Weschler & Bob Garfield considerE M Forster’s uncannily prescient 1909 story,“The Machine Stops.”
September 1st, 2021
Lawrence Weschler & Bob Garfield
Someday, decades and decades hence, following some sort of terrible ecological collapse, all mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures and throbbing ventilation, each cell containing a single individual, though everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of intermeshed video screens. Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre. For this is how the great E. M. Forster’s visionary 1909 story “The Machine Stops” begins, with a son calling out to videoconference with his mother on the other side of the globe, to chat and to complain,
“The Machine is much, but it is not everything.
I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you.
I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”
And the tale unfurls from there, a story the implication of whose eerily dismaying anticipations will constitute the launching off point for Weschler’s conversation with Bob Garfield, veteran of both NPR’s “All Things Considered” and ABC-News, and cofounder and for twenty years the cohost of WNYC’s award-winning “On the Media” weekly radio broadcast. He has authored a half dozen books, ranging from his first Waking up Screaming from the American Dream (1997) through his most recent American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals and Ourselves (2020). Soon after leaving WNYC earlier this year, he launched a Booksmart substack subscription site, “The Bully Pulpit,” across which this conversation will broadcast as a coproduction. For more, see https://bobgarfield.net