Living to Live: The Cost of Virtual life
By Sterling Wanamaker
E.M. Forsters’ short story The Machine Stops portrays a fictional world ruled by “the machine”. “The machine” provides the world’s population with entertainment, food, housing, and duties. First person accounts are frowned upon and questioning “the machine” forbidden. People in the story are living in the most elementary sense; simply existing to exist. Motivation to innovate and explore is squashed.
The protagonist, Vashti, lives in a room devoid of all physical accoutrements. Instead, there are buttons present in the room to summon a warm bath or food. The room provides all necessary items of entertainment and offers the resident to interact with their friends over a sort of video chat. Residents displease of physical interaction and prefer virtual interaction. When reading this part of the short story I immediately thought of smartphones. Vishti’s room is aken to a modern smartphone. Smartphones provide users with all imaginable kinds of entertainment; music, movies, lectures, essays, books, papers, video-chat, etc. The need to interact with another human in order to entertain oneself is diminished. I could see this effect in Vishti’s character. Vishti is horrified of physical human interaction and even more terrified of physically touching another human. In school today I often find myself offering to meet over Zoom versus making the trek to the library to meet with peers to work on projects. While I make this decision solely based on a matter of efficiency as it saves time to meet online versus spending thirty minutes walking to and fro the library, will this decision effect how I feel about human interaction in the future? I do realize that these virtual meetings lack the human element of physical interaction and do believe that virtual meetings might raise lasting social impacts in the future.
Another statement made in The Machine Stops that truly hit home was discussion of how “public gatherings had long since been abandoned”. During the past couple years, the COVID-19 Pandemic has reduced the number of public gatherings in a drastic manner. In the spring of 2020 when the world was supposed to be on fire I remember being isolated with my family and relying heavily on virtual forms of entertainment such as movies and tv shows for entertainment. Instead of interacting with my buddies and hanging out I was watching a lot more TV. In addition, I was reading more books, looking for any form of entertainment really. I felt like I was I was in Vishti’s room. There were lots of options to keep myself entertained as the internet provides practically limitless music, reading, and movies but I felt empty. When Vishti speaks in the short story her words sound empty, lacking emotion. She is living to live. When Vishti finally has to interact with other humans she is terrified, almost disgusted. I remember going to a bar last year and rubbing shoulders with other people. I must admit it almost felt foreign at first, but it felt natural. The long period of separation from crowds during the heat of the pandemic removed a lot of interaction for me with large groups. When finally inserting myself in a crowd it indeed felt awkward and took a couple minutes to get used to again, but I was easily able to overcome this slight level of anxiety. Thus, in the case of Vishti and the other residents of her world I can see how living one’s life entirely in isolation would result in a horror of human interaction. Is this terror of physical interaction the future of humanity? We shall see, I hope not.