In 1909, a thirty-year-old English novelist named E. M. Forster published a long short story called The Machine Stops. He set it in an unspecified future. The premise: humanity had abandoned the surface of the earth and lived entirely underground, each person alone in a small hexagonal cell. They communicated only through a device Forster called the round plate, a disk of dark glass that glowed with a faint blue light and showed the speaker's face. Through the round plate one could give a public lecture to thousands of friends one had never met in person. The Machine fed and clothed and housed them. It was, the worshippers said, omnipotent, eternal, and blessed.

Forster wrote it as a counterblast. Four years earlier, H. G. Wells had published A Modern Utopia, a vision of a future world unified by railways and rational government and machine-mediated abundance. Wells thought the machines would liberate humanity. Forster thought they would isolate it. The Oxford and Cambridge Review printed his answer in November 1909.

The protagonist, a woman named Vashti, lives in her cell on one side of the earth and speaks every day to her son Kuno on the other side. Forster has her dressing for a ten-minute lecture she will deliver from her bed on Music during the Australian Period to thousands of friends she has never met. Halfway through the story the Machine begins to break. The lights flicker. The piped air thins. Her thousands of friends cannot be reached. At the end she and her son die in each other's arms in a corridor she has not walked since childhood, the Machine silent at last.

The first iPhone shipped on the twenty-ninth of June, 2007. The first global lockdown began in March 2020. The first video lecture you sat through was probably last Tuesday.

A novelist in November 1909, working at his desk in Weybridge, Surrey, watched a hundred and seventeen years coming toward him through the round plate.

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