The Beginnings of Digital Culture - Digital Culture - page 24

Wells proposed what he called a Permanent World Encyclopaedia,
involving the 'collection, indexing, summarising and release of
knowledge' 30 by a 'centralised world organ' working on a 'planetary
scale' to pull the mind of the world together'. 31 Wells saw the techni-
cal means to realize this idea in the newly developing field of
micro-photography. For him the capacity for endless reproduction
and wide circulation afforded by photography was a 'way to world
peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision
with the warring political forces and the vested interests of today'. 32
Thus for Wells the technologies of reproduction offered the possi-
bility of going beyond the antagonisms of contemporary politics
and towards a global community united under a 'common ideolo-
gy'. By contrast Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a means
of resistance, rather than unification. In his essay he suggested that
the mechanical reproduction of works of art detaches them from
the domain of tradition and enables them to be reactivated for
different purposes. 33 For Benjamin this meant art could stop being
based in ritual and tradition and instead be based in politics, thus,
in particular, enabling a deritualized art to combat the fascist
aestheticization of politics through the politicization of aesthetics. 34
(Benjamin's more antagonistic vision of technology's potential
political role reflected his status as a German Jew, for whom the
threat of Fascism and Nazism was real and immediate. Three years
later, at the age of , he died at the Franco-Spanish border, while

fleeing Nazi-occupied France.)

48

the consequences of the second world war

Though it is likely that a universal digital computing machine would
have emerged in time, circumstances forced its development more
rapidly than might have been the case. By the s war was clearly

imminent. Its nature was clearly going to be dictated, in part at least,
by recent technological advances in ballistics, telecommunications

1930