E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) built his reputation on novels of manners—delicate comedies of English misunderstanding set in Italy and India and the English countryside—and compressed their entire moral architecture into two words: only connect. He believed that the one task worth a human life was the joining of inner to outer, of person to person across the gulfs that culture and fear erect between them, and that anything which promised to make that joining easy was almost certainly making it impossible. He disliked machinery and distrusted the telephone. Yet in 1909, early in his career, he published "The Machine Stops"—a novella so accurate about the trajectory of networked, screen-mediated, system-dependent life that engineers now cite it as documentation rather than fiction. It describes an all-providing machine, hexagonal cells where isolated individuals live connected to everything and present to nothing, the progressive deskilling of mind and body, the deification