I’ve been buying books for a while and whilst this is always a good thing, I thought that it would be enjoyable, and useful, to revisit or to read for the first time, some of the classic novels and books that are made available on the free ebook site like Standard Books or Project Gutenberg.
Recently I downloaded an ebook of short fiction by E. M. Forster with the intent to read The Machine Stops. Which I did in very short time.
Given this was published in 1909, and despite its failure to see some of the inventions that followed its publication over the decades, it is eerily prescient in its presentation of a dystopian vision of being run by “the machine”. When you consider the current oligarchy, the surveillance capitalism, and the concentration of power of the everyday lives of billions exerted by a handful of individuals with no elected authority or accountability (beyond losing a few dollars on the share) it is food for thought.
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 firsthand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.
“Offload your thinking for the machine to do, and free your mind to think other things.”
Those that do end up not thinking anything.