(2023) Culture Industry [dot] Club Computers, monitors, split-flap display, projection, receipt printers, dot matrix printer, custom software. Dimensions variable Commissioned by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin
Above: A museum-goer interacting with the Blessed is the Machine installation.
Above: A museum-goer interacting with the Blessed is the Machine installation.
In 1909, E.M. Forster, the famed British author, wrote the only piece of science-fiction he would ever write—a novella titled The Machine Stops, which was published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. Forster’s story anticipated most of the technological underpinnings of our society today—the Internet, telepresence (e.g., Zoom or FaceTime), virtual reality, augmented reality, and streaming music and video. But far from a technological utopia, Forster’s story was a warning.
Above: E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” was first published in the November 1909 issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Review
In that future in which “The Machine Stops” takes place, humans have become a subterranean species, living separately in small honey-comb-like cells united “only by The Machine, a gigantic technological network that supplies all the citizens’ needs.” [1]
“In the world of the Machine human beings live isolated in the confined and protective space of small subterranean rooms, refusing all contact with the external world because they prefer the simulation of experience to experience itself. Little more than simulacra themselves, they are fulfilled in a pseudoreality made up of voices, sounds and evanescent images, abstract sensations that can be evoked by pressing a few buttons. Feeble and colorless, unaware of their unnatural condition because completely forgetful of their true human dimension, Forster's creatures move in a hypertechnological world which electronic devices and the advent of virtual reality make today alarmingly possible.” [2]
Citizens of this dystopian world-state see themselves not as living in a dystopia but, instead, as members of a technologically advanced society. Quantification and rationalization of everything, even human contact, is essential to their “cultural orthodoxy” of appearing to be “efficient and advanced.”[3] Sound familiar? This obsession with optimization extends to the intellectual life of the citizenry, who “have exchanged imagination for ideas,” having reduced “ideas to empirical data” and making their function one of “social utility.”[4] Indeed, being deemed “unmechanical” is a sin of sorts, punishable by “Homelessness,” being cast out to the Earth’s surface, which is, in Forster’s imagined future, completely uninhabitable.
Their commitment to rational mechanization is matched only by their fervent quasi-religious devotion to The Machine, the user’s manual to which—The Book—is seen as a bible of sorts. “Blessed is The Machine,” they tell one another.
Above: A still from the 1966 adaptation of “The Machine Stops,” directed by Philip Saville, which aired on the British TV Series Out of the Unknown
The title of Forster’s story is a bit of a spoiler for how things turn out for those folks in the world of The Machine. And it’s… not great.
The faith the citizen’s of Forster’s world-state have in The Machine—a faith derived from their reliance on it to provide everything they need, which in turn produces more faith, which in turn produces a stronger reliance, and so on—should not sound unfamiliar. Today, from venture capitalists to cash-strapped non-profits, it seems as though the church of computation has recruited devotees from nearly every domain of society.
But there have been some very strange—and very dangerous—consequences that have emerged from our society’s own cycle of faith in, and subsequent reliance on, computing. “It’s creating a world that privileges machine-legibility over human-legibility; a world where an entry someone occupies in a company’s database is considered more real than that person’s lived experience.”[5] And this is precisely was Forster was suggesting would happen, that people experience a simulation of everything instead of the thing itself. Indeed, a mantra of The Machine’s most devoted acolytes is “Beware of first-hand ideas.”
If we are not careful, we will soon live in a world that functions in a way that is completely incomprehensible to people but perfectly suited to stochastic parrots. We will be completely clueless about why certain things are happening to us, why we’ve been classified in particular ways, allowed or disallowed certain social privileges, criminalized, or potentially even killed.[6]
In a way quite different than the experience of the characters in Forster’s story, our own Machine has begun to stop. Everywhere we see things coming apart. Major law firms, for example, which are working on cases involving real peoples’ personal bodily injuries, have used ChatGPT to help them file briefs that end up filled with fabricated cases and references to non-existent precedents. Meanwhile, hailed as advancements in efficiency and innovation, chatbots that replaced human employees at crisis centers and helplines have delivered “harmful” responses and even driven some actual people to suicide. Life is becoming just like Kafka’s story, The Trial, in which “a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.” [7]
In Blessed is The Machine, we try to make material the experience of being datafied and constantly subject to predictive personalization under the guise of convenience, efficiency, and innovation. Indeed, as we begin to rely more and more on computational systems, one’s direct experience of everyday life becomes less real than the inferences made by the computational systems that constantly surveil us.