that human intelligence and human ingenuity would eventually produce a stable, prosperous, rationally governed global civilization. This was not the optimistic Wells of the early 20th century. The Wells who had believed in the science of the future as an instrument of human liberation. This was a Wells who had watched two world wars, who had watched the atomic bomb fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who had watched humanity demonstrate twice within living memory its capacity for industrialized self-destruction, and who had arrived at a provisional conclusion that the thing he had spent his life predicting and advocating for, the world state, the rational global government, might simply not arrive before the next catastrophe rendered the question moot. But before we get to that final, unresolved question, there is a prediction we have not yet discussed. And in some ways, it is the most astonishing one. Chapter 5, The World Brain and the Internet. He described in 1937. In 1937, Herbert George Wells delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution in London. The Royal Institution, founded in 1799, was one of the most prestigious scientific venues in Britain. The place where Humphry Davy had discovered sodium and potassium, where Michael Faraday had done foundational work in electromagnetism, where countless major scientific ideas had been given their first major public presentation. It was not a place where speculative fantasies were presented. It was a place where people who had thought seriously about serious things went to say serious things and to serious audiences. Wells went there to describe the internet. He did not call it that. He called it a world brain and later a world encyclopedia and the terminology is obviously different. But when you read what he actually said, when you go back to the lecture and read its technical description of what he was proposing, the match is not approximate. The match is exact. Here is what Wells said a world encyclopedia would need to be. He said it would need to be permanent and continuously updated so that it was never fixed in a single edition that became obsolete but was always current, always incorporating the latest knowledge and correcting previous errors. He said it would need to be universally accessible, available to any person regardless of their physical location or their social status, not locked away in libraries that required physical travel or in academic institutions that required credentials and membership. He said it would need to be interconnected so that its entries were linked to each other in ways that allowed a reader to follow a chain of inquiry from any point to any other point rather than being organized in the linear alphabetical fashion of traditional encyclopedias that required you to know in advance which heading your question fell under. He said it would need to be collaborative in its production drawing on the expertise of specialists across every field of human knowledge rather than relying on the necessarily limited knowledge of any single editorial team. He said it would need to be decentralized, existing in multiple locations simultaneously rather than as a single physical object in a single place so that no single act of destruction could eliminate it. He said it would need to be searchable in a manner that allowed a user to locate information about any topic from any entry point, not just from a predetermined index. He described Wikipedia. He described Google. He described the linked structure of the World Wide Web, the specific architecture of hyperlinks connecting documents to other documents in a non-linear, explorable network, more than 50 years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in 1989. He described the open collaborative editorial model more than 60 years before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia in 2001. And he described it not as a fantasy, not as a dream of what might one day be possible, but as something he believed was technically achievable using the technologies available in 1937, and urgently necessary for reasons that he laid out in detail. His argument for the necessity of a world brain was itself a prediction. He argued that the fundamental problem of the 20th century was not a shortage of knowledge, but a crisis of knowledge management. More knowledge was being produced by more people in more fields than any individual or any traditional institution could possibly absorb and synthesize. The scientific literature was expanding faster than scientists could read it. The social sciences were generating insights about human behavior and social organization that were not being communicated to the people making decisions about human societies. The technical knowledge that existed, if it could be effectively organized and made accessible, was sufficient to solve most of the practical problems facing humanity. The reason those problems were not being solved was not that the knowledge did not exist. The reason was that the knowledge was fragmented, siloed, inaccessible, locked inside specializations and institutions and languages and physical locations that prevented it from reaching the people who could use it. This diagnosis was accurate in 1937. It is arguably still accurate now, though the tools available for addressing it are incomparably more powerful than anything Wells could have imagined. What is particularly striking about the World Brain lectures is not just the technical description, but the social prediction embedded in it. Wells argued that a functioning World Brain, a genuinely universal and accessible knowledge network, would change the political character of human societies. He argued that the information asymmetries that had historically allowed small groups of specialists and elites to make decisions on behalf of large populations who did not have access to the knowledge needed to evaluate those decisions would be radically reduced. He argued that an educated informed global population with access to the full range of human knowledge about any question they chose to investigate would be a qualitatively different political animal from the populations that had historically existed. He was partly right about this and the ways in which he was right and wrong are themselves interesting. The Internet has indeed democratized access to information in ways that have changed political dynamics in almost every country where it has penetrated. The Arab Spring, for all its incomplete and contested outcomes, was a political phenomenon that would not have been possible without the communication infrastructure that the Internet provided. The ability of individuals to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and communicate directly with large audiences has demonstrably changed the relationship between citizens and institutions in ways that institutional actors are still trying to understand and manage. At the same time, the Internet has also demonstrated that access to information does not automatically produce the kind of informed, rational, deliberative political culture Wells was imagining. It has demonstrated that information networks that are open and accessible are also open to misinformation, to manipulation, to the exploitation of cognitive biases by actors with the resources and motivation to do so. Wells assumed, perhaps because of his background in scientific culture, that the availability of accurate information would tend to displace inaccurate information, that truth, given access to the same communication channels as falsehood, would tend to win. The actual behavior of information on the internet suggests that this assumption was not entirely correct. But notice what has just happened. We are evaluating Wells’s prediction about the internet and its social effects, and we are finding that his description of the technology it was almost perfect, and his description of its political consequences was partly right and partly incomplete. That is a different category of assessment from wrong. When people are wrong about the future, they are usually wrong about both the technology and the consequences. Wells got the technology right and got the consequences partly right and partly wrong in ways that are themselves analytically interesting, that themselves reveal something important about the assumptions embedded in his method. The assumption embedded in his method was that human beings, given access to accurate information and adequate time to deliberate, would tend to make rational collective decisions. This is the assumption of the Enlightenment, the foundational assumption of scientific culture, and it has proven to be partially, but not completely valid as a description of human political behavior. Human beings do tend, in the aggregate and over time, to respond to accurate information. But they also respond to fear, to tribalism, to narrative, to charisma, to in-group identity, in ways that are not always reducible to the rational processing of available information. Wells knew this. He had written about it extensively. And yet, his prescriptions for the future tended to assume a more complete version of human rationality than his own analysis of human nature quite supported. This tension between his clear-eyed understanding of what human beings were actually like, and his insistent prescription for what his human institutions needed to become, is one of the most interesting features of his work, and one of the things that makes the final prediction, the one that has not yet resolved, so difficult to evaluate. Because the final prediction depends on whether human beings, confronted with sufficient evidence of the consequences of their current trajectory, will be capable of the kind of coordinated rational response that their previous behavior gives only partial grounds for expecting. Let us talk about the other predictions first. Let us talk about the atomic bomb and the tank and the things he got right that most people have forgotten he predicted. And then, we will arrive at the last thing. Chapter 6. The things most people have forgotten. He predicted there is a version of the story of H. G. Wells that gets told in popular accounts that focuses on the big predictions, the two World Wars, the internet, and then stops there, as though those three things were sufficient to make the case. They are sufficient, as it happens. But the full inventory of what Wells got right across 60 years of writing is considerably larger. And the full inventory matters because it is the full inventory that allows you to distinguish between a man who made three lucky guesses and a man who was applying a genuinely productive method with a remarkable degree of consistency. The atomic bomb. In 1914, Wells published a novel called The World Set Free. In that novel, he described a type of weapon he called an atomic bomb. He described it not as a single blast weapon of the type that a conventional explosive produces, but as a device that would release a continuous, self-sustaining chain reaction. A device that would not simply explode and then stop, but would continue releasing energy over an extended period, creating a zone of persistent radiation and destruction that conventional explosives could not produce. He described the particular horror of this kind of weapon, the way it would create damage that continued after the initial blast, the way it would render areas uninhabitable not through structural destruction, but through persistent radiation, the way it would fundamentally change the strategic logic of warfare because its effects could not be localized in the way that conventional weapons’ effects could be. He described this in 1914. The concept of nuclear fission, the physical process by which an atomic bomb actually works, would not be articulated by scientists until 1938 and 1939, when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated that uranium nuclei could be split, and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the physics of what was happening. The Manhattan Project, the American-British-Canadian program that actually built the first atomic bombs, did not begin until 1942. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were the realization of a concept that H.G. Wells had described in operational terms in a novel published 31 years earlier. This one is not disputed. The physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project knew about Wells’s 1914 novel. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-American physicist who conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and filed the first patent for a nuclear reactor, read The World Set Free in 1932 and later stated that it inspired his thinking about the possibility of a chain reaction. Frederick Soddy, the chemist who first theorized about atomic energy, had discussed his ideas with Wells before the novel was published. The connection between Wells’s fictional description and the actual development of nuclear weapons is not a coincidence that requires explanation. It is a documented case of a fictional prediction entering the intellectual culture of the field it predicted and helping to shape the thinking of the people who eventually made it real. This creates an interesting philosophical problem about the nature of prediction that we will return to. But first, the tank. In 1903, Wells published a short story called The Land Ironclads. In it, he described large, armored, self-propelled vehicles capable of crossing difficult terrain, equipped with weapons and used to break the stalemate of entrenched defensive positions. He described the specific tactical problem they were designed to solve, the trenches. Not the specific trenches of the First World War, which did not yet exist in 1903, but the logical consequence of the situation he could see developing in which improved defensive weapons, particularly machine guns and artillery, were making frontal infantry assault suicidally costly, creating situations in which neither side could advance and both sides were suffering catastrophic losses for negligible territorial gains. The solution he described in 1903, an armored vehicle that could cross no man’s land without being stopped by barbed wire, that could suppress machine gun positions, that could carry troops through terrain that was impassable to infantry on foot. This is a technically accurate description of the tank. The British Mark I tank, the first practical military tank deployed in combat, made its battlefield debut at the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. Wells had described the tactical concept and the general technical specification 13 years earlier. Ernest Swinton, one of the key figures in the development of the British tank program, later acknowledged that the land ironclads had contributed to the conceptual framework within which the tank was developed. Again, this is not a coincidence that requires elaborate explanation. Wells had identified a genuine tactical problem and applied engineering logic to the question of what physical system would solve it. The result was a description that was close enough to the actual eventual solution to be recognizable as an ancestor of it. The greenhouse effect and climate change. In 1901, Wells wrote a non-fiction essay called Anticipations, which was a systematic attempt to apply his method to the broad question of what human civilization would look like in the 20th century. In that essay, among many other things, he wrote about the relationship between industrial activity and the atmosphere. He wrote that the burning of coal and other fossil fuels at the scale that industrializing economies were now undertaking was releasing stored chemical energy in a way that would would have consequences for the composition of the atmosphere, and that changes in atmospheric composition could in principle affect the heat balance of the earth. He was describing in 1901 the basic physical mechanism of anthropogenic climate change. He was not the first person to raise this concern. Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist, had calculated the potential warming effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1896. But the combination of the scientific concept and its incorporation into a systematic prediction about the trajectory of industrial civilization was Wells’s particular contribution. And it was made in 1901, more than a century before climate change became the defining political and environmental issue of the 21st century. The global village and media saturation. In various essays and books from the 1920s onwards, Wells described a future in which instantaneous global communication would create a situation in which events happening anywhere on Earth would be immediately known everywhere on Earth, creating a shared global information space that would have profound consequences for political consciousness and cultural identity. He described the way that universal access to the same news, the same entertainment, the same cultural products would create both a sense of global connection and a kind of homogenization of culture that would sit in tension with local and national identities. Marshall McLuhan is usually credited with the concept of the global village in 1962. Wells had described the phenomenon in considerable detail 40 years earlier. This is not a knock on McLuhan, who articulated the idea with distinctive brilliance. It is simply an observation about the chronology. The rise of totalitarianism as a 20th century political phenomenon. In The Sleeper Awakes, published in 1899 and in other political writings of the early 20th century, Wells described a form of governance in which mass communication technologies were used not to inform and educate the population, but to manage and manipulate it. In which the gap between the information available to the governing class and the information available to the governed produced a systematic asymmetry of power, and in which the spectacle of political participation was maintained while actual political decision-making was concentrated in smaller and smaller groups. He was describing the logic of totalitarian propaganda, the specific mechanism by which mass media could be weaponized against the populations it was supposed to serve decades before Goebbels made it a practical art form and before Hannah Arendt and George Orwell made it a subject of serious political philosophy. Orwell, in fact, was deeply influenced by Wells. 1984 owes a structural debt to several of Wells’s political novels, though Orwell’s vision was darker and more pessimistic than Wells’s, and Orwell was more interested in the psychological mechanisms of totalitarian control than in the systemic analysis that was Wells’s characteristic mode. The decolonization of Asia and Africa. Wells predicted in the 1920s and 1930s that European imperial power would not survive the 20th century. He argued that the educational and communications revolutions happening within the colonized world, the spread of literacy, the development of indigenous intellectual classes, the increasing awareness among colonized populations of both the ideology of self-determination that their colonizers professed and the contradiction between that ideology and the reality of colonial rule would produce independence movements that the imperial powers would ultimately be unable to suppress without costs that democratic European societies would be unwilling to sustain. He was right. The decolonization of Asia and Africa was the defining geopolitical process of the mid-20th century. And it proceeded largely through the mechanisms Wells had identified, with the main exception that in some territories the process involved violent anti-colonial struggles that took longer to resolve than his more optimistic timeline had suggested. This is the full inventory, or most of it. There is more. There always is with Wells, because he wrote more than 100 books and articles over a 60-year career, and the rate at which his specific predictions have been subsequently validated is genuinely remarkable. But this is enough to establish the point. This was not a man who made three lucky guesses. This was a man who was applying a productive method consistently and getting consistently useful results. Which means the last prediction deserves to be taken seriously. Chapter 7. The invisible architecture of his method. Before we arrive at the last prediction, we need to understand one more thing about how Wells did what he did. Because the method is not just a historical curiosity. The method is the thing that makes the last prediction worth taking seriously. If it was luck or intuition or some kind of mysterious prophetic gift, then the last prediction is just one more fortunate guess among many. And we can assess its probability on the same basis we would assess any other speculation about the future. But if it was a method, a specific analytical procedure that can be described and examined and evaluated, then the last prediction carries the weight of that method’s track record. Here is the method as clearly as it can be reconstructed from Wells’s own descriptions of it and from the patterns visible across his predictive work. The first element is the identification of what Wells called driving forces. The underlying pressures and processes that are currently acting on a system and that will continue to act on it regardless of what any individual actor decides. In the case of the 1908 prediction, the driving forces were the development of heavier-than-air flight, the accumulation of military tensions between the great powers, the rigidity of the alliance system, and the structural vulnerability of a globalized economy to sudden, widespread disruption. None of these forces were hidden. All of them were visible to anyone who was paying attention. The question was whether you were willing to trace their trajectories forward honestly, without the wishful filtering that tends to make people dismiss inconvenient projections. The second element is the distinction between surface stability and structural instability. This is perhaps the most important element of the method and the one that most clearly separates it from ordinary social analysis. Most social analysis focuses on the surface condition, whether the current situation appears stable, whether the current leaders appear competent, whether the current institutions appear to be functioning. Wells trained himself to focus instead on the structural condition, whether the underlying pressures that were currently producing the surface stability were themselves stable or whether they were in a relationship that would eventually produce a phase transition, a sudden and catastrophic shift from the surface condition to something very different. This is a concept borrowed directly from physics, from thermodynamics. A system can appear stable on the surface while enormous amounts of potential energy are accumulating within it. Water looks calm at 99° C. Add one more degree and the phase transition is sudden and total. Wells applied this physical intuition to social systems, looking for the conditions under which surface calm was actually a mask for structural instability. For the accumulation of pressures that would eventually produce a sudden total reorganization of the system. The Europe of 1908 looked calm on the surface. The alliance tensions, the arms race, the nationalistic movements, the economic competition between the great powers, all of the structural pressures were there, but they were not at that moment producing visible catastrophe, and so most observers allowed themselves to believe that they would continue not to producing visible catastrophe indefinitely. Wells identified the structural instability and predicted the phase transition. This is the analytical move that the method required, and it is the move that most observers, most of the time, are not willing to make because it requires accepting uncomfortable conclusions about the future of a world that looks in the present more or less manageable. The third element is the extrapolation of technological development. Wells was not a technologist in the sense of being an engineer or an inventor, but he had the ability to understand the developmental logic of new technologies. To see where a technology that was currently in an early stage of development would tend to go as the engineering improved and the economic incentives accumulated. He could look at the Wright brothers’ aircraft in 1903 and see not the specific form of aircraft that would exist in 1943, but the general principle that heavier-than-air flight would develop along a curve of increasing range, increasing payload, and increasing speed, and that the military implications of that development would be transformative for any power that chose to exploit them. This extrapolative ability is not rare among engineers and scientists who are close to a particular technology. What was rare about Wells was his ability to combine technological extrapolation with social and political analysis, to think simultaneously about what a technology would be capable of and what the social and political systems it was being developed within would do with that capability. The question of what an airplane can carry is a technical question. The question of what a military power in an era of intensifying nationalism will choose to do with an airplane that can carry bombs to an enemy city is a political question. Wells kept both questions in mind simultaneously and arrived at the synthesis that neither the technologists nor the political analysts were producing on their own. The fourth element is the willingness to follow the analysis where it leads, even when where it leads is somewhere that most of your contemporaries are not willing to go. This sounds simple, but it is actually the most demanding element of the method because it requires overcoming the social and psychological pressures that tend to pull analysis back toward consensus and comfort. Wells was willing to write in 1908 that a catastrophic world war was coming. He was willing to write in 1920 that the peace settlement was not actually a peace. He was willing to write in 1933 that the conditions for a second catastrophe were already in place. These were not popular positions. They were not comfortable positions. They were positions that made Wells something of a professional pessimist in the eyes of people who preferred more reassuring analysis. He was not actually a pessimist. He was an optimist about the long run and a realist about the short run. The distinction matters. Pessimism says things will go badly because things always go badly. Realism says that under current conditions, the specific forces currently operating will tend to produce the specific outcomes those forces lead to. Realism leaves room for the possibility that the forces could be changed, that the trajectory could be altered, that the outcome is not fixed, but is the product of conditions that are themselves the product of choices. Wells was always, in his prescriptive writing, arguing for the changes that would be necessary to alter the trajectory, but he refused to allow the prescription to contaminate the analysis. The analysis was the analysis. The prescription was the prescription. Conflating them was the error that most of his contemporaries were making. There is a fifth element of the method that is perhaps the most distinctive, and the one that most clearly marks Wells’s approach as something that goes beyond ordinary futures analysis. It is what might be called the willingness to think at civilizational scale. Most political analysis, most economic analysis, most social analysis, is conducted within a framework that takes the existing nation-states, the existing economic system, the existing cultural framework as given. The analysis asks how things will develop within that framework. Wells asked what would happen to the framework itself. This is a fundamentally different kind of question, and it requires a fundamentally different kind of analysis. Most of the time, the framework is stable enough that the question of what will happen to it is not practically relevant. Most political events, most economic developments, most social changes occur within the framework and do not threaten it. But when the driving forces are large enough, and the structural instabilities are deep enough, and the technological developments are transformative enough, the framework itself becomes a variable rather than a constant. And if you are not asking what will happen to the framework, you are systematically excluding the most important possible developments from your analysis. Wells was always asking, “What would happen to the framework?” This is why he was able to see, in 1908, not just that there would be an aerial war, but that the aerial war would fundamentally, and perhaps irreversibly, change the framework of international relations, the framework of the relationship between governments and their populations, the framework of the global economic system. The war did not occur within those frameworks. The war transformed them. Wells predicted this. Nobody else in 1908 was predicting it, because nobody else in 1908 was asking the question that would have led them to that prediction. Keep all of this in mind as we turn to the last thing. Chapter 8, the prediction that has not happened yet. Herbert George Wells spent 60 years making a single argument. The specific predictions, the wars, the weapons, the technologies, the political movements, were all, in a sense, illustrations of the argument, rather than the argument itself. The argument itself was this: the nation-state is a temporary form of human political organization that was appropriate to a particular stage of technological and economic development, and that stage is now passing. The forces being released by industrialization and global communications are too large to be managed by nation-states operating competitively within an anarchic international system. Unless humanity succeeds in creating a new form of political organization capable of governing those forces collectively, the forces will destroy the framework of civilization as completely and as irreversibly as a forest fire destroys an old-growth forest. This argument is the last prediction. Not a prediction of a specific event in the way that the two World Wars were specific events, a prediction about the long-run trajectory of human civilization. A prediction that either the nation-state system will be superseded by some form of functional global governance or the nation-state system will produce a catastrophe large enough to destroy it from the outside. Wells called the positive version of this outcome a world state. He described it in many different ways over many decades, and the descriptions shifted as his thinking developed and as the evidence available to him accumulated. In the early version, the world state was almost utopian. A rational, scientifically managed global civilization in which the accumulated problems of poverty, disease, resource conflict, and political violence had been resolved through the application of intelligence and good organization. This was the Wells of 1901, the Wells of Anticipations, the optimistic Wells who believed that that the 20th century would be the century in which humanity grew up. As the century progressed and the evidence accumulated, the descriptions became more sober, more realistic, and in some ways more interesting. The later Wells, the Wells of The Shape of Things to Come and the post-war essays, was not describing a utopia. He was describing something much more modest, a global institutional framework capable of governing the forces that nation-states operating in competition with each other were incapable of governing. Not a perfect world, not a world free of conflict and inequality, a world with a functioning global governance architecture, the way a functioning state has governance architecture, imperfect, contested, frequently frustrating, but capable of performing the basic functions that prevent systemic collapse. He described what this would look like in operational terms. He described global institutions with the authority to set and enforce rules that nation-states could not unilaterally opt out of. He described a system for managing global commons, the atmosphere, the oceans, the fish stocks, the shared resources that no nation-state could unilaterally protect because they extended beyond any national jurisdiction. He described a framework for managing the development of transformative technologies, particularly weapons technologies, that prevented any single actor from acquiring a decisive advantage and using it for unilateral gain. He described a system for managing the consequences of global economic interdependency that did not depend on the goodwill of individual states to function. He was describing, with varying degrees of explicitness, the project that the United Nations was supposed to embody, and the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the International Criminal Court. He was describing, in other words, the actual attempt at global governance that the second half of the 20th century produced. And here is where we have to be honest about where things stand. The institutions Wells described as necessary exist in some form. They have existed in some form since the late 1940s. They have managed some problems with some degree of success. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, imperfect as it is, has significantly slowed nuclear weapons proliferation. The postwar global trading system has managed the relationships between the world’s major economies in ways that have prevented the kind of trade war escalation that contributed to the conditions of the 1930s. The international health institutions produced a vaccine for COVID-19 with remarkable speed by historical standards and coordinated its distribution across national borders. But they have also failed repeatedly and in ways that Wells would have found entirely predictable to govern the forces that are too large for nation states operating competitively to manage on their own. The atmosphere has continued to warm because no mechanism exists to compel states to internalize the global costs of their domestic carbon emissions. The biological commons has continued to be depleted because no mechanism exists to compel states to limit the exploitation of globally shared fish stocks and ecosystems. The gap between the world’s richest and poorest populations has not closed in ways that the naive optimism of the 1990s development agenda predicted. The proliferation of conventional weapons, of cyber weapons, of the doctrines and techniques of hybrid warfare has continued in ways that the existing international security architecture has not been able to manage. Wells described this situation, too. He described a world that had created the forms of global governance without consistently creating the substance of it that had built institutions that looked like they could govern the global commons but that lacked the actual authority and the actual enforcement mechanisms to do so when the interests of powerful states were in conflict with the institutional mandate. He described this as the age of confusion, which is what he called the period he believed would follow the two world wars. The age of confusion, in his description, was not a stable state. It was a transitional state, a period in which the inadequacy of the old framework was increasingly obvious and the new framework had not yet been fully constructed. A period in which the forces requiring governance were growing faster than the governance capacity was growing. A period in which the question of whether the new framework would be built in time was genuinely open. He believed the age of confusion would end one of two ways. Either humanity would succeed through a combination of crisis and deliberate construction in building functional global governance before the next catastrophe. Or the next catastrophe would come first, would be large enough to force the construction of global governance in the aftermath. The way the Second World War forced the construction of the United Nations. But at a cost so enormous that it might permanently impair humanity’s capacity to build anything functional from what remained. He was not, in his final years, confident about which of these outcomes was more likely. Mind at the end of its tether, published in 1945, the year before his death, expressed a genuine uncertainty about whether the adaptive capacity existed. He was not saying humanity would definitely fail. He was saying he was no longer certain it would succeed. And he had been certain for most of his life. The question of whether he was right is not yet resolved. We are in the age of confusion. We have been in it since at least 1919. The forms of global governance exist. The substance of global governance is contested and incomplete. The forces requiring governance, climate change, nuclear proliferation, the unregulated development of transformative technologies, including artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, the management of global financial systems, are growing in scope and speed. The capacity of the existing governance architecture to manage them is not growing at the same rate. This is the prediction that has not happened yet. Not a prediction of a specific event with a specific date. A prediction about the long-run trajectory of a civilization that is demonstrably in the situation Wells predicted it would be in facing the choice between the two outcomes he identified and not yet having made the choice. He thought we would make it. For most of his life, he thought we would make it. Though he thought it would be far more painful and far more costly than it needed to be. In the last year of his life, he was not sure. He died before he found out. We have not found out yet, either. Chapter 9 The Second World War he saw coming. We should spend more time with the Second World War because the specificity of what Wells got right about it in 1933 deserves more attention than it typically receives. The Shape of Things to Come is a long book and it contains more than the prediction about Danzig and the aerial bombing campaign. It contains a detailed account of the social and political consequences of the war that, reading it now with the full knowledge of what actually happened, produces the same quality of intellectual vertigo as the military predictions. Wells described in 1933 the particular form of ideological conflict that would define the Second World War. He described a war that was not merely a territorial or strategic conflict between nation states, but a war between incompatible political visions of how human societies should be organized. He described one side as committed to a version of rational, progressive, internationally cooperative governance and the other side as committed to a version of national exceptionalism, racial hierarchy, and the primacy of force in international relations. He described these two visions as fundamentally incompatible, as unable to coexist within a single international system and as therefore producing a conflict that could not end in a negotiated compromise but would need to end in the decisive defeat of one vision by the other. This is an accurate description of what the Second World War was. It was not simply a territorial dispute though it involved territorial disputes. It was not simply a great power rivalry though it involved great power rivalries. It was a conflict between political visions between the vision of a world governed by national sovereignty racial hierarchy and the right of the strongest to dominate the weakest and the vision of a world governed by international law individual rights and the principle that no state had the right to simply take what it wanted from weaker neighbors. The fact that the winning side was not always perfectly consistent with its own stated vision does not change the fact that the conflict was organized around that fundamental opposition. Wells described this opposition in 1933 when the war that would be organized around it was still six years away. He described it not as a prediction that a war would happen but as an analysis of what the war would be about what it would mean and what it would require to resolve. He was right. He was also right about something more specific and more surprising. In The Shape of Things to Come Wells described the aftermath of the Second War as involving a period of American global dominance. He described the United States as emerging from the conflict as the world’s preeminent power capable of projecting military and economic influence globally in a way that no previous power had been capable of doing and choosing to use that dominance to construct a new international order rather than simply to exploit the advantages it conferred. This is an accurate description of the post-war world. The Pax Americana, the period of American global dominance from 1945 to the present, is exactly the structure Wells described. The construction of the post-war international institutions, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the World Trade Organization, was led by the United States and reflected American preferences and values in ways that Wells had anticipated when he described the dominant post-war power choosing to build institutions rather than simply to exploit dominance. He was less right about the duration and the stability of this dominance. He seemed to expect that American leadership would be more consistently exercised and more consistently oriented toward building the global governance architecture he believed was necessary. The actual history of American engagement with international institutions has been more ambivalent, more intermittent, and more subject to domestic political pressures than his model had suggested things it would be. But the basic structure, American hegemony expressing itself through institutional construction rather than direct imperial control, is exactly what he described. And the fact that he described it in 1933, when the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression, had retreated into isolationism following its disappointing experience at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and was not yet visibly on a trajectory toward global dominance, makes this a particularly striking element of the overall predictive record. He also described, in the same book, the eventual emergence of China as a major power capable of challenging American dominance. He described this in 1933 as a long-run development, something that would not fully manifest until well into the 21st century, but that was already embedded in the structural logic of Chinese demography, Chinese cultural cohesion, and the inevitable consequence of economic development spreading beyond the initial industrializing nations. He was describing, in 1933, the situation of the 2020s, a world in which American global dominance is being actively contested by a China that has industrialized rapidly and is now asserting its interests in the international system. In ways that are producing exactly the kind of competitive dynamic that Wells identified as one of the key risks in the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world. The emergence of China as a major power was not a prediction that required great analytical skill in 1933. China was the most populous country in the world. It had a sophisticated civilization with several thousand years of history. The fact that it was then in a condition of political fragmentation and foreign exploitation did not alter the demographic reality. A large, culturally cohesive population that had historically been capable of sustaining sophisticated civilization would not remain in a subordinate position indefinitely. The trajectory was visible to anyone who was willing to think at civilizational scale over a sufficient time horizon. What was less obvious, and what Wells did identify, was the specific form that Chinese resurgence would take and the specific kind of challenge it would pose to the international system. He described China as likely to develop economically through a model that combined state direction with market mechanisms, producing rapid growth while maintaining more central political control than the Western democracies were exercising. He described the resulting Chinese state as likely to be assertive about sovereignty and territorial integrity in ways that would conflict with the kind of liberal international order that the West was trying to build. He described the tension between the Chinese model and the Western liberal model as one of the defining structural tensions of the 21st century international system. He wrote this in 1933. It is the defining structural tension of the 21st century international system. The trade conflicts, the technology competition, the disputes over Taiwan and the South China Sea, the disagreements about the governance of global institutions, all of it plays out along exactly the fault line that Wells identified in 1933 as the likely primary geopolitical tension of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was right, again. Using the same method, looking at the driving forces, identifying the structural tensions, following the trajectory forward with honesty and rigor, arriving at conclusions that most of his contemporaries were not yet in a position to reach. Which returns us inexorably to the last prediction. If the method has been this consistently productive, if the track record is this extensive and this specific, if the same analytical procedure that predicted the First World War and the Second World War and the atomic bomb and the internet and American hegemony and Chinese resurgence has also been applied to the question of whether humanity will succeed in building the global governance architecture it needs before the next civilizational catastrophe, what does the track record of the method tell us about how seriously to take the conclusion? Wells was uncertain in the last year of his life. Not certain that we would fail. Uncertain that we would succeed. That is different from his earlier positions in which he was uncertain about the path but not about the eventual destination. Something had changed. What had changed was the atomic bomb. Chapter 10. The bomb changed the calculation. When the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima on the 6th of August, 1945 and on Nagasaki on the 9th of August, 1945, Herbert George Wells was 78 years old and had less than a year to live. He had predicted the atomic bomb. He had described it in operational terms in 1914. He had been thinking about the implications of nuclear energy as a military technology for more than 30 years. And yet, when it actually happened, when the thing he had described in fiction was actualized in fact, when two Japanese cities were erased from the air in a way that demonstrated the operational reality of a weapon capable of destroying an urban center with a single device, he found that the reality was different from his fictional prediction in a way he had not fully anticipated. He had predicted the bomb. What he had not fully predicted was the particular relationship between the bomb and the nation-state system that would develop after the bomb existed. In The World Set Free, the novel in which he described atomic weapons in 1914, the atomic war was so devastating that it forced, by sheer catastrophic necessity, the creation of the world government that Wells believed was the only adequate response to the forces of modern warfare. The bomb in Wells’s 1914 fiction was so obviously beyond the capacity of any individual nation to protect itself against that it forced the construction of global institutions capable of controlling it. In reality, the bomb did not do this. In reality, the bomb did something more complicated and, in some ways, more dangerous. The bomb created a strategic environment called nuclear deterrence in which the possession of atomic weapons by both major powers created a situation of mutual assured destruction, a situation in which neither side could use its nuclear arsenal without triggering a response that would destroy it in turn. This situation of mutual deterrence was stable in the sense that it prevented direct military conflict between the nuclear powers for more than 70 years. It was deeply unstable in the sense that it created a world in which the absolute destruction of human civilization was, for the first time in history, a live strategic possibility dependent not on the correct functioning of complex machines, but on the correct decision-making of fallible human beings operating under conditions of extreme stress and incomplete information. The near misses are real and documented. In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came genuinely close to nuclear exchange on at least two separate occasions through mechanisms that had nothing to do with any deliberate decision to start a war. A Soviet submarine commander named Vasily Arkhipov refused to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo on the second day of the crisis, when the other two officers required to authorize the launch had already agreed to do so. A Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov, in 1983, overrode a Soviet early warning system that indicated an American nuclear strike was incoming, correctly identifying it as a system malfunction rather than a real attack, when his protocol required him to report it up the chain as real. In both cases, the prevention of nuclear catastrophe depended not on the correct functioning of the institutional safeguards that were supposed to prevent it, but on the correct intuition of individual human beings who decided in the moment to deviate from the protocol they had been instructed to follow. The institutional safeguards themselves had failed. The protocol itself would have produced catastrophe. Only the deviation of a specific individual from the protocol prevented it. This is not the kind of thing that is supposed to happen in a well-designed system. And it happened at least twice within documented record during the period of nuclear deterrence. The number of undocumented near misses is unknown and probably larger. Wells had predicted the atomic bomb. He had also predicted in 1914 that the atomic bomb would force the construction of global governance capable of controlling it. The bomb came. The global governance it was supposed to force has not been constructed in the form Wells specified. Instead, the world has been managing nuclear weapons for 80 years through a combination of deterrence doctrine, arms control treaties of varying effectiveness, and a series of close calls that have been prevented from becoming catastrophes by the correct decisions of specific individuals in specific moments of crisis. This is not the same as Wells’s prediction being wrong. It is the prediction being in process. The nuclear weapons exist. The question of who will govern them and how is still being worked out. The arms control framework that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union has been significantly degraded since the end of the Cold War. New nuclear powers have emerged: India, Pakistan, North Korea. The probability of nuclear use, assessed by most serious analysts, is currently higher than it has been at any point since the Cuban missile crisis. The question Wells was asking in 1945, the question of whether the forces that had been released, forces so destructive that they had changed the fundamental strategic situation of the species, would be managed by institutions adequate to govern them, or would eventually produce the catastrophe that adequate governance was supposed to prevent, is still open. He was uncertain in 1945 in a way he had not been uncertain before, and he had a good reason to be uncertain. He had predicted the bomb. He had predicted, in the same work, that the bomb would force the construction of adequate global governance. The bomb had come. The global governance had not come in the form he had predicted it would come. Something had gone wrong with the mechanism he had described. What had gone wrong was that deterrence had proven to be a more stable, short-run equilibrium than he had expected. A world of two nuclear powers with sufficiently large arsenals that both sides were certain of being destroyed if they struck first had found a kind of stability that Wells had not anticipated because the stability, while real, was also deeply fragile and entirely dependent on the continued correct functioning of human decision-making under conditions of maximum pressure. He had not trusted human decision-making under conditions of maximum pressure. He had been right not to trust it. And yet, for 80 years, it had largely held. Whether it will continue to hold is the question. Whether the institutional architecture being built around it, imperfect, contested, slowly being dismantled as the political consensus that built it is eroded, will prove adequate to govern the forces it is supposed to govern is the question. This is the prediction that has not happened yet. Let us talk about where things stand and what the method, applied to the current situation, would tell us. Chapter 11, applying the method to now. Let us do what Wells would do. Let us identify the driving forces currently acting on the system. Let us identify the structural instabilities. Let us follow the trajectory forward with the kind of honesty and rigor that the method requires and see where it leads. The driving forces are not difficult to identify. They are visible to anyone who is paying attention, which is to say they are visible and yet somehow remain consistently underweighted in political and social discourse in the way that the structural instabilities of 1908 were visible and yet consistently underweighted in the Edwardian conversation about the prospects for Europe and peace. The first driving force is climate change. The physical science is clear. The atmosphere is warming as a result of human industrial activity. Primarily, the burning of fossil fuels. And the warming is producing and will continue to produce disruptions to the physical systems that support human civilization, including the agricultural systems that feed the human population. The water systems that supply the human population. The coastal geography that houses a large fraction of the human population. And the weather systems that distribute resources across the inhabitable portions of the planet. The scale of these disruptions is uncertain within a range, but the range does not include the possibility that they will be negligible. The low end of the range includes widespread disruption to food production systems, severe water scarcity in populated regions, inundation of low-lying coastal areas, and intensification of extreme weather events. The high end of the range is considerably worse. None of this is contested in the scientific literature. The policy response to it is contested, deeply contested, because the policy response requires exactly the kind of collective action across national borders that the nation-state system is structurally poorly equipped to produce. The costs of reducing emissions fall on individual states, primarily the wealthiest states that have industrialized most completely and whose populations have the highest energy consumption. The benefits of reduced emissions are diffuse and global, accruing not primarily to the states bearing the costs, but to the global system as a whole. This creates a collective action problem that no existing international institution has adequate authority or enforcement capacity to resolve. Wells would recognize this immediately. He described exactly this structure of problem in his prescriptive writings. A global problem whose solution requires collective action across national borders, where the existing international system has no mechanism for compelling states to bear the costs of actions that benefit the global commons rather than them themselves. He argued that solving problems of this structure requires a level of institutional authority that the nation states of his day were not willing to grant to international institutions. And he argued that the refusal to grant that authority would eventually produce catastrophes of a scale that would force a reconsideration. The question is whether the reconsideration comes before or after the catastrophe. Or whether, in the case of climate change, the catastrophe is the kind that accumulates gradually and persistently in a way that does not produce the sudden forcing function that Wells’s model depended on. Two world wars were sudden and total enough to produce forcing functions for institutional innovation. Climate change is slow enough and diffuse enough and its worst effects are concentrated in regions that do not have the political weight to force responses from the regions primarily responsible for it that it is not clear it will produce the same kind of forcing function. The second driving force is the development of transformative technologies at a the that exceeds the capacity of existing governance frameworks to manage them. This was a concern Wells articulated repeatedly across his career, and it is more acute now than at any previous point. The technologies in question include artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, autonomous weapon systems, and the various applications of these technologies that are currently at early stages of development, and that will, following the same developmental logic Wells applied to aircraft in 1908, develop along curves of increasing capability with increasing speed. The particular concern with artificial intelligence, the technology that is currently developing most rapidly, is not that it will produce an immediate catastrophe, though there are scenarios of rapid capability gain that could produce acute crises. The concern is structural. Artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology that will transform the economies and the militaries and the social organizations of every major power in ways that are not yet fully predictable, and that will do so unevenly, at different rates and in different ways in different countries, creating asymmetries of capability that have historically been one of the primary drivers of geopolitical conflict. A world in which one major power has significantly more capable artificial intelligence than its competitors is a world in which the military, economic, and political balance has shifted in ways that the existing international system was not designed to manage. The existing international system was designed in the postwar period around a rough balance of the major powers and around the stabilizing logic of mutual nuclear deterrence. Artificial intelligence, if its development proceeds in ways that produce significant capability asymmetries between the major powers, could disrupt that balance in ways that the existing governance architecture is not equipped to handle. Wells would say this is visible. The pressures are there, the driving forces are active, the structural instability is building. The question, again, is whether the governance capacity develops fast enough to manage the pressures before the pressures produce a phase transition. The third driving force is the fragmentation of the shared information environment that Wells identified as a necessary precondition for functional democratic governance. His World Brain vision assumed that universal access to accurate information would produce a more rational, more deliberative, more capable political culture. What the actual internet has produced is more complex. Genuine democratization of information access combined with an unprecedented capacity for information manipulation for the construction and dissemination of false narratives at scale for the fragmentation of shared factual reality into competing tribes of belief that do not share enough common ground to engage in productive political deliberation. Wells’ prescription required a citizenry capable of processing information rationally and arriving at collective decisions that reflected their actual shared interests. The actual information environment that exists makes this more difficult in some ways. Not less difficult than it was in the pre-internet world. The availability of accurate information does not automatically displace inaccurate information. The truth does not automatically win in an attention economy that rewards novelty, emotional activation, and tribal confirmation over accuracy and nuance. This is a genuine complication for the method. If the method assumes a trajectory toward more rational collective decision-making and the actual trajectory of the information environment is producing more fragmented more manipulated and in some ways less rational collective decision-making than one of the key mechanisms Wells relied on. The mechanism by which increasing information access would tend to produce increasing governance capacity has not worked as specified. He knew this was a risk. He wrote about it. He argued for the world brain not just as a repository of accurate information, but as an active project of civic education, of building the shared informational foundation without which democratic deliberation could not function. He understood that information availability and information literacy were different things and that the second was much harder to produce than the first. We have produced extraordinary information availability. We have not produced the information literacy that Wells’ prescriptions required, at least not at the scale and consistency that his model needed. This is a problem. It is not a fatal problem, necessarily. Literacy itself, the capacity to read and write that we now take for granted, took centuries to spread through populations and required enormous institutional investment in universal education to achieve. Information literacy may follow a similar trajectory, developing more slowly than the optimists expected, but eventually reaching the scale necessary for functional democratic governance, given sufficient institutional investment in developing it. But the question is whether we have the time, whether the other forces, the climate change, the technological disruption, the geopolitical competition, will produce the next forcing function before the governance capacity has developed sufficiently to manage them. Wells was uncertain in 1945. He had reason to be uncertain. We have additional reasons to be uncertain now because we have 80 more years of evidence about the rate at which governance capacity is developing relative to the rate at which the forces requiring governance are growing. The honest assessment of that evidence is not reassuring. Chapter 12. What Wells would say now if Herbert George Wells were alive today in his position of chronological impossibility and were applying the method he developed under Huxley to the current state of human civilization, what would he say? He would say he was not surprised by any of it. Not by the climate crisis which he had identified and outlined in 1901. Not by the technology disruption which he had described as an ongoing feature of industrial civilization throughout his career. Not by the fragmentation of international cooperation which he had consistently argued was the inevitable consequence of trying to govern global forces through a system of competing national sovereignties. Not by the polarization of democratic politics which he had identified as a predictable consequence of economic inequality and information manipulation as early as the 1920s. He would say, “These are the pressures I identified. The pressures are following the trajectories I described. The question is still the same question it was in 1908, in 1933, in 1945. The question is whether the governance capacity will develop before the next phase transition.” And then he would say something that, given the full weight of the track record, deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as pessimism or alarmism. He would say that the thing he had not predicted correctly in 1914, when he predicted the atomic bomb, was the mechanism by which the bomb’s existence would influence the governance question. He had predicted that the bomb would force the construction of adequate global governance. The bomb had come. The adequate global governance had not come in the form he had predicted. Instead, something else had come. Deterrence. Which was a substitute for governance. A way of managing the forces without building the institutions. And which had worked for 80 years through a combination of careful management and fortunate individual decisions in moments of maximum crisis. He would say that the question for the next stage of the process is whether the next set of transformative forces the technologies that are developing in ways that may eventually break the strategic equilibrium that deterrence has maintained will produce a similar set of close calls managed through individual competence and fortune or whether the complexity of the system has grown beyond the point where individual competence and fortune can reliably manage the close calls. This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is a rigorous one. The same method that has been applied with consistent success to the prediction of the two world wars the atomic bomb the internet and American hegemony has been applied to this question. And the answer the method produces is uncertain leaning toward concern. But there is a second answer that the method also produces. And it is important to include it because Wells included it throughout his career. The trajectory is not fixed. The pressures produce probable outcomes not certain ones. The whole point of understanding the trajectory is that understanding gives the possibility of intervention of changing the conditions that are producing the probable outcome before the probable outcome manifests. Wells spent his entire career alongside his predictive writing doing prescriptive writing. Arguing for the specific institutional changes the specific educational investments the specific political choices that would alter the trajectory toward the better of the two possible outcomes. He was not describing the future in order to tell people it was fixed. He was describing it in order to tell people it was not fixed, that the forces producing it were real and powerful and needed to be taken seriously, and that taking them seriously was the only way to have any hope of influencing where they led. This is the part of Wells’s legacy that gets least attention and that is, in some ways, the most important part. The predictions get attention because they are dramatic and specific and verifiable. The prescriptions are harder to assess. They involve choices that have not yet been made, institutions that have not yet been built, a level of collective human intelligence and organization that has not yet been demonstrated at the required scale. He believed it was possible. He believed this not naively, not without acknowledging the evidence that human beings were also capable of catastrophic stupidity and self-destructive irrationality, but as a considered judgment based on the same analysis he applied to everything else. The historical trend across the very long run was toward more rational, more inclusive, more effective forms of human organization. The nation-state itself was an improvement on the feudal system it had replaced. The international institutions of the post-war world were an improvement on the anarchic great power competition of the 19th century. The improvements were imperfect, contested, frequently inadequate to the challenges they faced, but they were improvements. They represented a genuine, measurable increase in the capacity of human societies to govern the forces acting on them. The question was whether the rate of improvement was sufficient, whether the governance capacity was developing fast enough to stay ahead of the forces as being asked to govern. This was the race. This was the last prediction. Not a prediction of a specific outcome, but a prediction about a race. And an honest acknowledgement, delivered in the last year of his life, that he was not certain which side of the race was winning. He had never been uncertain about that before. We should take his uncertainty seriously. He had earned the right to be uncertain on the basis of everything else he had gotten right. And we should take his prescription seriously, too. That the thing that makes the difference, the thing that tips the race toward the better outcome, is the number of people who understand that there is a race, who understand what is at stake in it, who understand the forces that are acting on the system and the trajectory those forces are following, and who make choices in their political lives, and their institutional lives, and their daily lives, that are adequate responses to the actual situation, rather than comfortable accommodations to the surface appearance of stability. Wells wanted informed people. He wanted people who could look at the structure of the situation, rather than the surface of it, and make choices adequate to the structure. He wanted this because he had been doing it himself for 60 years, and had arrived at a body of predictive work that demonstrated beyond any reasonable dispute that the structure was more important than the surface. That the pressures were more important than the apparent stability, and that the trajectory was more important than the current position. The current position looks, in many ways, stable. The major powers have not gone to war with each other. The global economy continues to function. Democratic institutions, though stressed in many countries, have not collapsed everywhere. The surface condition, like the surface condition of Europe in 1908, suggests that things are more or less under control. But the pressures are building, the structural instabilities are deepening, the trajectory followed forward honestly leads to places that require more adequate governance than currently exists. This is not pessimism. This is what Wells spent his life saying, and he spent his life saying it while simultaneously arguing with all the force he could bring to bear that the adequate governance was buildable, that the trajectory was not fixed, that the choice was genuinely open. He died in 1946 before he found out how the race was going. We are still in it. The method is still available. The question is still open. Chapter 13, the man behind the predictions. We have spent a great deal of time with the predictions and the method. We should spend some time with the man because the man was more than the method and because the things that made him difficult to be around are the same things that made the method work. And that paradox is itself interesting. Wells was not an easy person. This is documented extensively by the people who knew him and worked with him and in a number of cases loved him and were loved by him and were also eventually driven away by him. He was argumentative. He was impatient with people who had not thought as carefully as he had about the questions he was thinking about, which was most people most of the time. He had a very large number of affairs in a period when affairs were considerably less socially acceptable than they have become, and he managed these affairs in ways that caused considerable pain to the people involved, including himself. He had views about the relationship between men and women that were considerably ahead of his time in some ways and considerably behind his time in other ways, and he was not always willing to notice the contradiction. He was also, the people who knew him, consistently reported, one of the most stimulating conversationalists they had ever encountered. Henry James, the American novelist who lived in England and was for a period one of Wells’s neighbors in Kent, found him exhausting and brilliant in roughly equal measure and left extensive correspondence documenting both reactions. Shaw engaged with him in a public intellectual debate that produced some of the most entertaining political writing of the Edwardian period. Bertrand Russell, one of the finest minds of the 20th century, regarded him as a serious intellectual interlocutor, which from Russell was a compliment of the highest order. He was not a comfortable man. He was not a man who made the people around him comfortable. He made them think. He made them defend positions they had not previously had to defend. He asked questions that most people preferred not to be asked about the direction of history, about the responsibilities of the present to the future, about the gap between the world as it was and the world it needed to become. He asked these questions with the precision of a person who had spent decades developing the analytical tools to formulate them correctly. And he asked them persistently in book after book after book with a productivity that was itself remarkable. More than 150 publications across a 60-year career on topics ranging from biology to politics to economics to fiction to philosophy to the future of education. He ate enormously, worked compulsively, and maintained throughout his life the intellectual discipline of a person who had learned in a rented house in Kent at the age of 24 that understanding the future required a degree of analytical rigor that most people were not willing to apply. He applied it anyway. He applied it when it was inconvenient. He applied it when the conclusions were uncomfortable. He applied it when the conclusions made him unpopular with people whose approval he otherwise valued. This is perhaps the most important thing about him. Not the predictions, important as they were, not the method, productive as it was. The thing that made the predictions possible was the willingness to follow the analysis where it led without allowing the destination to influence the analysis. Most people who engage in prediction, consciously or unconsciously, tend to filter their conclusions through their wishes. They tend to predict outcomes that are consistent with the world they want to live in, that are consistent with the political positions they hold, that are consistent with the social framework within which they operate. This is natural. This is human. It is also analytically disabling. Wells had developed the discipline, rare and difficult and only really available to people who have had the time and the inclination to examine their own analytical processes carefully enough to identify and compensate for this kind of motivated reasoning, of separating the analysis from the wish. He wanted the world state. He wanted it for the same reasons he wanted everything he wanted because the analysis told him it was necessary and the analysis also told him it was achievable. But the want did not contaminate the analysis of whether things were moving toward it or away from it. He could want the world state and also honestly assess that the current trajectory was not moving toward it fast enough and say so clearly without the want pushing him toward a more optimistic assessment of the trajectory. This kind of intellectual honesty is very difficult to maintain. It requires constant vigilance against the natural human tendency to see what we want to see in the data available to us. It requires a kind of self-awareness that does not come naturally to most people and that has to be deliberately cultivated. Wells cultivated it. The track record is the evidence of what cultivating it consistently over a 60-year career produced. He was not happy, particularly, in the way that comfortable people are happy. He was engaged. He was committed. He had a project. The project of understanding where human civilization was going and arguing for the choices that would make the destination better. And he pursued that project with the intensity of a person who genuinely believed that it mattered, that the quality of the thinking and the quality of the prescription could make a difference to the outcome. He died on the 13th of August, 1946. The Second World War had been over for less than a year. The first nuclear weapons had been used. The United Nations had been established. The Cold War was beginning. He died in the early stages of the exact situation his final analysis had described. A world that had survived two catastrophic wars and was now in the process of determining whether it would build the institutions adequate to prevent the next one or whether it would allow the deterrence equilibrium to substitute for that institutional construction indefinitely and hope that the equilibrium would hold. We are still determining that. Eight decades after his death, we are still in the period whose character he described accurately and whose resolution he was uncertain about. The resolution has not come. The forces are still active. The structural instabilities are still building. The governance capacity is still developing more slowly than the forces it is supposed to govern are growing. He would not be surprised. He would perhaps be something close to sad. Not because the outcome was inevitable, but because it was so obviously avoidable. So clearly the product of choices that could have been made differently. Of forces that could have been governed if the political will to govern them had been present. He believed the political will could develop. He never stopped believing it even in the dark final essay. He believed it could develop because he believed human beings were capable given sufficient understanding of their situation of making choices adequate to their situation. This was the hope at the foundation of all the realism. Not the hope that things would automatically get better. The hope that under understanding was possible and that understanding once achieved created the possibility of choice. And that choice was what the future was made of. He was right about two world wars. He was right about the atomic bomb. He was right about the internet. He was right about American hegemony and Chinese resurgence and the fragmentation of the post war international order. He was right about almost everything he applied his method to across a 60-year career with a degree of specificity that has no real parallel in the history of predictive social thought. He was uncertain at the end about one thing. The thing that has not happened yet. The resolution of the race between the forces requiring governance and the governance capacity developing to manage them. He had reason to be uncertain. It is a genuinely uncertain question. But it is not an uncertain question for the reasons that most people treat uncertain questions as uncertain. Because the evidence is insufficient or the future is inherently unknowable. It is uncertain because it is a question about a choice. A collective choice that has not yet been made. And choices unlike physical processes are genuinely contingent. They depend on understanding. They depend on will. They depend on the kind of informed, honest, rigorous engagement with the structure of the situation that Wells spent his life modeling. This is perhaps the most important thing he left us. Not the predictions, which are now history. Not the method, which is available to anyone willing to apply it with sufficient rigor and honesty. The most important thing he left us is the demonstration across 60 years of extraordinary intellectual productivity that it is possible to look at the structure of the situation clearly, to follow the trajectory honestly, and to act in full knowledge of where things are going in ways that might make the destination better. He thought that was enough. He thought, for most of his life, that it had to be enough because it was all there was. Understanding the trajectory was not the same as being able to change it, but it was the necessary precondition of changing it. You could not alter a trajectory you could not see. You could not build the governance architecture the situation required if you did not understand what the situation required and why. He could see the trajectory. He could describe what the situation required. He spent 60 years doing both with a consistency and a rigor that we have not seen match since. He was right about everything he predicted using the method. He was uncertain about the one thing the method could not resolve, the one thing that depended not on the forces acting on the system, but on the collective choices of the people within it. That uncertainty belongs to us now. He left it to us along with everything else. The method, the predictions, the prescriptions, the intellectual honesty, and the central question of whether, when it finally comes to the point, we can choose the better of the two available outcomes. He thought we could. He was not certain we would. He was almost never wrong. Chapter 14 14 The strange accuracy of the small things. We have talked about the large predictions, the wars, the bomb, the internet, the geopolitical architecture of the 21st century. But there is a category of smaller predictions that deserves its own discussion because the smaller predictions reveal something about the method that the larger ones obscure. The larger predictions are the result of applying the method to the biggest questions. What will the global political situation look like in 20 years? In 50 years? In a century? But the smaller predictions show the method working at a finer grain. At the level of specific technologies and specific social changes and specific cultural shifts that required a more detailed engagement with the evidence available in Wells’s time. Let us take the highway system. In Anticipations, published in 1901, Wells predicted the development of a network of roads specifically engineered for motor vehicles, physically separate from the pedestrian and horse traffic infrastructure of the existing road network, designed for sustained high-speed travel across long distances. He described something very close to what we would recognize as the motorway or the interstate highway, the infrastructure of the 20th century car economy in 1901, when the total number of motor vehicles in Britain could be counted in the hundreds and the legal speed limit was 14 miles per hour. The argument he made for why this would happen is more interesting than the prediction itself. He argued that motor vehicles would, as their technology matured, have a transformative effect on economic geography, allowing people and goods to be moved between points that were not connected by rail, reducing the monopoly of the railway companies over long-distance transport, and creating economic incentives for the development of road infrastructure capable of sustaining the speeds that improved motor vehicles would be capable of achieving. He was describing the political economy of highway construction, the set of economic interests that would accumulate and eventually dominate political decision-making on the question 30 years before the motorway age actually began. The garden suburb and the suburban expansion of cities Wells predicted in the same 1901 work that the combination of improved transportation and rising incomes would produce a movement of urban populations outward from city centers, creating new forms of residential settlement that were neither fully urban nor fully rural, but occupied an intermediate position with lower densities than the Victorian city, more access to green space, and a stronger orientation toward the private domestic sphere. He described the suburb, in other words, with sufficient specificity that reading the passage now produces the same recognition you get when reading his description of the internet in 1937 or his description of aerial bombing in 1908, the decline of retail shops in city centers as a result of home delivery. In a 1902 essay, Wells described a future in which the development of efficient distribution systems would allow households to order goods directly from producers or large warehouses and have them delivered to their homes, reducing their dependence on the local retail establishments that formed the commercial fabric of Victorian cities. He described this development as the probable outcome of the same forces that were producing industrial consolidation more generally, the economies of scale available to large centralized distribution operations that could not be matched by small, locally owned shops. He was describing in 1902, the economic logic of Amazon. The specific technology of online ordering was not available to him, but the economic structure, the elimination of the retail middle layer by a more efficient distribution system, was exactly what he described. The suburbanization of churches and the decline of religious practice in urbanized societies, Wells argued, in several essays from the first decade of the 20th century, that the forces of industrialization, urbanization, and the expanding scope of scientific explanation were producing a gradual but persistent decline in religious belief as the primary framework through which people organize their understanding of the world. He was not unique in making this argument. The secularization thesis was a common element of progressive thought in his period. What was distinctive about Wells’s version of it was the specificity with which he described the mechanism, not the direct displacement of religious belief by scientific knowledge, but the indirect weakening of the social and community structures within which religious practice was embedded as those structures were disrupted by the mobi- mobility and anonymity of industrial urban life. He was describing, in other words, the social contextual theory of secularization that later sociologists would develop as the dominant academic framework for understanding religious decline in the 20th century. The changing role of women in professional and public life. Wells was, in ways that were advanced for his period, a consistent advocate for the expansion of women’s roles beyond the domestic sphere. But beyond advocacy, he also made analytical predictions about the trajectory of this change. Predictions that turned out to be broadly accurate. He predicted that the combination of women’s increasing access to education and the expanding service economy of the 20th century would produce a systematic transformation of the labor force with women entering professional occupations at an increasing rate and the domestic and reproductive roles that had historically defined women’s social position gradually becoming a smaller fraction of the average woman’s adult life. He predicted this in a period when most mainstream opinion regarded women’s participation in professional life as an aberration rather than a trend. The replacement of coal by other energy sources in domestic heating. In a 1902 essay, Wells predicted that the dominance of coal in the heating of British homes would be temporary. That cleaner, more efficiently distributed energy sources would eventually displace it. Not because of any policy decision, but because the economics of coal particularly its distribution costs and the labor intensity of its use would make it vulnerable to competition from alternatives as those alternatives developed. He was, obviously, describing the trajectory that led to the electrification of domestic heating and cooking in the 20th century. He was describing it in 1902 when the electrical grid was in its infancy and the idea of widespread domestic electrification was still, for most people, a distant prospect. These smaller predictions matter because they demonstrate that the method was not only capable of producing the large dramatic predictions about wars and bombs and geopolitical transformations. It was capable of operating at the level of everyday social and economic life with the same kind of structural analysis that produced the larger predictions. Wells was looking at the same driving forces, the same structural instabilities and developmental trajectories, and applying the same analytical procedure to questions of much smaller scale, arriving at correct conclusions with the same consistency. This completeness of the track record is what makes the final prediction, the large unresolved one about the race between governance capacity and the forces requiring governance, so difficult to simply dismiss. It is not the prediction of a man who got a few things right by chance. It is the culminating prediction of a man who applied a productive analytical method to dozens of questions over 60 years and got the vast majority of them right with remarkable specificity. The method has a track record. The track record is extraordinary. The last application of the method produced a conclusion Wells found genuinely uncertain. The uncertainty was honest. It was the uncertainty of a person who had applied the method with maximum rigor and arrived at a conclusion that genuinely depended on a contingent choice rather than on the inevitable trajectory of deterministic forces. He could tell you where the forces were going. He could not tell you whether the choice would be made. He could only tell you that the choice existed, that the situation it addressed was real and urgent and getting more urgent, and that understanding the situation was the precondition of making the choice wisely. He told us. For 60 years, he told us. He wrote more than 150 books. He gave lectures. He met with heads of state. He argued with the greatest minds of his generation. He told everyone who would listen and many who would not that the trajectory was visible. The forces were real. The outcome was not fixed and the choice was theirs. He died not knowing whether they had heard him. We are still deciding. Chapter 15, the conversations he had with the powerful. There is one more dimension of Wells’s life that deserves attention before we close because it addresses a question that this kind of discussion always eventually raises. If he was this consistently right, why did it not make more difference? Why did the people in a position to actually make the choices Wells was describing not act on his analysis? The answer is not that they did not hear it. Wells was one of the most famous public intellectuals in the world for the last 30 years of his life. He was read everywhere. He was translated into dozens of languages. He was cited in parliamentary debates in Britain, in congressional hearings in the United States, in policy discussions across the democratic world. He met personally with some of the most powerful leaders of his era. In 1934, he went to the Soviet Union and met Joseph Stalin. The meeting lasted 3 hours. Wells argued for the convergence of the Soviet and American systems toward a more rational, planned form of industrial organization. Stalin listened, engaged, and then proceeded to do exactly what Stalin always did, which was to pursue his own ideological vision with the complete disregard for anyone else’s analysis. That was his characteristic mode of political operation. Wells came away from the meeting with a complex impression. Not quite disillusioned, but clearer about the limits of what rational argument could accomplish with a man who had already decided what the future would look like and was using state power to enforce that decision. In 1934, also, he met Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was in many ways the political figure most aligned with Wells’s prescriptions, a democratic leader committed to using state capacity actively in response to the structural failures of the market economy, committed to international cooperation, committed to building the institutional architecture of the post-war international order that Wells had argued for throughout his career. The meeting was cordial, stimulating, and apparently mutually respectful. Roosevelt was familiar with Wells’s work. He was in a broad sense sympathetic to its conclusions. Roosevelt also did not implement the Wells program. No political leader of Wells’s era did. Because the Wells program was not a program that any single political leader operating within a single national political system could implement. It required coordination between political leaders across national systems against the resistances of domestic constituencies that were committed to national sovereignty and national interest in ways that made them deeply skeptical of the kind of supernational institutional authority Wells was arguing for. This is the fundamental political problem that Wells identified and never fully solved in his prescriptive writing. The forces requiring global governance were global. The political system within which choices were made was national. The people who had to make choices about governance were accountable to national electorates with national interests, not to global populations with global interests. Even a leader who was entirely convinced by Wells’s analysis and entirely committed to his prescription was operating within a political system that constrained what they could do. Wells knew this. He wrote about it extensively. He argued that the way through the constraint was to change the nature of the electorate, to develop a public that understood the global situation clearly enough to demand governance adequate to the situation, rather than governance adequate to the national interest as narrowly conceived. He argued for education. He argued for the world brain. He argued for journalism and public discourse that engaged seriously with the structure of the global situation, rather than with the surface drama of national politics. He was describing, in other words, the exact project that this kind of work is doing. Understanding the structure, tracing the trajectory, making the analysis available to people who are then in a position to demand, within their national political systems, choices adequate to the actual situation. He believed this could work. He believed it because he believed, at the foundation of everything, in the capacity of human beings to understand their situation accurately, and to make choices adequate to that understanding when the understanding was available to them. This was the bet at the heart of everything he wrote. The bet that understanding was possible, and that understanding created the possibility of adequate response. He made this bet. He made it for 60 years. He applied his method, described what he saw, advocated for the responses he believed were necessary, and waited to see whether the understanding would develop, and whether the choices adequate to the understanding would be made. He did not wait long enough to see the resolution. None of us has. The resolution is not yet here, but the understanding is available. It has been available, in the form Wells left it, since 1901. The structure of the situation is visible for anyone who is willing to look at it honestly, in the same way it was visible to Wells in 1908, when he sat down at a battered writing desk in a rented house in Kent, and described a war that would not begin for another 6 years. He could see it because he was looking at the structure, rather than the surface. He was following the forces, rather than the appearances. He was asking what would happen to the framework, rather than what would happen within it. All of those things are still available to us. The question, the last question, the one he left us, is whether we are willing to look. He thought we were capable of it. He spent his entire life acting on that belief. And now we are here in the world he described, facing the choice he identified, and the question is still ours. Outro: The house in Kent and the battered desk. Let us go back to the house in Kent. Let us go back to 1908, to the man at the battered writing desk, to the moment before the first word of the War in the Air was written. He is 42 years old. He has already written The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau and a dozen other books that have made him one of the most widely read authors in Britain. He has money now and some degree of comfort and the social position that came with literary success in Edwardian England. He does not need to write another difficult book. He does not need to sit down and describe in careful operational detail a catastrophe that most of his contemporaries believe is not coming. He writes it anyway. He writes it because the forces are visible, the trajectory is clear, and the discipline he developed under Huxley, the discipline of following the analysis where it leads, without filtering the conclusion through the wish, will not allow him to do anything else. He is not happy about what he sees. He is not, despite what some of his critics have suggested over the years, eager for the catastrophe he is predicting. He wants the world state. He wants rational global governance and the end of the nation-state system’s capacity to generate catastrophic wars. He wants a world in which the forces of industrial civilization are managed wisely enough that the worst outcomes do not occur. He wants all of this desperately and he can see from where he is sitting that the current trajectory does not lead there, not directly, not without passing through exactly the catastrophes he is describing. He writes The War in the Air because the method requires him to write it. And then he spends the next 38 years writing everything else that the method requires him to write. The prescription for the atomic bomb, the description of the world brain, the future history of the second catastrophe, the prescriptions for the institutional architecture that he believed was the only adequate response. Six years after The War in the Air, the First World War begins. 25 years after The War in the Air, he publishes The Shape of Things to Come. 31 years after he predicts the atomic bomb, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. 64 years after he describes the world brain, Wikipedia is launched. He was right. He was right about almost everything he applied his method to across six decades of consistent, rigorous, honest intellectual work. The last prediction is unresolved. The race between governance capacity and the forces requiring governance is still running. The age of confusion, which he described with such precision, continues. The choice, which he identified and could not make for us, remains ours. He left us the method. He left us the track record. He left us the analysis of the current situation and the prescription for what the situation requires. He left us the demonstration, repeated across 60 years, that looking at the structure, rather than the surface, following the forces, rather than the appearances, asking what will happen to the framework, rather than what will happen within it, produces understanding that is closer to the truth than the comfortable alternatives. He left us the question. If you have spent time with this story and found it genuinely interesting, if the question Wells left us seems like a question worth carrying, then share this with someone who would find it interesting, too. Drop a comment about what you think the resolution will be, whether you think the governance capacity is developing fast enough, whether you think the race is winnable. These are not abstract questions. They are the questions that the man at the battered writing desk spent his life trying to get us to take seriously. He thought we were capable of taking them seriously. He bet his entire career on it. We are still deciding whether he was right about that, too. Thank you for being here. We will see you next time.