Lockdown, isolation and the Internet: how a science fiction writer predicted the future 100 years ago
Columnist Air force Arts and Culture Affairs Will Gompertz talks about an amazing 1909 book his wife read that is “breathtakingly, breathtakingly accurate” and describes our lives during quarantine in 2020. Next - from the first person.
My wife recently listened to a radio program where a man was talking about artificial intelligence. He mentioned the fantastic story by E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, published in 1909. As the man put it, the story is “extraordinarily prescient.” Neither my wife nor I had heard of her.
To be honest, Forster was not regarded as a science fiction writer at all - more as a writer whose books were used to make films with Helen Bonham Carter in fluffy vintage dresses.
We ordered a copy for ourselves, but you can read it for free online (in English only).
OMG! - as Forster would hardly have put it.
“The Machine Stops” is not just a visionary tale; it's a breathtakingly accurate literary depiction of our quarantine lives in 2020.
If this story was written today, it would not surprise anyone. But the fact that she was born more than a hundred years ago is staggering.
The action of the novel takes place in a kind of futuristic (for Forster, but not for you and me) society. People live alone in stereotypical houses (globalization), where they prefer to isolate themselves (his word!); they send messages to each other via pneumatic mail (prototype email or WhatsApp) and communicate on the network via a video interface that is surprisingly reminiscent of Zoom or Skype.
“The inconvenient system of social gatherings has long been a thing of the past,” as the author writes, as has the “outdated habit” of touching strangers—all now forbidden in this new world where people live in underground cells with an Alexa-type computer doing all their whims.
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Progress Machines
If you're already "feeling good" about how similar everything is, it won't get any better when you learn that members of this isolated society know thousands of people through social networks, which are controlled by an algorithm that encourages users to receive and pass on certain borrowed ideas. “In some areas human communication has advanced unheard of,” the visionary author tells us sparingly and then adds: “However, humanity, in its desire for comfort, has overestimated its capabilities. It has overused natural resources. Step by step, with its characteristic complacency, it slid into decay, and progress came to mean the progress of the Machine.”
I have not forgotten that you are reading this now on the Internet on a device made by man, which, in our opinion, we control. But, according to Forster’s tale (which some of today's artificial intelligence experts seem to agree with), there’s not much time left.
We've entered frightening Frankenstein territory—yet another literary portent we should hardly ignore.
However, in Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” you will not find the same terrible consequences of scientific progress - this can be judged from the very title of the work. But this makes it even more true. The two main characters of the story, Vashti and her son Kuno, are normal people, like you and me. She lives in the Southern Hemisphere, he lives in the Northern Hemisphere.
Kuno wants his mother to come to him, but she is not burning with desire.
“I can see you! - she exclaimed. “What are you missing?”
“I don’t want to see you through the Machine,” Kuno said. “I don’t want to talk to you through this hateful Machine.”
“Oh, be quiet! - said the mother, slightly frightened. “You shouldn’t say anything bad about the Machine.”
Cave myth
She prefers social distancing and lectures online on "Music of the Australian Period", a hidden audience absorbing abstract historical information that has absolutely no connection to their real lives underground, other than to temporarily distract attention from their devastated lives (which can probably be compared to online lectures during lockdown).
I won't retell the plot anymore - this is a very short novella that can be read in less than an hour. I will only say that this is a kind of technocratic similarity to Plato’s Myth of the Cave [from Plato’s dialogues “The Republic”, book VII].
The machine (and for us, the Internet) is an airless, sunless, solitary cave in which we exist, and the information it provides is just shadows on the wall.
EM. Forster published this story between the publications of A Room with a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910), in which he examines similar philosophical issues regarding the clash between internal and external. worlds, truth and pretense.
“The Machine Stops” first appeared in the periodical Oxford and Cambridge Review in the same year (1909), in which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his furious “Futurist Manifesto” [as a paid advertisement] in the newspaper Le Figaro.
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The Italian poet and writer proclaimed in it the opposite of what was narrated in Forster's visionary novel.
Marinetti welcomed the advent of mechanization, declaring that a racing car was better than the most beautiful Greek statue [“A racing car, the hood of which is decorated with large pipes like fire-breathing snakes; a roaring machine, the engine of which runs like a large buckshot - it is more beautiful than the statue of the Nike of Samothrace.”]
The past, according to Marinetti, has outlived its usefulness, it must be rejected in order to enter the Future [“Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed."]
He would have liked Vashti, who, having flown on an airship to meet Cuno, shaded the window while flying over Greece, since this is not the place where you can find ideas - such is Forster's ironic joke, given that the idea for his novella was born in the School of Athens Plato's philosophy.
Perhaps this is where the jokes end in this story, where, in fact, there is no real human community or direct experience of anything. There it is impossible to get rid of the constant hum of the Machine without asking permission from the Central Committee to obtain a pass to go outside. And for this you put on a respirator and - it was not.
As the man said on the radio, a visionary tale. And very, very good.
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