If you want to terrify a modern reader, you needn’t bother with haunted houses, poltergeists, or even climate change. All you need to do is thrust E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story The Machine Stops under their nose and whisper: “This is you. Right now. With your Wi-Fi password tattooed on your soul.”
Forster, that gentle liberal humanist who gave us Howards End and A Room with a View, one day looked up from his Edwardian tea service and foresaw Zoom calls, X pylons, content algorithms, and a nation of pallid citizens worshipping a god of convenience. He saw us, hunched over in our cubicles, mistaking ‘connection’ for the glow of a blue screen. He saw us long before we saw ourselves.
The story is, on the surface, simple. Humanity has fled underground into a honeycomb of identical rooms. Each person sits in a cell, summoning food, music, and lectures at the push of a button. Face-to-face contact is gauche; physical travel is subversive. The Machine provides. The Machine knows best. The Machine is worshipped as though it were not engineered, but eternal. And the Machine – as machines tend to do – eventually collapses.
The true horror lies not in its collapse, but in the docile acceptance of the masses before it. Like the congregants of some deranged techno-church, they can’t imagine life without their deity. “The Machine is omnipotent, eternal,” they chant, even as the lights flicker and the air turns foul. It’s the ultimate satire of human idolatry: we carve our golden calf out of steel and wires, then bow before it as it strangles us.
Now, transpose Forster’s dystopia onto our present. Do we not live in our cells, hunched before glowing rectangles, mistaking mediated experience for real? Our politicians, too, have turned the Machine into their altar – an algorithmic paradise of managed decline, where immigration quotas, NHS waitlists, and crime figures are reduced to data points in a spreadsheet, while the lived reality on Britain’s streets is dismissed as ‘misinformation.’ One almost suspects Westminster itself has been swallowed by a subterranean hive.
Forster’s rebel character, Kuno, insists that “man is the measure,” not his invention. He dares to walk on the Earth’s surface, to feel air and soil and sky. He’s dismissed as a crank, much as today anyone who resists the digitised, homogenised order is branded a reactionary, a Luddite, or worse – a free thinker. Yet Kuno is right: when we cease to touch life directly, we’re no longer living but embalming ourselves in comfort.
And here lies Forster’s genius. He saw that the danger of machines was not their power, but our passivity. We stop thinking, stop daring, stop rebelling, and in exchange we’re swaddled in efficiency. We become the machine’s children, then its sacrifices. In that sense, The Machine Stops is not dystopian fiction at all but an obituary for civilisation written a century early.
Perhaps the final irony is that we’re reading this story on the very devices Forster warned us against – scrolling, swiping, searching for meaning in a web spun by silicon spiders. The Machine hasn’t stopped. If anything, it has merely updated its operating system.
The question remains: will we have the courage of Kuno and climb back to the surface, or will we – polite, obedient, eternally online – go on whispering to ourselves, as the servers hum: The Machine is eternal. The Machine knows best.
Wording 