Entertainment & Arts

The Machine Stops: Will Gompertz reviews EM Forster's work ★★★★★

Will GompertzArts editor@WillGompertzBBCon Twitter

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My wife was listening to a radio programme the other day and heard a man talking about artificial intelligence. He mentioned a science fiction novella by EM Forster called The Machine Stops, published in 1909. He said it was remarkably prescient. The missus hadn't heard of it, and nor had I. Frankly, we didn't have Forster down as a sci-fi guy, more Merchant Ivory films starring Helena Bonham Carter and elegant Edwardian dresses.

We ordered a copy (you can read it for free online).

OMG! as Forster would not have said.

The Machine Stops is not simply prescient; it is a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breath-takingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020.

If it had been written today it would be excellent, that it was written over a century ago is astonishing.

Image copyrightWLC PUBLISHING

Image captionThe Machine Stops was republished in 2013, more than a century after it first came out, reflecting its enduring quality

The short story is set in what must have seemed a futuristic world to Forster but won't to you. People live alone in identikit homes (globalisation) where they choose to isolate (his word), send messages by pneumatic post (a proto email or WhatsApp), and chat online via a video interface uncannily similar to Zoom or Skype.

"The clumsy system of public gatherings had long since been abandoned", along with touching strangers ("the custom had become obsolete"), now considered verboten in this new civilisation in which humans live in underground cells with an Alexa-like computer catering to their every whim.

If it already sounds spookily close for comfort, you won't be reassured to know that members of this detached society know thousands of people via machine-controlled social networks that encourage users to receive and impart second-hand ideas.

"In certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously" writes the visionary author drily, before adding later:

"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 into decadence, and progress had come to mean progress of the machine."

Image copyrightSHUTTERSTOCK

Image captionEM Forster started writing fiction at King's College Cambridge, where he first studied the Classics, and then History (1897-1901)

It's not lost on me that you are reading this on the internet on a man-made device over which we just about still believe we have mastery. Not for long according to Forster's story, nor, I suspect, some of the boffins behind AI today.

We are in Frankenstein's monster territory, another literary warning we probably shouldn't ignore.

Forster has no similar scary physical manifestation of science going wrong in The Machine Stops (the title says it all), but that brings it even closer to home. The tale's two protagonists, Vashti and her son Kuno, are normal people, just like you or me. She lives in the southern hemisphere, he lives in the north.

Kuno wants his mother to visit. She isn't keen.

"But I can see you!" she exclaimed. "What more do you want?"

"I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

"Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked. "You mustn't say anything against the Machine."

Image captionYvonne Mitchell played the role of the mother Vashti in this 1966 television adaptation of The Machine Stops, as part of a science fiction series called Out of the Unknown

Image captionMichael Gothard acted as her son, Kuno, in the same television adaptation

She prefers social distancing and giving her online lecture on Music During the Australian Period to an unseen armchair audience who lap-up abstract historical information that has absolutely no relevance to their actual subterranean lives beyond being an illusory distraction from their hollowed-out existence (not dissimilar to lectures under lockdown, maybe).

I won't say any more about what happens - it is a very short story that can be read in under an hour - other than to mention it is basically a machine-age take on Plato's The Allegory of the Cave.

Image copyrightTRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Image captionIn Plato's Cave are two groups of philosophers who are separated by a wall, but animated in discussion

The Machine (or internet for us) is the airless, sunless, solitary cave in which we exist, the information it imparts the shadows on the wall.

EM Forster published the story between A Room with a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910), two novels in which he explores similar philosophical themes around inner and outer worlds, truth and pretence.

The Machine Stops first appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in the same year as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his furious Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro newspaper.

The Italian poet was arguing for the very opposite to Forster's prophetic parable.

Marinetti embraced the machine, arguing that a speeding car was far more beautiful than an ancient Greek sculpture. The past was a dead weight that needed destroying to make way for the future.

Image copyrightALAMY

Image captionThe Oscar-winning film A Room with a View, starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helena Bonham Carter was adapted from EM Forster's novel, which, like The Machine Stops, explored concepts of reality and pretence

Image copyrightGETTY/SOTHEBY'S

Image captionAlthough Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto was also published in 1909, he celebrated machinery as a force for good -- unlike Forster

He would have liked Vashti, who, when travelling by airship to see Kuno, pulled down her blind over Greece because that was no place to find ideas - an ironic joke by Forster given the idea for his story came from Plato's Athens.

That's about it for jokes in a novella where there really is no such thing as community, or direct experience, and it is impossible to get away from the constant hum of the machine without asking the Central Committee for an Egression-permit to go outside. At which point you strap on a respirator and take your chances in the real world.

As the man on the radio said, it's prescient. And very, very good.

Recent reviews by Will Gompertz

• Who's Joe Rogan and is his podcast really worth $100m? ★★★☆☆
• Revelations about Rembrandt's masterpiece captured on camera ★★★★★
• Self-taught artist gets top prize: A worthy winner? ★★★☆☆

Follow Will Gompertz on Twitter

More On Cops And Less On Housing: Here’s How Minneapolis Spends Its Money

"While Black people in Minneapolis have been reduced to bottom caste status, white communities have thrived.”

Lam Thuy VoBuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on May 29, 2020,

Kerem Yucel / Getty ImagesA police officer aims a projectile weapon at protesters in Minneapolis.

The death of George Floyd has put the Minneapolis police force in the global spotlight and led to an officer being charged with his murder. There are deep underlying tensions in the way the city polices its residents; Minneapolis spends a much larger share of its budget on policing than many other large US cities do, with services like health and community development taking a backseat to salaries for law enforcement.

The city spent more than one-third of its discretionary budget on policing in 2017, according to a study published by Popular Democracy. That’s a larger share than all but 2 of the 10 cities studied in the report. For every dollar Minneapolis spent on police that year, it spent just three cents on youth training and development, the authors found.
Here’s how much each of the 10 cities devoted to police from their general funds — the part of a city’s overall budget that leaders can spend at their discretion.

Those priorities are still in place today. For 2020, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced a budget that would allocate $193 million to the city’s police department. This is 60% more than the $120 million devoted to the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development Department, which is responsible for things like affordable housing and job training for residents making low incomes.

Here’s where police spending sat within the overall 2020 Minneapolis budget, which includes both its general fund and mandatory spending.

In return for all that spending, Minneapolis residents get a police department that paid out $9.3 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits in a recent three-year stretch — millions more than was spent during a similar period in Baltimore, a city roughly 40% larger. In 2014, the ACLU reprimanded the department for over-policing black people, reporting that they were 11 and a half times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people were. And the city has historically failed to remove and discipline bad police officers. Derek Chauvin, the officer who was charged with murder today, previously had 17 complaints filed against him, 16 of which resulted in no disciplinary action.

Residents have been very vocal about spending on the police force taking priority over other programs, and that conflict was particularly acute in negotiations for this year’s budget. City leaders were successfully pressured to more than double the number of police hires, with the increased spending to be paid for with a property tax hike. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported the hike will be “felt most acutely in less wealthy pockets of the city, where property taxes are expected to rise more than 20% next year.”

More money was also allocated to violence prevention programs, but residents expressed fury at the boost in police spending. “If policing was going to help our problem, it would have happened by now,” Mysnikol Miller told the Star Tribune. “We have had plenty of police for plenty of years, and it’s not improving anything.”

Local activists interrupted a press conference where Frey discussed the boost in police spending, MinnPost reported. “Creating more cadets brings more police officers on the streets, more harm into our communities, less investment in community-led violence prevention,” said Sheila Nezhad of Reclaim the Block.

Other activists point out that combating crime requires investment into the community itself. A recent study of census data ranked the Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington metropolitan area as the fourth-worst place in the country for black people to live. The median income of black residents was just 43.4% of that of white residents (nationally, that number is about 61%), and homeownership among black people was 25.4% versus 75.3% for white residents (on a national level, that's 44% versus 73%).

“Policing is a byproduct of larger, more insidious, but often less visible systems. [...] We know that when we see aggressive policing practices — behind it are the most brutal forms of economic and social inequality," wrote Yeshimabeit Milner, the executive director of Data for Black Lives, a coalition of researchers and activists.

“While Black people in Minneapolis have been reduced to bottom caste status, white communities have thrived.”

Lam Thuy Vo is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

The Protests Against George Floyd's Death Make Some People Uncomfortable. That's The Point.

As responses to the protests over George Floyd’s death come in, it’s clear that only some people are allowed to agitate in public without any consequences.

Scaachi KoulBuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on May 29, 2020, at 6:19 p.m. ET

Getty Images, AP / Jim Mone

Left: Protesters confront police at the Michigan House of Representatives chamber after protesting for the reopening of businesses in Lansing, Michigan, April 30. Right: A protester stands face-to-face with a Minnesota state trooper on May 29 after another night of demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody Monday in Minneapolis.

Consider the following questions a kind of Myers-Briggs personality test for how you feel about protests. What bothers you more: images of armed white protesters storming the Michigan State Capitol and screaming at police in late April, demanding the state reopen so they can exercise their rights to possibly contract the coronavirus, or images of demonstrators setting buildings on fire in Minneapolis while protesting the death of a black man named George Floyd, who died while in police custody?

The Michigan protesters were armed with assault rifles and bulletproof vests; no national guard was dispatched there. Meanwhile, the Minneapolis protesters were demanding criminal charges for Derek Chauvin, the police officer who crushed Floyd’s neck with his knee for eight minutes as Floyd gasped for air, the same officer who had 17 complaints against him throughout his career, all closed without disciplinary measures, except one. (Chauvin was finally arrested and charged with murder this morning.)

This is a unique time for protest in America. Black Americans are still demanding that their government and police forces do something about police brutality against black people and the general spate of violence against unarmed black people. (Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by a retired police officer and his son in Georgia in January, and the perpetrators have only now been arrested and charged with murder after video leaked.) But black Americans are also grappling with a pandemic that’s disproportionately affecting them. And yet, despite this outsize risk, many black people still took to the streets across the country to protest the killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a black EMT worker who was shot by police in her own home in Kentucky.

The police killings and the coronavirus’s impact are galling enough, but it’s only made worse by the dialogue around the protests and riots happening now. “If you loot riot and destroy you lose all moral credibility, in my eyes, to protest injustice,” tweeted conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Wednesday. “Our country allows for peaceful protests, but there is no reason for violence,” first lady Melania Trump tweeted today.

On Twitter, Tracy Clayton offered up a long list of why white people riot, including their sports team winning, their sports team losing, wanting dolls, hating disco, and being mad that black people wanted to go to school. Meanwhile the president tweeted early this morning that looters should be shot, invoking a phrase first used by Walter Headley, a Miami police chief from the late ’60s who used violent tactics against black protesters in Miami at the time. (Trump has since tweeted some version of a correction.) There’s a fallacy already being presented, as if people are looting instead of attempting peaceful protests. But what’s happening in Minneapolis, Louisville, Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and other parts of the country is actually a last resort.

The priorities in American life are wildly disordered. First comes white health and safety. Then comes white property and goods. Then white economy. Then white comfort. The safety of black and brown bodies, the right to not be killed by the police when you’re not a threat, the right to not be pepper-sprayed or teargassed while a respiratory disease is already ripping through your community at an alarming rate, is miles behind white comfort.

What did the president call the armed Michigan protesters? “Very good people.” What did he call the Minnesotan protesters, demanding justice for Floyd? “THUGS.”

If you’re exhausted, it’s because you’re paying attention. This isn’t the first or the last time we’ll debate what the right way for black and brown people to protest is. It’s already been made clear that peaceful protests draw an incredible amount of ire too — in 2016, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest deaths like Floyd’s. At an Indianapolis Colts game in 2017, Vice President Mike Pence stormed out of the game soon after arriving because some of the players kneeled during the national anthem; in this case, this peaceful protest was still too much for the government to tolerate. Protesting peacefully — without disturbing property and buildings or hurting anyone — has still become a major touchstone of the American culture wars anyway. Years later, Kaepernick is still effectively shut out from the NFL.

Kerem Yucel / Getty Images

Protesters throw objects into a fire outside a Target store near the Third Police Precinct station in Minneapolis during a demonstration over the death of George Floyd, May 28.

If kneeling is too disruptive for white comfort, then how can any black person make clear their fury at a broken system and a country that still doesn’t care about their lives? If a black reporter gets arrested on camera when he’s clearly just there doing his job, what hope is there for anyone else who doesn’t have the privilege of CNN backing them when the police arrest them?

If kneeling is too disruptive for white comfort, then how can any black person make clear their fury at a broken system and a country that still doesn’t care about their lives?

No one is advocating that burning down an AutoZone be the first resort of protesters asking for racial justice. Fires and looting are rarely the first resort for anyone. But for all the hand-wringing over destruction at a Target store, there wasn’t nearly as much about Target, a company worth billions, not providing its outsourced employees with appropriate PPE. In fact, their employees were part of a mass “sickout” protest organized for May 1, demanding the company do more to protect their essential workers. And there’s been little accounting for the actual small businesses in the area affected by the rioting, which have likely also been severely affected by COVID shutdowns. Meanwhile, the owners of the restaurant Gandhi Mahal in South Minneapolis posted on Facebook in support of the protests despite their business catching on fire. “Let my building burn,” they wrote. “Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail.”

So what have we learned? Not much that we didn’t know before. We already knew that white people getting arrested at a protest will look like a woman being handled respectfully by police sans riot gear, while black demonstrators are faced with police officers wearing riot gear and gas masks, and brandishing weapons.

And it’s no mistake that white people protesting with guns over the right to reopen have been received differently by the federal government and conservative talking heads — people who are routinely unable to recognize the privilege they have when dealing with police — than when black people protest for the right to live. The comfort of white people has always come before the safety and survival of black people. As New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones explained in a Twitter thread, “The fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans.” Martin Luther King Jr. himself once said: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” These protests are not coming out of a vacuum. Rather, it’s more of the same: a history of black humanity being put last, always. ●

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  Scaachi Koul is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

  Contact Scaachi Koul at scaachi.koul@buzzfeed.com.

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