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 garages to "access tools". Although these two narratives may seem contradictory, they are both valid, and how you measure them often depends on your political views.
But next, let's talk about the story of Paul Otlet. He was born a long time ago and lived during the Belgian Empire. Otlet was a visionary entrepreneur whose problems were the same as those we face today: nationalism, war, and information overload. Otlet's efforts to find solutions still resonate today, and perhaps the most surprising thing is how you are reading this article.
Long 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 made up of index cards and microfilm. "Thus, a dynamic world will be established, reflecting the true picture of memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, which will be enlarged and limited to the subject required, projected on an individual screen. Thus, everyone sitting in an armchair will be able to contemplate creation in its entirety or in certain parts."
Quite visionary, isn't it?
Otlet was born in 1868 and 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 fully realized in his lifetime but have become increasingly close to reality since 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 access to information. While he may never have said that information "wanted to be free," Otlet devoted his life to reducing the friction that hindered the sharing of information.
When he came of age, the world was just beginning to be wrapped in telegraph wires, marking the dawn of our information age. With news able to spread at the speed of 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 on the rise. In order 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 organizing 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 is currently used in over 130 countries and 150,000 libraries, although Dewey specified that it should not be translated into English. The UDC can not only organize books but also be applied to any other text, including films and recordings, and allows for analog hyperlinks between texts.
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, which Wright referred to as an "analog search engine" in a 2008 New York Times article. This massive paper database, established in 1910, contained over 12 million entries and received over 1,500 inquiries per year until the Belgian government cut funding, gradually eroding Otlet's grand vision.
Otlet was an internationalist, and his dreams were shattered by his homeland being destroyed by two world wars—much of his life's work was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Brussels. When Otlet died, his grand bibliography 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 internet history is told through "information science," but even from this perspective, Otlet cannot truly be connected to how the internet was formed, so it is awkward to integrate him into the history of the internet.
Wright told me in an email, "While there is no evidence that the English-speaking inventors of the internet had any direct knowledge of Otlet's work, there is a wealth of indirect evidence that his ideas were 'in the air' in the 1930s and 1940s 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 looks 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 is 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 app claiming to "change the world" by allowing us to order pizza more efficiently.
Translated from an article on VICE from 2014: The Man Who Envisioned the Internet Before Computers, Without Computers.