The Machine Stops (1909)
standardebooks.org132 points by xeonmc 3 days ago
132 points by xeonmc 3 days ago
It would seem that Pixar's Wall-E took more than a little inspiration from The Machine Stops. The ending of the original is better, since it acknowledges the universality of decay. The ship in Wall-E, the Axiom (the rough analog to The Machine) is in excellent shape even after 700 years, and long since any living human knew anything about how it works. A rosy picture indeed! But The Machine is wordless, humming, utterly inhuman, and it decays in the end. Interesting that the mechanisms that compose Axiom are all sentient and expressive and individual - a hallmark of Pixar's "anthropomorphize all the things!" approach to story-telling. But the central theme about human dependency on technology is exactly the same.
I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)
Isn't the problem also that each tech level allows a greater population? Without our industrial-scale food production and distribution system, the first thing you'd have to get rid of is 50+% of the people needing to be fed.
That kind of depends. The biggest factor is nitrogen fertilizer. Without the Haber-Bosch process, there is just simply not enough nutrients in all available soil to grow nearly enough crops.
But that process was invented in 1900 and doesn't require any remotely advanced technology. The ancient Romans could have pulled it off with the technology at the time, though probably at much smaller scale.
I guess it depends on whether you want to consider chemistry a technology. The chemistry to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia has obviously always been there, we just didn't discover it until recently. If you told an ancient alchemist how to combine the ingredients under pressure, they could produce fertilizer from air, iron, and acid. Is that knowledge a type of technology?
Excellent idea. I could see a scifi story based on that too.
Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups.
Retrotopia by John Michael Greer has an aspect similar to different technology levels. Except that in the novel they are essentially taxation zones relating to infrastructure. If you want to live in a zone with, say, publicly maintained roads, then you have to pay taxes for it. Otherwise you could live in a zone without them. Same for other public amenities. More details here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/01/01/retrotopia-john-michae... "To maintain autarky, and for practical and philosophical reasons we will turn to in a minute, Lakeland rejects public funding of any technology past 1940, and imposes cultural strictures discouraging much private use of such technology. Even 1940s technology is not necessarily the standard; each county chooses to implement public infrastructure in one of five technological tiers, going back to 1820. The more retro, the lower the taxes. Family farming is apparently the main activity for the population, usually with horses and oxen (petroleum is nearly non-existent and the few motor vehicles run on heavily-taxed biodiesel). Towns and cities have been rebuilt in solid 1940s style; they are powered by modest amounts of central electricity, generated by manure, supplemented by point-source hot-water solar and wind. There is no internet, much less metanet, and no satellite access (portrayed as ubiquitously critical to the outside world’s functioning). Business is conducted at a 1940s level, as is all physical culture. Clothes are throwbacks—made of high quality, long-lasting materials, rather than the disposable “bioplastic” found in the outside world. Economically, Lakeland is somewhere on the continuum to distributism—the Grange is back in action, concentrations of wealth with disproportionate power are forbidden, and associations and other intermediary institutions are ubiquitous. Subsidiarity, rather than concentration, is the rule; banks are individual and tied to the community, for example. Automation is rejected as costing a society more than it provides, if properly accounted. ..."
Alistar Reynolds' _Terminal World_ had something sort of like this (only discussed halfway through the story, of course), where the world had "zones" , each of which supported a maximum precision or resolution... Technology taken from a high precision zone to a lower precision either ran poorly or would lock up entirely. Bonus; the zones were not always contiguous.
It's an exceedingly common theme in sci-fi, but particularly the space opera genre. In any literary universe where humans occupy multiple planets, at least one of those planets is an agrarian society who has renounced all the higher technology that brought them there.
Peter F. Hamilton loves talking about this. Offhand, I can't think of a single one of his books that doesn't at least mention this concept. He really likes to explore the very long-term evolution of the relationship between humans and technology. You get simple low-tech societies governed and protected by the most sophisticated AI it's possible or conceivable to build, lots of backwater planets with no money for technology, idealistic societies that set up a new way of life, farm planets, all sorts.
Look at 'The Dreaming Void' trilogy. It's very explicitly a juxtaposition between high 30th century intergalactic technology and a society living on a planet where electricity simply doesn't work. It's one of my favorites.
One underrated world-building element of Dune is the lack of computers and how things were developed to handle it. I don't remember if its addressed directly in the text, but the whole concept of mentats (they guys whose eyes roll back in their heads when they do math) was to compensate for this. Kind of a "post-Terminator world".
What a great story!
I was introduced to it by The Hugonauts podcast. Have a great audio rendering of it[0]. I went into it not knowing anything about the book or the author and was really surprised to find out it was written over 100 years ago.
[0] https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-...
I first read it decades ago. As time goes on, it has become more relevant.
"The Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair."
I was really struck by the phrase "better thus than not at all", expecially where it appears in the story. It's made an impression on me since.
Whether so intended or not, I like to think it was a response to Angell's The Great Illusion.
Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.
There was a decent BBC Radio 4 adaptation of this in 2016 - no longer available on iPlayer but it’s on YouTube -
Here's a copy of the 2001 BBC adaption from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/e.-m-forster-the-machine-stops
I love when history shows that we have always had the same human ambitions.
The magic of the technology described in the story is where we have always been headed.
There’s something very comforting about a story like this. Humans have always been humans. The names may change but our fears have been our fears, our ambitions have been our ambitions.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
I read this and was left wondering - is this about technology, or civilization?
I think the machine is just other people. And maybe the music has seemed off lately.
As a great story, it can have multiple meanings. I first read it at the start of the pandemic and it felt prescient as a description of what its like when civilization falls apart. People carry on their day to day, at first subtle things stop working, and then big things.
> is this about technology, or civilization?
Or man's relationship to nature?
This is not the first time that this is posted, but it's a great story, and I'll read it again. This made me think, ycombinators hive-memory, it'd be interesting to have this a community-curated collection of links to evergreens like this one.
> "I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me down speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.”
Hi HN waves; Reddit, news aggregators, the 24 hour news cycle. One quote I went looking for, which sticks in my mind, was about novel ideas:
> "Had she had any ideas lately? ... 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."
She's talking of the Orion's Belt constellation[1], which she has never seen because she lives underground in The Machine (city). It stuck with me how quickly she dismisses the idea because it isn't immediately useful. Jony Ive said that once in an interview decades ago, why he had to move to America, because new ideas are weak and need nurturing and the UK culture dismisses them too easily but America supports them. I saw that basic concept just now on HN comment about EU startups, that EU people see startups as too risky and Americans are enthusiastic about them[2]. Orion's Belt ties to so many ideas, the stars as a shared canvas, projection of our own view up onto them, culture-specific constellaitons, the signs of the Zodiac mark the path the Sun takes overhead, different constellations visible in different hemispheres, imagery as dots, imagination filling in missing details, an ancient time when skies were clear and everyone could see them. I see Orion's Belt through Winter here in the UK but maybe there are people in the Southern Hemisphere who don't see it, so I linked to DuckDuckGo below; worse, maybe there are people in cities with light pollution who never see stars or constellations at all?
Social Media notifications:
> "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? Had 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? —say this day month."
The rise of interest in Urban planning and human scale cities:
> “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong."
LLM Stories:
> So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors [access to the surface / outside], 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.
Was it prescient or was it just observing things already happening 100 years ago?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellatio...
> That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.
Americans were much slower to forget, which is why we correctly spurn the metric system for all save technologists and likewise self-fettering minds. Unfortunately, the tech industry exists, for the moment.
" On this bridge, Lorca warns, 'life is not a dream. Beware. And beware. And beware.' And so many think because Then happened, Now isn't. But didn't I mention the ongoing "wow" is happening right now? We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel, starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world, is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be.
Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other's presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories.
Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguanas will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness... " ~Timothy Levitch in “Waking Life”
++upvoted to null the dofus who thinks expressing opinions about the metric system is a crime against humanity
Oh, one needn't. A downvote is an honest cri de coeur, if not an honest signal. And they are in any case more likely because I had the temerity to remind someone he is about to be still standing as the music stops, or likelier still I reminded him all he can find to value within himself merits pity from the generous and contempt from everyone. I only died to get out, for which I never blame people hating me; they must, no coward can ever withstand the acknowledgement of courage.
> But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Now this is the way to live.
I remember reading this after Jaron Lanier recommended it in one of his talks, I think from around 2018-2021, really wonderful short story. So happy to see it on standard ebooks, easily one of my favorite things Ive ever found on hacker news
One of my favorites of all time! I always name this book when someone asks me for sci-fi recommendations. Had a big influence on me when I was young.
This was the first prediction of The Internet. It’s such a great short story too. It’s pretty salient even today.
This is the short story that provided strong thematic inspiration for the movie WALL·E.