We Are Living "The Machine Stops" (crosspost from crunchysteve.dreamwidth.com)
In 1909, 116 years ago, E. M. Forster published the science fiction novella, "The Machine Stops." It tells the story of a future that, having had the story read to me, ironically by a Youtube content producer, is terrifying and already here. It's scarily the most broadly accurate dystopia! While it very much simplifies the world to a single machine that houses and connects humanity, yet runs with little or no human intervention, the priciple of the story is very much the world in which we live in. Lecturers (Youtube content creators and other social media influencers) and their audience of students (fans/followers/tweeps) communicate via what we in the 21st would immediately recognise as "Zoom" calls, live in isolation in single rooms, deep underground. All their food and other needs are shipped to them by the Machine and person to person contact is considered common, even coarse. The Lecturers deliver their "ideas" to their audiences or work on lectu...