There are several ways to tell the story of the internet. Military infrastructure turned into academic tools, and the environment became more relaxed. The Whole Earth Catalog allowed people in their garages to "access tools." Although these two narratives seem contradictory, they are both accurate accounts, and how you measure them usually depends on your political views.
But next, let's introduce the story of Paul Otlet. He was born a long time ago and lived during the Belgian Empire. Otlet was a visionary entrepreneur, and the problems he addressed are the same as the ones we face today: nationalism, war, and information overload. Otlet's efforts to find solutions resonate today, and perhaps the most surprising thing is how you are reading this article.
As early as decades before the first microchip was invented, Otlet called for screens to be installed on everyone's desks and created a "global network." Or, yes, a web.
"Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced," Otlet wrote in 1934, envisioning a steampunk/Gilliam's Brazil prototype internet composed of index cards and microfilm. "In this way, a dynamic world would be established, a true reflection of memory. From a distance, everyone could read texts, which would be magnified and limited to the desired subject, projected onto separate screens. In this way, everyone sitting in an armchair could contemplate creation as a whole or in certain parts."
Foresight, isn't it?
Otlet was born in 1868, and he dedicated his life to such grand and ambitious projects—a global knowledge network, an internationalist world city—none of which were fully realized.
Alex Wright's recent biography of Otlet, Cataloging the World, portrays him as someone whose ideas were not realized in his lifetime but have become increasingly close to reality after his death. Wright refers to Otlet as the father of information science, and his spiritual successors likely include the late Aaron Swartz and local librarians. Otlet believed that binding information in books provided limited information. Although he may never have said that information "wanted to be free," Otlet devoted his life to reducing the friction that hindered information sharing.
When he came of age, the world was just being wrapped in telegraph wires, the dawn of our information age. With news able to spread at the speed of static electricity, newspapers proliferated, and international organizations emerged. The mass production of the 19th century included the mass production of literature, and literacy rates in Western Europe and the United States were rising. To sort the increasing number of publications and improve efficiency, information needed to be standardized. Thus, card catalogs were the application of Fordism and Taylorism to information: a standardized method of classifying information to make it more accessible.
Otlet and the Belgian Henri La Fontaine created the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) based on Melvil Dewey and his decimal system. The UDC, currently used in over 130 countries and 150,000 libraries, can organize not only books but also any other text, including films and recordings, and allows for interlinking between texts—an analog hyperlink.
Otlet and La Fontaine were also among those who attempted to catalog all the information in the world or, at the very least, create a catalog of all published knowledge in the world.
Their plan was to organize facts on index cards, allowing people to write questions that workers could answer for a fee. Wright referred to this massive paper database, established in 1910 and containing over 12 million entries, as an "analog search engine" in an article for The New York Times in 2008. However, Otlet's grand vision began to fade as the Belgian government cut funding.
Otlet was an internationalist, and his dreams and homeland were destroyed by two world wars—much of his life's work was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Brussels. When Otlet died, his vast catalog was sent to storage. But in recent years, his reputation has been on the rise because the world has become what Otlet imagined.
In 1998, his archives were reopened to the public in a museum in Belgium. In 2002, a documentary about Otlet was released, and now Wright's book is also available.
Wright effectively connects Otlet's work and ongoing mindset with H.G. Wells' speech envisioning a "world brain" and Vannevar Bush, whose article "As We May Think" is said to have inspired computer scientists who shaped the internet as we know it.
Otlet's history of the internet is told through "information science," but even from this perspective, Otlet cannot truly be linked to how the internet was formed, so integrating him into the history of the internet is awkward.
Wright told me in an email, "While there's no evidence that the English-speaking inventors of the internet had any direct knowledge of Otlet's work, there's plenty of indirect evidence to suggest that his ideas were 'in the air' in the 1930s and '40s when people like Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart were first starting to think about automated information retrieval systems."
This is a new way of looking at the internet, seeing it at its best—a standardized outline of human knowledge accessible from anywhere. From this perspective, trolls and online toxicity disappear, and it seems like a victory.
Wright says, "For me, what makes Otlet important is not so much his direct influence (or lack thereof) on the invention of the internet but rather how his work deepens our understanding of the historical forces at play. The internet is not just a recent technological innovation; it's also the culmination of a series of complex events, including the history of libraries, the second industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century, and the progressive social idealism of Europe's 'Belle Époque' (among many other things)."
From the perspective of Cataloging the World, the pleasant and grand potential of the internet seems more valuable than an application claiming to "change the world" by allowing us to order pizza more efficiently.
Translated from an article on VICE in 2014: "The Man Who Envisioned the Internet Before Computers, Without Computers"