I caught Things to Come on TCM last night. H. G. Wells was the author of the book The Shape of Things to Come, on which the movie was based, and, interestingly, was closely involved in the making of the film. Filmed in 1936, it's a movie that takes us through 100 years of future history of the world.

As the host on TCM pointed out, it's very interesting -- with 76 years of that predicted 100 years now in humanity's rear view mirror -- to consider what Wells got right, and what he got wrong. The story is set in a thinly-disguised London renamed "Everytown" (I've visited a lot of towns all over the world, but have only been to one where you regularly see these and where you often have a view of this). We first see Everytown at Christmastime in the year 1940, when war breaks out. The World War projected in the movie is disturbingly similar to the real thing in some respects, especially the portrayal of aerial bombardment of urban civilian populations. What Wells (fortunately) got wrong was the duration: the War drones on for decades and ultimately brings civilization as we know it to an end.

By the year 1970, Everytown is under the control of local despot called the Boss who wants to go to war with the nearby Hill People in order to take their coal and convert it to fuel for his shabby fleet of non-functioning airplanes. The nation-state as we know it is gone, along with the infrastructure that kept it going. Although the Boss dreams of bringing some pieces of that infrastructure back for his own personal enrichment, no one has seen a working airplane in years.

And then, one day, an airplane lands in Everytown -- a sleek, futuristic model (still propeller-driven, alas) unlike anything anyone has ever seen. The pilot, decked out in what must surely be the dorkiest helmet in the history of science fiction, has no interest in or use for the Boss, and instead seeks out the local technorati. He explains that he is part of a new brotherhood of "airmen," a technical elite who have headquartered themselves in Basra -- yep, the same Basra -- and who have carried on the technological progress of the human race that was cut short by the war and ensuing chaos. This new fraternity calls itself Wings Over the World and it is ready to usher in a new chapter in the history of humanity.

Before long, an entire fleet of enormous futuristic aircraft descend upon Everytown and conquer it. It's unclear to me whether they kill the Boss or he kills himself, but Wings Over the World is otherwise pretty much nonviolent -- essentially slipping the entire town an airborne roofie, allowing them to wake up later to find themselves now under the control of the benign and progress-loving airmen.

The airmen conquer the entire world in this fashion and, true to their word, bring in a new age of peace and prosperity. We next see Everytown in the year 2036. The city is utterly transformed, an underground techno-paradise with rolling green hills above it. And now humanity is ready for it's next big adventure -- the first voyage to the moon!

It just goes to show you: technology is hard to predict. In parts of the world-war montage, we see tanks that look more advanced than anything we have today, and this would have been in the 40's or 50's. But a trip to the moon? Wells gives us 67 years more lead time on that one than we needed.

So, as prophecy, the movie fails. The world wars didn't bring down civilization. From their ashes, a dictatorship of the proletariat did not emerge. Airmen never conquered the world. We don't live underground. The state has not withered away.

That is one big helmet

But it's interesting to see how, in some ways, Wells' communist Utopian tropes are not that different from some of our own favorite ideas. When you get a choice as stark as Wings Over the World vs. the Boss, it's not hard to be for the people who want to set humanity free and who want technology to improve everybody's lives -- even if they are a bunch of commies. And in 2036, when a Luddite rebellion threatens the moon mission, there's, like, no way I'm siding with those losers. Their position seems utterly incoherent to me: arguing against the very progress which has made their easy, healthy, lengthened lives possible. It's hard to imagine that people would take that position.

So score a big one for Wells: he got that exactly right.

The other thing that Wells got right was the transformative power of technology. We look for nanotechnology and artificial intelligence to enable, ultimately, a reboot of human history. It's not surprising that people saw that potential in earlier technologies, especially things like electricity, industrialization, the telephone, radio, etc. Wells gave us an intriguing scenario: the Aeronautic Singularity.

And he was closer to being right than we might suppose at first glance. After all, air travel has been a major enabler in the emergence of the global economy. This isn't the global economy that Wells was looking for, but I'm not sure he would completely disapprove. If he could see the real 2009, he might be disappointed that there are still nation-states, and that capitalism is still with us, but the ability to review a century that tried communism and found it severely wanting might temper his disappointment.

On the upside, the second world war did not destroy civilization. We still have nation-states, but a global civilization is emerging. Whether it ends up under one government might not matter as much as we once thought. And whether the world is largely "socialist" or "capitalist" might not matter that much either, not when technology threatens to distort what those terms mean beyond recognition. In 1936, nobody had the idea that technological development and more or less free markets could create a world in which all material goods ultimately become...free. But that is an idea that we have spent a lot of time exploring here recently. And it's an idea that's catching on.

Chris Anderson explains it very well:

Wells thought aviation was the transformational development that would allow us to rebuild the economy from scratch. Before him, Marx thought the same of industrial production. They were both right to the extent that there is, ultimately, a set of technologies that can make that possible. But they were both wrong about capitalism. It turns out that we needed it to give us those technologies. The Luddites in Things to Come arguing against a trip to the moon or any further technological development share something in common with the great visionaries who imagined the world in which those Luddites dwell -- both groups fight against the very thing that makes everything they want possible.

The visionaries who extolled the greatness of human accomplishment missed out on a huge one -- figuring out how to pay for Utopia. It is not just humanity's great scientific and technological advancements that enable ushering in a new age -- it is our economic achievements as well. Thanks to capitalism, by 2036 we may well live in a world far more abundant, clean, and free -- and with humanity better poised to carry on the march of progress -- than anything Wells or Marx could have imagined.