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 lectures at their leisure. The "ideas" are only considered valid if derived from the work of others who have come before. The longer the train of previous, contributory thinkers, the more valid these ideas. It is a humanity in stagnation.

Enter Vashti, a lecturer who is happy with her solitary existence, researching ancient music from "The Brisbane Period," occasionally holding forth to her students via video, until hearing from her estranged son, Kuno, who lives on the other side of the world. He is inviting her to visit and witness his heresy, that he has been to the forbidden surface and people are still alive there, and that the Machine is failing: - "The Machine stops," he says.

The problem with this existence of influencer/audience culture, as we'd call it today, is that there is no original material. The entirety of it is sourced from all previous work. Development of new ideas or, learning practical skills, is considered gauche, and everybody believes the Machine will continue forever. Kuno knows otherwise and is at risk of "Homelessness" (Enforced exile to the supposedly lethal surface) for such radical thought. In a world of "ideas" rather than action, he is at great peril and so is everybody else.

Forster predicts a world earily akin to the world we live in no and did so more than 100 years before anybody could have predicted this world from the sciences of the time. His descriptions of the Machine are clunky and somewhat steampunk, but the humanity of this world is spot on! Climate denial is rife - our "machine" shows us we are breaking it with too much carbon-dioxide, yet some argue the science is wrong, despite increasing average planetary average temperatures. "It's just a warm patch, history has always had those." (Nope, not this severe!)

Those who argue and influence for drastic change, before the planet is irreparable for human habitation, are dismissed as trouble makers, even terrorists. Yet, all the while we "tube" and "facebook" and "tweet" our opinions (ideas, as Forster calls them), mostly without evidence. The only "valid opinions" are those regurgitating existing popular opinions while scientists, people with actual proof and proof-of-work, panic at the realisation of how little value is placed on evidence anymore! Kuno would feel right at home in our world and he would be no happier about it than we are... if we're truly honest with ourselves.

The arch trust in the Machine becomes religion, like MAGA, or other nationalist philosophies around the world, have become a kind of religious fervour as much as a political one. Then, because the religious faith in the apparently steady state environment, despite the evidence that the system is declining, scientist, activist and deluded denier, all die. This also happens in "The Machine Stops." Kuno, the whistle blower, just like his mother, the true believer, and all other humans die because the Machine can no longer feed or protect them. The entirety of human civilisation is under threat by climate denialism and extreme nationalism using the power of personal "broadcasting."

Youtube is "the Machine." TikTok is "the Machine." And, as Forster predicts, the Machine will stop and we will all die as the planet becomes unable to support higher order life.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBcr6_HsfE8&si=MY31IcIL8VqjShqR

https://youtu.be/RzkD_rTEBYs?si=PFIb-IrJrmL62SXA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops