Will the Machine Stop?

E M Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1909, tells us about a future where, in effect, almost all human beings live their lives inside what we now call the Internet.
Every person on Earth lives alone in an identical room under the surface of the Earth, having collectively abandoned the surface and its messy ‘humanness’ for the predictability and comfort of what is, in all ways except name, a vast and universal hotel where all services, and all life’s needs, are delivered in the rooms. At a command, a bath rises from the floor or music plays or the enormous maintenance and repair system, out of human sight, and apparently now out of human control, responds.

Through a console (Forster’s word), each person in his hexagonal cell (think prison, as well as bee-hive) is in permanent communication with the rest of the world, by sound and vision, unless they choose to isolate themselves, by specific action, as the default position of this Internet is ‘On’. The main character, Vashti, ‘knew several thousand people’. Forster comments, ironically, ‘in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously’.

When the story starts, the manual for operating the room (and the console) has taken on the status of a Holy Book, just as the Machine also, in many minds, has become deified. Some people have even developed personal rituals and taboos surrounding the Book.
Physical travel now happens only rarely and with great reluctance; the door out of the cell has fallen into disuse for most people. A transport system of underground railcars and intercontinental rocket-planes survives, but the trains and planes often move empty. Only to fulfil ones reproductive duty (also organised by the Machine) does one travel any great distance and then only once or twice, and then only with permission mediated by the machine.
People, it seems, do recognise the existence of their mothers, but they rarely meet. Contact through the Machine is enough for most people, but not for Kuno, who has decided that he wants to meet Vashti who is his mother. He tells her he sees ‘something like you on the plate [screen], but I do not see you’. She goes to visit him across half the world but the visit is sterile and the journey disturbing.

People feel they are happy and it’s implied in the story that those very few dissatisfied are somehow dealt with, possibly exiled to the surface, where Kuno eventually also goes, through an ancient airlock, out of curiosity, to see the stars, and is briefly both poisoned and exhilarated by fresh air.

‘Ideas’ (might we now call them ‘memes’?) rule – and have to be ‘interesting’. They sweep in minutes round the world, just as quickly fading away. Vashti gives a ten-minute lecture on ‘Music in the Australian period’ ranging from the pre-Mongolian epoch to the ‘great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest’. She has an audience, she has a chat-room like response and then everyone’s interest sweeps to the next thing, which, it is certain, will be another commentary or second-hand recounting, but about nothing experienced first hand. Even as she flew over the Himalayas and the oceans she ‘got no ideas’, and closed the windows.

All is fine until … the machine stops. This happens slowly; images on the plate become fuzzier, sounds less sharp. The repair mechanism slows and finally the recycled atmosphere itself deteriorates.

The final scene in the story is of all the people stumbling out of their cells into the dark and barely used corridors as the atmosphere fails to refresh, lights dim, systems run down and then ‘the unexpected terror, silence’ replaces the permanent hum they had barely been aware of.
Reading ‘the Machine Stops’ again recently prompted me ask how right and prophetic E M Forster was. Are the roads we have followed and the world we now live in similar to what he predicted?

Certainly 97 years later, in 2006, we float in a sea of data and information of which a large amount is not accessible directly by our senses without tools or instruments. I can read a book or a print-out, but unaided I can’t read a CD or a flash disk, and now my new laptop can’t help me read a floppy disk, of which I still have quite a stock.

Like Vashti I can watch the FIFA World Cup, or something like it, in Germany and, yes, through various electronic devices I can communicate with huge numbers of people.

Yet, in 2006, it’s not really about slavery to computers. The computer is still more of a servant than a master to most people, though it can be alarming to consider how much autonomy we have given these servants, and how we have come to trust systems, like bank computers, electronic voting systems, air traffic control, or databases, or automated medical tests which are not ‘transparent’ to us.

In a recent general election in Uganda the whole national result passed from the constituencies through the laptop of one technician who had set up the national network. I know him, I believe I trust him but I am relieved that the ballot papers are publicly counted at the polling station at the end of the voting day before they are entered into the electronic system.

In a similar vein, it’s not in being confined to cell-like offices or inward-looking malls, or rooms without outside windows or the spread of tele-commuting. An outdoor life remains a desideratum in the West at least; sport, physical culture and tourism ensure that we don’t stay at home all the time and life in the open air is still available to most of the world’s population, albeit obligatory to many, like refugees and displaced people in Darfur.

It’s not in being restricted to fixed or limited means of communication. The portability of elegance of the mobile phone, a true thing of beauty, especially when compared to the clunkiness of the Internet on PCs, was not foreseen by Forster. The democratisation and personalisation of transport, whether Easyjet in Europe or buses in Africa, and the concept of mass tourism, were also not predicted by most writers of Forster’s day.

No, it is more about wondering how disconnected we are becoming from the sources of what keep us going, economically and physically, socially and intellectually. How many of us in the ‘developed world’ know where our power, our water or our food and, importantly, our information come from? Does it matter?

As the Millennium midnight approached I fantasised (as did Ray Bradbury in the fifties about the then nascent national telephone networks) that someone high up (in Microsoft?) might use a single switch – or virus -- which would take control of everything or switch us all off at once, a premise in not a small number of modern techno-thriller films.

Would the effect have been so devastating? Those who embrace intelligent fridges (that tell you when the milk goes sour and order new milk for you) and those who live at the top of a skyscraper would certainly have been affected, as I was in my eighth floor flat in Kinshasa when the power (which also supplied the water pumps) went off.

Some would be locked in or out by their electric security systems (don’t ever believe ‘fail safe’). Over-computerised medical machines might collapse with quite a lot of flat-lining. Quite a number would be turned away at their banks because ‘the lines to Bangalore are down’.
However, much of the world would be less affected. I am based in Entebbe on Lake Victoria, where because the lake level has fallen, we have electric power only every second day. I normally work in small towns in Eastern Congo and Southern Sudan (huge areas, by the way, not small corners of the world) both of which are recovering from war and isolation. These towns have no municipal water supply; if you want electricity you get a generator (with fuel at nearly £1 a litre).

Such areas would quite welcome the Machine, one would suspect (just as my A level literature students in Kenya thought that, given the hardships of rural life, Brave New World was a jolly good thing).

Since globalisation with its return of most complex economic activity to the developed world, even batteries for our radios which used to be made locally are imported, as are light bulbs and bicycles, so to that extent, we are in thrall to the world economy.

Our pastor in Sudan would tell you the same. He needs glasses to read (yes, also a ‘tool’ to access information!) and relies on well-wishers to send them to him from the west or outposts of the west like Nairobi or Johannesburg. The second hand computer that was donated is also languishing since there is no power supply. On the other hand mobile phones have been of immense use and they are slowly penetrating to the smaller towns. One simple example of their value has been a local organisation called Foodnet who send out the prices of commodities in the main city markets every morning, thus helping the rural farmer immensely by cutting out the middle man.

Since globalisation many things that were made here, like batteries, light bulbs and bicycles, along with the skills needed to make them have all disappeared -- along with some of our youth who believe they will do better in the west.

It’s not a rural idyll though. There is the issue of fuel which is imported, over long routes from the Middle East. The mobile phone has to be charged, the operating theatre needs air-conditioning, the newspaper needs to be printed so the generator needs fuel. Solar power has not lived up to its promise; it has never become cheap enough for ordinary people to use. The latest wind-up/solar radio, beloved of aid workers, costs 8 times as much as the little Chinese battery radios you can buy anywhere.

Then there is medicine. The internationals are trying to stop the local factories making generics. My own blood pressure tablets can cost ten times more if I can’t get generics. For people with AIDS the price difference is simply life or death.

In tropical Africa outdoor activity is as common as indoor activity. The open veranda or the garden is the best place to be in the early morning or evening. Here, we know exactly where our food, water and electricity come from. If the water does go off, we don’t just telephone an office to find out but we go along the water-pipe to the source or the leak, or ask the woman on the bicycle who passed there this morning if anyone is working on the pipe. Since mine is a world where the power does go off without warning and since I can make a very good estimate of my risk, I prepare. I keep extra water in the house, and torches and a lot of batteries. I make hard copies of everything. If my work is bringing in enough money I could have a small generator, or very expensive solar lighting.

Further, I usually have someone around in my house or my compound: a refugee student from a neighbouring war who does my garden for his college fees and so he can have a place with light where he can study in the evening. Another, as a night-guard when I live in the areas where human violence is a greater danger than that from animals, from car accidents or from bad drinking water. Indeed, visitors from the labour-deprived world, comment that I have a cook, implying that I exploit her; I counter that the only difference is that everything my cook does for me is visible, and this includes slaughtering the chicken for lunch. The exact same tasks are done for people in the west, but behind closed doors.

It is difficult to imagine the Machine stopping having quite the same effect on me and my neighbours.

Barry Sesnan, Goma 2002 and Entebbe 2006