Communicating Dystopia: A Critical Essay on E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

In E.M. Forster’s day, our great-grandparents’ generation complained that the advent of telephones and automobiles had strangled the art of letter-writing among their children’s generation. The personal letter, which took days if not weeks to reach its destination via postal service, had kept distant family members in touch with one another’s news and lives. But as car ownership became mainstream, driving to see relatives in the next town for a few weekend hours became simple and commonplace, and the need for letter-writing waned. As the telephone reached into the homes of nearly the entire national population, a person need not even spend hours driving to the next town or state to speak with loved ones: within a few seconds, they could be connected by wire in their own homes. Letter-writing ceased being necessary at all. Today, though, parents are distressed by the onset of social media sites and texting that has become so critical to the American teenager, and pop media has made much of this change in communication culture. In his The Machine Stops, though, Forster seems to have presaged much of our present-day technology in 1909. In his science-fiction future, human use of technology has evolved to a place where it has actually devolved the human species into a weak-bodied and subterranean creature completely dependent upon technology for its most basic needs. If we take Vashti to be Forster’s allegorical human, we shall see how the Forster’s dystopia is created entirely by choices made by Vashti and her peers. While our use of technology has become pervasive, it has not become the dystopia that Forster anticipated.

Vashti lives in solipsis and near isolation when we meet her. She resides in a windowless room which is shaped “like the cell of a bee” (Forster 1). Pneumatic and electrical buttons seem to surround the single chair, which sits centered in the small room, and the ubiquitous Machine delivers her every need—food, air, bed, and electronic communication. Vashti lives her days there listening to the piped-in music of her choosing and occasionally delivering lectures on that music through a steam-punk version of Skype. She is a scholar, a vocation “Forster disdains […] as only 'a serious form of gossip'” (March-Russell 60). For Forster, Vashti seems to be the worst possible outcome for human potential.

As the story opens, her son Kuno has requested to speak with her on the Skype-like contraption, and we have the impression he has made this request several times. Vashti has deliberately dismissed his previous attempts at communication, choosing instead the influx of experience she has control over—her lectures and her music. She admonishes Kuno for “dawdling” and not sending his message in a less intrusive“pneumatic post”(Forster 2); she expects that her time will be solely spent in pursuit of her studies, with no demands from anyone else for immediate attention. Vashti, after initially refusing, agrees to her son’s request for a personal visit, and when she arrives after a 2-day air-ship flight, Vashti stays just long enough to hear Kuno’s retelling of a trip to the surface, then returns to her cell. She avoids outside experiences, claiming, “I get no ideas [from them]”(Forster 3). Repeatedly throughout the piece, she chooses experiences which keep her isolated from others and which reinforce her own Machine-oriented conceptions of the world. For Forster, “technological progress lead[s] toward increased isolation”(Seabury 66), and toward this tendency in her and her ilk which has created the homogenized dystopia Forster describes.

In the reality of 2013, we do rely on technology for a great deal, and more important to this discussion, we have communication technologies that Forster could not have foreseen—namely, smart phones and the use of the  Internet. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have become global mass media sites where not only do professionals communicate with the world, but any individual with connection can reach any number of others. Contrary to Forster’s isolated and homogenous cells in a great hive community, David Holmes suggests in his book Communication Theory that contemporary Internet users have not become victims of “the presumed homogenizing function of the media,” but are “in fact differentiated and heterogenous”(Holmes 23). In the digital age, once-isolated pockets of cultural identity are now able to connect to reinforce that identity which might have otherwise faded, and those pockets of unique culture are also now easily accessed and experienced by others around the world via web presence. Perhaps because Forster could not imagine our wireless technologies, he could not have guessed that we take our little machines and their buttons along with us, out into the world, as an accessory to our experiences, rather than as the sole creator of them.

We do not, of course, live in a technological utopia. Issues of cyber-bullying and sexting have been in the news recently. New York politician Andrew Weiner sent sexual pictures of himself via Twitter to a college student in Washington state; the pictures made it into the news, and Weiner resigned from the US House of Representatives in 2011 after more than a decade of service. Earlier this year, he made a run for the office of Mayor of New York City, and once again sexual pictures he’d taken of himself and tweeted to a young woman came out, costing him the race. In October of this year, two Miami teenagers were arrested and charged for cyber-bullying after a third girl committed suicide following two months of harrassment (New York Times A20). Prior to this incident, college freshman Tyler Clementi lept to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his dorm roommate set up a web cam in their room and broadcast a real-time video to his friends of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another young man. Through these incidents we find not isolation and lack of intimacy as Forster depicted, but rather the impetus to act cruelly or inappropriately within the anonymity that internet communication often provides.

In that sense, we might say that the internet offers a virtual reality where we might be tempted to imagine we can engage in activities that will not incur the same repercussions they would in real time. The technology can offer the opportunity to create societal change and the intense personal illusion of being, so to speak, untouchable and beyond the reach of law and societal norms. However, as each of these cases shows, inappropriate activity online can and does lead to real world consequences and problems. In order to fend off a different kind of dystopia than Forster’s, we must look toward creating a web culture that encourages the kind of healing and spiritual development an individual can find when one“dismantle[s one’s] own [virtual] reality illusion in order to arrive at the real reality, which is consciousness”(Chopra 181, ital. original). In other words, we must remember that, despite the virtual nature of some internet experiences, real people are on the other side of the internet illusion, and as such they are affected by our actions and words.

In The Machine Stops, Forster depicts a technological and dystopian future where Vashti serves as an allegorical everyman. Unlike her son Kuno who longs to live on the surface away from the realm of the Machine, Vashti accepts the comfort, isolation and solipsistic experience created by the Machine at the expense of her humanity. While we live in a technological age where we are somewhat dependent upon our machines, we have not devolved into the weakened creatures Forster suggests, nor do we remain isolated as a result of our communication technologies. In fact, today’s parents are concerned that teenagers are a bit too connected through their smart phones and the internet. And they may have a point: how lost would we be if our machines stopped?

Works Cited

Chopra, Deepak. Spiritual solutions: answers to life's greatest challenges. New York: Harmony Books, 2012. Print.

Holmes, David. Communication Theory: media, technology and society. London: SAGE, 2005. Print.

March-Russell, Paul. "'Imagine If You Can': Love, Time And The Impossiblity Of Utopia In E.

M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops'." Critical Survey 17.1 (2005): 56-71. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.

Seabury, Marcia Bundy. "Images Of A Networked Society: E. M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops'." Studies In Short Fiction 34.1 (1997): 61-71. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.