The Machine Looms
E. M. Forster's Prophetic View into Machine Culture
by Arthur W. Hunt III
Samuel Morse probably thought he was only being witty when he tapped out the first telegraph message in 1844: "What . . . hath . . . God . . . wrought?" He must have known that he was obliterating time and space forever for the human race; otherwise, he would not have claimed, as he did, that what he was doing amounted to creating "an enormous brain of nerves" that would unite the country into one big neighborhood.
A poem was even written to celebrate his efforts. "The Victory" declared, "We are one!" Then the Civil War broke out.
A year after Morse sent his famous message, Henry David Thoreau ran off to the woods so he could hear himself think. "We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," he wrote in Walden (first published in 1854). But what if "Maine and Texas . . . have nothing to communicate?"
In the midst of the Industrial Revolution there would always be pestering voices of dissent, like Thoreau's, that asked if what we were leaving behind was worth what we were gaining. Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Twain, and Whitman were among the dissenters, but the voices that celebrated the ingenuity of people like Morse, Bell, Edison, Marconi, Rockefeller, Ford, and many others—some of whom became Robber Barons—could always be counted on to have the upper hand because they represented what historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford called the "mega-machine"—an irrational drive toward profit and power.
And what were the Robber Barons robbing us of? Neil Postman says in his book Technopoly (1993) that they were depriving us of the past, "for their essential idea was that nothing is so much worth preserving that it should stand in the way of technological innovation."
So as the nineteenth century marched on, high expectations were placed on inventions like the "wireless" and the telephone. In 1900 The Century Magazine reported with "absolute certitude" that people would one day "communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance. . . . Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face."
A budding English novelist, E. M. Forster (1879–1970), could not help but notice the self-congratulatory tone of these pronouncements. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as H. G. Wells, he wanted to write a story that showed the potential downside of a civilization that lived under the total sovereignty of technology.
Published in 1909, Forster's The Machine Stops remarkably imagines much of the gadgetry we use in the second decade of the twenty-first century. You will not find the words "Zoom," "Skype," or "Instagram" in the story, but you will read about "glowing round plates" that allow people to communicate virtually, "speaking tubes," and "pneumatic posts."
While technological optimists living around 1909 would have seen these mechanisms as enhancements of human connectivity, Forster depicts them as dehumanizing. His achievement in The Machine Stops is that he took the themes of remembrance, family, nature, and religion and showed how a machine culture might ravage each one of them.
The Great Hookup
Arthur W. Hunt III is a former professor of public speaking at the University of Tennesse at Martin. He is now preparing to transition to ministry-related service and lives in the greater Memphis area.
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