The Machine Stops

“Beware of first-hand ideas!”

I stumbled across E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” online years ago, and his dystopian vision still haunts the edges of my thoughts. When I think about technology, social media, and the relationship between ideas and reality—or when I just have that dazed, floaty feeling from spending too much time staring at screens—I sometimes picture Forster’s main character, Vashti:

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 doesn’t help that I’m 5 feet tall and kind of pale. Ugh.

Besides “get outside more,” what, exactly, does this century-old Ghost of Speculative Fiction Past have to say to us now?

Turns out the question is easier asked than answered. This article has been sitting half written in my drafts for a while now; spying its title, I looked away and wrote about something else. I lived, grieved, worked, and watched old episodes of House while pedaling a half-broken elliptical machine in front of the TV. I love medical dramas because the mystery always gets solved and the patient saved from the brink of death, preferably by a scruffy, sarcastic Hugh Laurie. I love my elliptical machine because although its computer gave up the ghost long ago, it works pretty well unplugged. Anyway…back to “The Machine Stops”:

Published in 1909—when radio technology was still in its infancy—Forster’s story depicts the human race thousands of years after an environmental collapse. With the air still unbreathable, these future people live in honeycomb-shaped cells deep underground. They interact almost entirely through computer-like screens except when summoned for scientifically planned procreation. To these weak, grublike creatures, earlier civilizations seem barbaric. Imagine, people walked on the earth and touched each other! How horrid!

All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

With their every physical need tended to by a globally networked Machine, people lose themselves in Escher-like echo chambers of ideas about ideas. The farther removed these ideas are from their referents—real music, actual historical events, living people, etc.—the better.

“Beware of first-hand ideas!” one lecturer exhorts.

Pretty much the only unprescient thing about Forster’s vision is that it would take a thousand years underground to set the stage for Twitter.

A few days ago, I took a last look at my Twitter feed before deleting my account. Scrolling, I chanced across an article by Oliver Sacks that was posthumously published in The New Yorker in 2019. Its title was “The Machine Stops.” I felt a thrill of recognition. Forster’s story had haunted Sacks, too, for similar reasons.

Sacks was a brilliant, empathetic neurologist who also became a famous storyteller, publishing medical case studies in collections such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. After reading his article (anything to avoid finishing my own!), I detoured to watch a documentary about his life. It was a more painful life than I ever would have guessed. A wounded healer, Sacks was able to go deeply into his patients’ experience—to understand them from the inside instead of merely diagnosing and medicating them. Sacks’s narratives of neurologically broken people “storied” them back into the world. He didn’t just treat them; he affirmed their humanity.

When he wrote the New Yorker article toward the end of his life, Sacks was horrified by what he saw around him: a “bewitched, besotted society” in which people peered into little boxes while zombie-walking into oncoming traffic. He viewed our collective screen addiction as nothing short of a neurological crisis that threatened to destroy our humanity. For Sacks, Forster’s story was a cautionary tale for the times.

Interestingly, though, Sacks and Forster may have had very different views about science in general.

Forster wrote his story in response to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In Forster’s future, there is no equivalent of evil Morlocks enslaving gentle Eloi; technology itself is the great evil. Humanity dies because it has willingly surrendered its agency to the Machine, sort of like we’ve gleefully handed ourselves over to smart speakers and content-promotion algorithms. (“Hey wiretap machine, do you have a recipe for brownies?”) The Machine without the Ghost in it is always psychopathic.

While Forster championed natural vitality and fresh ideas, Sacks believed deeply in science as the means of our salvation:

I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. —Oliver Sacks

Sacks may have been right…but “get outside more” surely is our first step, like Vashti’s son Kuno emerging from an abandoned tunnel and lifting his face to the forgotten sky. Only away from my screen do I viscerally feel the value, as well as the fragility, of all that we have to lose.

We also need sharp gusts of wind to pierce our mental cobwebs: stories like “The Machine Stops,” poems like Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet,” and novels like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. At least, I do.

A Luddite I’ll never be. Yesterday, I walked on the greenway in crisp fall air as I listened to an excellent audio recording of “The Machine Stops.” If not for the internet, I wouldn’t have discovered either Forster’s story or Sacks’ article to begin with. I wouldn’t be sharing these thoughts with you now.

But I’m really glad I deleted my Twitter account. We need neither neurologists nor novelists to tell us that profit-driven content promotion algorithms mess with our heads, and that global communication platforms shouldn’t be in the hands of emotionally broken billionaires.

Hey, it’s almost 2023, and we’re still moving and breathing under a blue sky. That’s reason enough for hope.