this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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I was talking to my daughter yesterday about H. G. Wells and the one film he wrote the screenplay for, the 1936 film Things to Come.
In the film, a great world war starts in 1940 with an air attack on Britain (surprisingly prescient, but the rest isn't). The war lasts until 1970 until Britain is completely destroyed and petty dictators rule tiny patches of land in the wastes. But men of science return to Britain and rebuild it as a scientific utopia.
Wells was a scientific technocrat. He thought that scientists should be in charge of things because there was nothing technology could do that wouldn't eventually lift humanity up and bring about a paradise on Earth...
So why did he also write The Time Machine, where everything falls apart and humanity splits into two species, both unintelligent? Because he was also a socialist and he saw what capitalism and the class system was doing to the world (The War of the Worlds was also about this, a critique of Western colonialism).
So over 100 years ago, H. G. Wells was telling us that we were on a path to either scientific utopia or destruction due to our embracing old modes of thinking.
What would he have made of capitalists using technology to end civilization?