E M Forster’s uncannily prescient 1909 story, “The Machine Stops.”

Bob Garfield & Lawrence Weschler

Someday, decades and decades hence, following some sort of terrible ecological collapse, all mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures and throbbing ventilation, each cell containing a single individual, though everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of intermeshed video screens.  Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre.   For this is how the great E. M. Forster’s visionary 1909 story “The Machine Stops” begins, with a son calling out to videoconference with his mother on the other side of the globe, to chat and to complain,

“The Machine is much, but it is not everything.

I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you.

I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”

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