Forster, as early as 1909, has seen the future that the technocrats would articulate (this next time in the 30s, without a hint of parody) that the technologicalization of reality cannot be stopped or undone, once it has begun. It creates new problems (in this instance, the surface of the earth has been made hostile to organic life) and gives us a meager replacement — one that cannot really touch the “imponderable bloom” of the Real.
“There was a button that produced literature….” He seems to anticipate the AI infiltration of arts + literature and the vast availability of human wants + needs creating not satisfaction but emptiness and disinterest in those own desires. “The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
Forster also images the total social alienation that comes with technologicalization — the enshitification of academia — the dislocation from the organic biology of Earth.
As a mode of soothing her nausea at this world, she plunges herself deeper into the technological theology, “O MACHINE! O MACHINE!” — experiencing what’s called the delirium of acquiescence.
They keep repeating “no ideas here,” and I am reminded of Orpheus’ youtube video on Stalker and Labryinth’s — how the fetish for the IDEA eclipses the experience, and that the call for artwork is to move back to focusing on experience as a countermeasure.
A fascinating detail too — “punishable by homelessness,” identifying already that in a Machine world of networked surplus, noncompliance is dealt with weaponized financial isolation which is now possible on an immense scale. Moreover, in this post apocalyptic setting, exposure to the seemingly contaminated elements would be deadly. Kuno, her son, was threatened with Homelessness due to his Dyionsyian excursion to the surface, cheered on by ancestral voices.
Sometimes I find myself feeling that the story takes it a bit too far, on the nose, such as athletic infants being destroyed because the life the Machine required would be too difficult a condition for them to live under. And then I am reminded of my own body — even as unathletic as it is, screaming with frustration as I sit on the computer for huge hours at a time.
Kuno is also refused by the Machine Committee to be able to pass on his genes — I am reminded of Incels or the privilege it is these days to actually afford to be a parent and pass on genes or partake in the practice.
He gives his mother an incredible speech on the Machine, how it is the thing that lives while we are dying. It robs us of all our relations, biological origins and then compels us to worship it. It has its own teleology, it’s own goal and direction.
After he is banished, they establish a religion for worshipping the Machine — which is big, because before, Kuno accused his mom of doing so which she denied worshipping it at all — an attitude we can imagine is pervasive as she is a stand in for a rather normie perspective. In this new religion, People would then worship their own preferred aspect of the Machine and ask for it to intercede for them on the whole — so it was a very decentralized, individualized form of worship still.
When the Machine stops being able to provide any sort of high quality of life, then Kuno’s prediction that “the machine stops” seems to come true. But despite moldy food and bad poetry and cold bathwater, people just adapted. “things went from bad to worse to unchallenged.”
Then Sleeping Issues and Pain return, people can’t read anymore. The Committee finally admits the Machine needs to be fixed.
“Then she broke down, for with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror - silence.” When the hum of the machine goes quiet, people have to confront themselves. Relatable to the contemporary need for white noise to sleep or multiple sounds to focus. Humanity dies in the tunnels, with the hope that Kuno has seen a few still living on the surface. His mother worries they will just turn the machine back on one day.
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