역병의 시대에 읽는 E. M.포스터의「기계가 멈추다」

While E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” has long been read as an expression of liberal humanist technophobia, it has gained extraordinary topical significance in the aftermath of the global pandemic. Connected to a worldwide telecommunication network, people in Forster’s story shun physical contact and shy away from intimacy in general. They rarely leave their rooms, spending most of their time communicating with others online. The Machine that provides housing, food, clothing, and entertainment to humans has become their master and substituted God. Illustrating human life completely subordinated to machines, “The Machine Stops” explores what implications the loss of corporeality may have for humanity, nature, and the machine. Such disembodiment further resonates with the production and dissemination of knowledge as mere “ideas.” People function as information nodes within a “mega algorithm,” and scholarly work becomes meaningless circulation of ideas; consequently, truth no longer holds value. “The Machine Stops” thereby urges readers to question the major premises of technological utopianism.