I recently had the honor of reading this extremely prophetic masterpiece - The Machine Stops - by E.M. Forster. The story is about a world where humanity relies on a giant machine to provide its needs. Dare I say, not dissimilar from the screens that provide and run and determine so much of our lives and “needs”.
As I was reading this story my doorbell rang - a package I had ordered on Amazon had arrived (the same day!) and the box read, “Fast delivery is my love language.”
I thought of The Machine and I thought of my own commitment to keeping the machine alive, commenting on the machine, distrusting it, disliking it at times, and still keeping it alive: "Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?” Says the character Kono who is the only one who seems to see the machines flaws.
I don’t want fast delivery to be my love language I thought, I want love to be my love language. Emotion took me over, I want people not boxes to be my love language … and still I open the app and order the next thing I “need” from the machine and the machine makes it so.
Kono says, “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. The Machine develops - but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
We want connection and still we operate in this disconnected ways. We want to know we are enough and beautiful and perfect as we are and still we scroll for ours looking at people who tell us to be more beautiful and smart and succesful all we need to do is take this supplement and buy this glp-1 shot.
If it could work without us, it would let us die.
So what do we do with a machine that is out of our hands, that would let us die if it could? What do we do with a machine that often makes us feel worse about ourselves than better? A machine in which we are the product and our attention, eyes, and scrolling-carpal-tunnel thumbs are the fuel?
How do we stop for long enough to ask, what is the cost of same day shipping? What is the cost of this Chat GPT search? Do I really need 6G, followed by 7G, followed by 8G? How fast is a fast enough search?
It’s scary to ask these questions, to stop participating in the machine, Kono speaks about this fear of unplugging and disconnecting from the machine, the fear that comes when we stop pressing all the buttons we have been trained to press over and over again, “For with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror- silence … silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone. With that silence they burst into tears. They wept for humanity. Their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth: Man, the flower of flesh, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored strength on the constellations… beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the machines that he had woven.”
I think when we enter this world we are receivers, we receive what is given - children are sponges they say, we absorb what is around us… and then, pretty quickly we evolve to taking, we are takers, we don’t just want to receive what is given, we want more. We are trained to want more - it fuels the machine, the machine needs our wanting and consuming and taking (if all the things we consumed were actually meant to fill us, don’t you think you’d be full by now?).
Here’s the thing, I have no remedy, other than asking you to stop for long enough to ask these questions about the Machine, it’s value, it’s harm, and our own role in it. Imploring you to notice if fast delivery is your love language. We weren't meant to live this fast. That's why our bodies push back with anxiety, exhaustion, illness. We were made for slowness, connection, care, nature, laughter, and deep presence. That's where we belong. That's where we can return. In the meantime I will shout out again and again - that as we get closer to our end, we will go back to being sponges, we will go back to receiving - because we will finally remember that nothing we try to take from the world and its inhabitants will ever stop the inevitable. No machine will stop what is coming.
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ps. Another amazing prophetic book from 1920 that maybe can set us free - The Revolt of The Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset. Some notable quotes:
“As they say in the United States: ‘to be different is to be indecent.’ The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.”
“The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who "did not care to give reasons or even to be right", but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ;the reason of unreason.’”
If you love Engaged Liberation, find some medicine and love here, consider buying me a coffee and/or supporting me here for just $2.75 / $3.35 / $5 a month!
I read something recently about how boredom is essential fuel for the creative act. Not boredom in the sense of an endless scroll, but of actual sitting in silence--choosing to sit with having nothing to do. Time to think. I think Instagram is a poison when it isn't used very intentionally and efficiently and sparingly. As for Amazon, as a writer who sells more books there than anywhere else, it's a real conundrum. But we all know what would happen OVERNIGHT if we stopped wanting same-day deliveries, as if that made us fulfilled. Sooner or later, I do think we have to make a choice to disconnect with certain machines that are clearly making this world a sadder place.
breaking up with amazon is way easier than people think. recommend.