The Machine Stops: ‘men made it, do not forget that’
‘You talk as if a god made the Machine […] Men made it, do not forget that.’
E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909.
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’.
There were buttons for everything, ‘to call for food, for music, for clothing […] there was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which [they] communicated with friends’. Vashti’s day (the main character) consists mainly of ‘making the room light’, eating and exchanging ideas with friends, listening to music and attending lectures. She even gives lectures of her own, all lasting ten minutes given the further regression of the human attention span.
Something to be on guard for were ideas of your own conception. ‘Beware of first-hand ideas!’ exclaimed the intellectuals. It is in the devout act of thousand-fold replications that ideas were ideas at all. This way, ‘they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation’. Never learn about a subject first-hand for fear of manifesting an actualised thought and being threatened with ‘Homelessness’.
You are not to say or notice that there could possibly be something ‘wrong’ with the Machine, the Machine that you were born into, that gives you ‘light’ and ‘life’. Rather, should there be a potential defect, people would ‘readily adapt themselves to every caprice of the Machine […] Things went from bad to worse unchallenged’. The biggest threat to this way of life being ‘an unexpected terror’, which eventually came, ‘-silence. She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her - it did kill many thousands of people overnight’.
Vashti’s son, Kuno, warns her that she has begun “to worship the Machine”. “I worship nothing!”, she cries out, and asserts “I am most advanced […] there is no such thing as religion left”. Yet, she nonetheless turns to the Machine for advice, consolation, life, and light.
She, ‘who had always been so respectable and full of ideas’; tenth-hand ideas, mind you, which made her all the more respectable.
Kuno’s warning, and Forster’s warning at that, still stand for the reader one-hundred years following the publication of this novella: ‘the Machine stops’. When it stops, ‘panic reigns’, following ‘gradations of terror - at times rumours of hope’, until it finally and indefinitely stops. What is man-made will remain just that.
And ‘they wept for humanity [...] beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments he had woven’. The only way out Forster offers in this eerily foretold tale of isolation and collapse is if humanity could learn to ‘come back to their own’, if they could ‘shed the garment at will and live by the essence that is their soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is their body’.
Thought of the Day
The biggest threat to this way of life was the ‘unexpected terror’ of ‘-silence’ which may cause one to manifest the incorrigible blight of the first-hand idea. Forster warns, however, that ‘the Machine stops’. When it stops, ‘panic reigns’, following ‘gradations of terror - at times rumours of hope’, until it finally and indefinitely stops. What is man-made will remain just that.
-Gabriela Milkova.
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