“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. 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. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.” – E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909).
In his farsighted 1909 novella, The Machine Stops (free to read or download at Project Gutenberg), E.M. Forster writes of a future world where people have lost the ability to communicate face to face and are unable to live on the surface of the earth. Each human being lives below ground in a cell while all communication and bodily needs are taken care of by a supreme omnipotent deity known as the Machine. Living on opposite ends of the earth, Kuno frequently argues with his mother Vashti who has long been sedated by technology to the extent that life itself frightens her. Kuno implores his mother to exit her cell and come visit him as he can no longer tolerate talking to her through “blue optic plates”. She is hesitant travel as it would mean she would have to board an airship and risk seeing the land below that she frowns upon, “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark”. When Vashti does eventually take the flight, the sight of the earth gives her no inspiration whatsoever. Even when she flies over Greece with its innumerable majestic islands and peninsula, and its long glorious past, only to murmur “No ideas here” and closes the window blind. An enraged Kuno who is eager to see the stars from the surface of the earth like his ancestors, says to his mother “We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”
Forster’s 1909 novella was a counter-argument to H.G. Wells’ successful 1895 novel, The Time Machine, that painted a bright tech-utopian future (rival fictional binaries signaling roadmaps to the future are a fascinating area to explore, e.g. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World vs George Orwell’s 1984). Forster was a visionary in which he looked around and perceived the seeds of immobility in the inertia-driven Edwardian era of his time which saw the introduction or spread of gramophones, radio, telephones, and mass production. The author took this trend to its logical conclusion, giving us more than an inkling of where the future home was headed – from addiction to digital devices to the fetishization of working from home, among many other trends. All in the midst of the terror of the same that turns today’s cities into generic cities that are filled with Zaras, H&Ms, and Starbucks.
The dystopian story was projected thousands of years into the future, except many of its motifs have crystalized in our contemporary world. Techno-fundamentalism puts us at the mercy of algorithms and automatic processes, as well as producing a fatal compulsion to digital devices that shape the sense of being, civil society, and social movements. A digital gluttony, like in the novella, has blurred human relations, and paralyzed the centrality of thinking.
The ongoing digital revolution requires a human counter-revolution grounded in socio-geographic practices that disciplines the encroaching technology from becoming central to thinking and displacing the human condition and its relationship to the collective good. Techno-fundamentalism is more than the worship of technological use and innovation. It can be as subtle as the belief and hubris that we have the right tools. While methods of capacity building were a feature of past activism, it is now assumed that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the likes are readily available to be harnessed. It removes the once necessary years of preparation, organizing, slow trust building measures, in order to quickly scale up the movement. A Martin Luther King jnr in the twenty-first century would instantly become known internationally, rather than his fame gradually budding after a prolonged duration while the civil rights movement slowly built up and took form.
For techno-fundamentalism to be addressed it needs to be understood in light of what drives it. Belief in the progress fallacy and the technological neutrality myth is harmful as it lends immunity to technology to never or rarely be questioned. Perhaps because it showcases itself to be the norm and empty’s political language of meaning, that it becomes difficult to recognize it as the default mode of thinking. On an individual level, this can be negligible, but a collection of individuals in a digital civil society and social movement will surface larger problems. Oblivious to the global backlash, tech experts are not catching up with the social weariness and “techlash,” and may in fact be emboldened by the pandemic that has given them the upper hand. It is an age when Zoom and video communication tools are being groomed as the new orthodoxy in the evolving models of the world’s political economies.
Thinking against and with techno-fundamentalism requires a return to earth, by staking the weightless and fluid digital order in the solid terrestrial order of consequential political practices, thus making abstractions more palpable. Otherwise, the fleeting digital swarm overwhelms civil society, social movements, and publics with a scourge of shapelessness that subverts voices for a mass of noise and echo-chambers – “no ideas here.”
The above is a short modified extract from my paper, “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The journal article is open access. Also, you might be interested in another short post from the article, What a sideway map of the Mediterranean reveals.
