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Thursday
Greg Olear at the Substack blog Prevail has alerted me to an E.M Forster dystopian novella that, in 1913-14, predicted our technological future far more accurately than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. As Olear points out, in The Machine Stops
Forster foresaw the Internet, Zoom calls, bleeping notifications, well-honed HVAC systems, tech worship, globalization, Reddit boards, Yelp reviews, Spotify, YouTube, environment-destroying pollution, shitty automated customer service, psychological issues involving physical isolation, and more.
About this astonishing perspicacity Olear observes, “maybe the future was always mapped out this way, for those visionaries sensitive enough to survey the undiscovered frontier.” If authors and poets have such sensitivity, I think it’s because (to borrow from Wordsworth) “they see into the life of things.” Above all, they see into the life of people and can imagine what they are capable of in various conditions. It’s an advantage they have over engineers and sociologists.
Machine Stops features a mother (Vashti) and her son (Kuno) who live in an underground world serviced by “the Machine,” which provides them with all necessities of life—or at least it does so until it starts breaking down. They are underground because the outside environment has been degraded to such an extent that it is no longer habitable. Vashti teaches remotely about safe subjects from the past (such as “Music from the Australian Period”) and is contented with her life remotely. Kuno, by contrast, feels confined and wants to explore the outside world, even though to do so is forbidden. In certain ways the story resembles the movie Matrix, with Kuno being a red pill guy. He works to expand his mother’s consciousness and, when the Machine fails, comes to her side.
The novella begins with a scenario that many who lived through the Covid pandemic can relate to:
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk – that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh – a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
At that point Vashti is essentially Skyping with Kuno, who is in Australia. (Remember, this was written in 1913!) He tells her he wants to see her in person rather than through “the wearisome Machine,” and when she says he must not say anything negative about the system that rules their lives, he replies, “You talk as if a god had made the Machine.” And then,
I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.
Her objection is that it will take two days by airship to reach him and that she will have to witness “the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark.” She complains, “I get no ideas in an airship.”
For a moment after Kuno hangs up she feels lonely, but she finds an instant way to escape her loneliness in a way that we can all relate to. First, the setting:
Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. (My emphasis)
What happens next is what we happens when we return to our messages after having silenced our phone:
Vashanti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.
“Last three minutes” is a nice touch.
There’s even telemedicine in this world:
“Kuno,” she said, “I cannot come to see you. I am not well.”
Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the ceiling, a thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor.
So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling. The voice of Kuno was heard asking how she felt.
“Better.”
“The machine” has become so pervasive in Forster’s novella that people have started worshipping it:
Sitting up in the bed, she took [the instruction manual] reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence.
The machine doesn’t only provide services. Kino points out that it reconfigures the way we experience space itself:
“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.
Unfortunately, “man” in the novella has farmed out all that is lovable and desirable and strong to machines. And not only to machines, as Olear makes clear:
I worry because the Machine, in 2025, is owned and operated by some of the greediest, cruelest, least empathic men on the planet, who are doing everything in their power to accelerate our destruction. The Internet was conceived as a democratic space; it has become an oligarchy. A.I. was intended to help humanity; it may well stamp it out.
Because he is mostly focused on technology, Forster doesn’t deal with the men who run the machine. One must go to Orwell’s 1984 for that.
Further thought: For a related take on technology, my wife Julia has been conducting a class for our church on Becky Chambers’s Psalm for the Wild-Built. In the author’s more optimistic vision, when robots start becoming a full replacement for the human workforce rather than merely a supplement—when we “had bastardized constructs to the point that it was killing us”—they develop consciousness and walk away. Humanity is thereby saved as it is forced to revert to an earlier and healthier stage where the handcrafts flourish once again.
And yet another thought: Regarding how advancing technology reconfigures how we experience space, I am put in mind of the Ursula K. Le Guin short story “The Direction of the Road.” It is narrated by a oak tree, which complains that, with advancing speed technology, human beings notice trees less and less. Le Guin invokes the principle of relativity to make her point:
I’d approach steadily but quite slowly [to the walking man], growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I’d finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size — sixty feet in those days — I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish. Sometimes on a hot afternoon one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting-place, and lie down with his back against mine for an hour or more.
This healthy relationship declines with the advent to the automobile and finally ends when someone is killed crashing into the tree:
It is not [the killing] that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this: as I leapt at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole, and saw nothing else — then, or ever.
He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.
“I am not death. I am life,” the tree complains, before throwing some serious shade at humans:
If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.
