The Machine Stops

Yo, so this is basically our reality. Except (for now) we carry the machine (i.e. laptop) around a little bit. But there really is no point to this carrying around and I presume we'll stop doing that soon and just sit. But for now:
- I carry my laptop to work, where I then sit (or stand) and stare and peck at it for 9 hours.
- I carry it home, where I lounge and stare at it.
- I order my food from it.
- I get my jobs from it.
- I learn lots of things from it.
- I talk to my family and friends through it.
- I reminisce with it.
- I plan my life in it.
- I'm sitting and staring and pecking at it right now, for the ten gazillion millionth hour I seem to have done this in my waking life.
If there isn't something totally unnatural and unholy with this way of living - yeesh.

Anyway, this is a short story written before sci-fi Officially Began; but it's basically the ancestor to so many other stories which confront the anxiety of becoming big fleshy extensions to our screens. (The best of which, in my mind, is still M.T. Anderson's Feed.) People live underground, in pleasantly lit rooms surrounded by pleasant screens and buttons which feed them, inform them, and cater to their animal and spiritual needs. People are mostly preoccupied with “ideas” - making new ones, interpreting old ones - and one is immediately reminded of the great tides of roiling indignitude on Twitter in the Neverending Social Justice War, or the endless thinkpieces on Slate and Vox and AV Club about what last night's episode of fictional entertainment Means, in some faux philosophical sense. These underdwellers are also made incredibly anxious by “direct experience”, find the natural world ugly and boring, and have become hyper-specialized in their technological understanding: no one quite knows how the whole Machine works.

Hmmm.

So this is basically us, right now. The story follows an elderly lady whose son (the usual hero protagonist type) is a drone trying to break free of his dystopian shackles. She is horrified - as anyone with an older mom can imagine. He is a back-to-nature type who manages to visit the surface by clambering through a bunch of tunnels. He describes a moment (and I paraphrase) when all of his 1000 friends/followers and all his Internet memes are rendered small by his communion with nature: his gazing at some boring, ugly English hills. I was reminded of a similar feeling I had on a camping trip once: suddenly my computer - great source of joy and comfort and fascinating that it is - great holder of great minds like Turing and von Neumann - seemed small and stupid in comparison to, say, the food chain, or natural selection. Which means... I guess... we should all be biologists? And just marvel at the abundance of life on this planet, rather than having screens interpret them for us and being “passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle” (as Guy Debord would say)? I realize the irony of pecking all this into my screen! I realize, with horror, the rarity that “direct experience” has indeed become! Gaaaarghhhh.