In case you missed it, an Internet failure has “crippled” most of the Middle East and North Africa. Two undersea data cables have been accidentally cut, causing “severe problems” from Egypt to India. While nobody is yet speculating officially, the economic ramifications could total into the trillions of dollars.
Will this lead to mass hysteria? The end of the world (or at least the Metaverse) as we know it? Armageddon? Maybe not, because this has been a relatively isolated event. But, what if there were a more systemic problem? What havoc would that cause? Some insights can be gleaned from a 100-year-old prophesy, embodied in the short story “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.
But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended.
Sound familiar? The warning bell has tolled this week.
While we could delve into the apocalypse that an Internet failure would bring about in our modern world, the lessons of “The Machine Stops” are much more profound than that and are so very germane to our lives today that the story is almost eerie.
How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!
Members of Generation Y can scarcely remember a time without the Internet. The most respected and widely covered industries owe themselves entirely to it. The Internet has been the central and key resource upon which our communication, our education, our economy, our everyday lives have been molded for the past 10-15 years. But, have we become too dependent on the Internet?
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking in decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
We collectively spend entirely too much time and effort on how the Internet will evolve, what the Internet will become, what more the Internet can do for us. (I do not exclude myself from this statement, as evidenced by my other postings.) We have fallen victim to the Information Age. With the flood of information, we’ve mostly stopped thinking for ourselves, and reverted to simply reading and recounting the interpretations of others.
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 first- hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” – his voice rose – “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”
The course that we are following now is one of ever-increasing dependence on all things Internet strips us of our very humanity. Of course, we could all remember that there once was life without the Internet. People survived, and even managed to thrive before this invention managed to pervade our very souls. We can learn again to ignore the constant flood of emails, to turn off the computer, to leave the cell phone at home. We could even discover the rewards of spending more time on our first life and less time on Second Life.
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? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was 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 paralysed 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. Oh, I have no remedy – or, at least, only one – to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.
