"Whirlpools of discourse"

E.M. Forster saw it coming. In 1909.

Last week, I read something that made me think of The Machine Stops, a short story published in 1909. And it gave me a little surge of vertigo.

This was the something that inspired the moment.

“Activity on the platform is now responding to other activity on the platform, rather than pointing out to the world,” noted Kevin Munger.

I comment. You comment. He comments. She comments. I comment. You comment… “After a few trips round the whirlpool, it’s all noise.”

I’m sure you recognize the phenomenon. This may look like people exchanging ideas, but it’s so devoid of observations from outside the feedback loop that it becomes sterile, unfruitful. Noise. Yet easily capable of dragging more and more people in.

Even by noting their existence, we contribute to them, feeding them, making them stronger, as Tom Stafford notes.

Of course, I have now contributed, too. These “whirlpools of discourse” really are insidious.

But what I find gobsmacking — what made me a little dizzy — is that this very modern phenomenon is the centrepiece of The Machine Stops. And as I said, The Machine Stops was published more than a century ago.

To put that in context, Marconi’s version of radio — which only sent messages by Morse code — had been in practical use for less than a decade when Forster wrote The Machine Stops. The wireless transmission of voices by radio had been achieved three years earlier but was scarcely in use anywhere, while the sending of voices and images remained firmly in the province of what later generations would call “science fiction.” That was the state of technology when Forster — decidedly not a science fiction writer — wrote The Machine Stops.

Image by Gemini, just to be extra-creepy.

Set in an undefined distant future, we humans live in subterranean, sound-proof, hexagonal cells. But this isn’t punishment. It’s paradise. The cells are part of a vast, tightly interconnected, globe-spanning, spectacularly efficient and technologically advanced society — “the machine” — which takes care of every need and desire. The machine provides precisely the heat and light you want precisely when you want it. Food. Entertainment. Press a button and whatever you desire is yours. The machine provides all.

That includes human connection. Every cell is connected to every other cell in the world by speaking tubes, with bells that announce the receipt of new messages. The centrepiece of each cell is a device Forster calls a “plate,” or a “cinematophote.” We would call it a “screen.” It can instantly connect to any other device in the world. People use these screens to watch lectures about ideas and share their own ideas in lectures. There are no gatekeepers in this intellectual paradise.

With every itch scratched, people cease to leave their apartments. Indeed, to leave one’s cell, to walk outside, to meet and physically touch others, is considered low and vulgar. What every respectable person instead pursues is the endless exchange of “ideas.” Every day. For life. These ideas are not drawn from experience and observation of the world. That would require people to go outside and “touch grass,” to use an anachronism it’s impossible not to mutter while reading The Machine Stops. Instead, ideas are generated by ideas, lectures by lectures, so thinking has become profoundly detached from reality — which is considered the height of sophistication because, remember, reality is vulgar.

Is that starting to sound just a little like a “whirlpool of discourse”?

In the following passage from The Machine Stops, “Vashti” is the mother of the protagonist, a women serene in her cell, who spends all her days collecting and creating “ideas.” In this passage, she is about to deliver a lecture on Australian music.

See if you don’t experience some slight, niggling, personal recognition.

And if it gives you ideas, please do schedule a lecture on your cinematophote.

For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?

To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one — that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

…

Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered. So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors, and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject.

“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepti-cism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” — his voice rose — “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation ‘ seraphically free from taint of personality,’ which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”

Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men — a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored, and that the abolition of respirators was a positive gain. It was even suggested that air-ships should be abolished too. This was not done, because air-ships had somehow worked themselves into the Machine’s system. But year by year they were used less, and mentioned less by thoughtful men.