The Machine Stops: ‘men made it, do not forget that’

In 1909, E. M. Forster writes of a society in the far-off future that ‘had long since abandoned the clumsy system of public gatherings’. People entertained themselves in self-isolated cells, able to ‘see [one another’s] image […] on the other side of the earth’, and ‘never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine’.