Lina Maria Giraldo's Blog

In 1909 the Futurist Manifesto was published. The Futurist movement, which discarded the past, celebrated speed, machinery and industry was launched. This is the same year that “The Machine Stops” was published. I realized this because of the idealization of the machinery and the pedestal that was created for it. In the plot, Humans have lost the ability to live on the Earth and they create a world underground were the machine does all for them. You just have to push a button, and things happen. The main character of the history is Kuno, who is rebel and sensitive and Vashti who is very happy and comfortable producing endless ideas. The machine is all for the civilization, it is its future and past. The machine represents their world, which provides everything for them. Civilization even forgets that they created the Machine. They get to the point, where they don’t even know how to repair it.

As I see the plot 100 years after it was written, makes me realize how close we are to romanticizing computers and fully depending on them. How we are forgetting about our land. Thanks to the new devices, we don’t know mathematics anymore. We have lost our sense of location and direction. We depend on technological devices to survive. Even the natural cycle of life and death in humans has been disrupted and made longer than expected. It is a story to make us think twice where we are coming from and where we are heading to. We are isolating ourselves in rooms in front of computers. We tend to use only text messaging and email for communication as they do with videoconferencing. The interpersonal relations are very far from being personal. You see but you can’t touch; you hear but you can’t smell. 

Our world is getting smaller. Almost everything we need to survive can be found through the computer: food, literature, social networks. If you want to do an experiment of living in a room for a year without going outside and just using the computer as a tool, I assure you that you can achieve it. The author was also aware of how the virtual communities made human loose interaction and narrow love.  

Producing ideas is a concept that could be implied in what we want to do right now. We only produce concepts that help us fit in a competitive society. 

 As a conclusion, It’s very important to remember that we came in this world naked. No devices that we can take wit us either.