The Global Brain can be defined as the distributed intelligence emerging from all human and technological agents as interacting via the Internet. It plays the role of a nervous system for the social superorganism. A brief history of this idea is sketched, with a focus on the developments leading to the creation of the Global Brain Group, and the Global Brain Institute (GBI) that emerged out of it. As directors of the GBI, the authors of this paper took the initiative of editing a special issue on the topic of “the Global Brain as a model of the future information society”. We briefly sketch the contributions from the different papers in this issue. We conclude by reviewing some common dystopian misconceptions associated with the Global Brain paradigm, and by offering an optimistic outlook on how the “offer network” protocol inspired by this paradigm may lay the foundation for a much more synergetic and sustainable society.