The Cocoon

[version]

Weird how you this type of technological quaintness is so conducive to nostalgia. It's not so much any identifiable good thing about that time that you yearn for. It's more like a yearning for not now. It's not the presence of past technology but the condition it evokes of the absence of current technology, a yearning for the comfort of simplicity, for innocence, a sort of prelapsarian yearning.

 

[IdleRich]

Actually Borges, prescient fucker that he was, imagined something like this in his 1949 fable "The Aleph" - on the connected man of the future, "I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins.”

Also EM Forster in 1909

The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.

The Machine Stops - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[IdleRich]

As well as Forster predicting globalisation, the Internet, video conferencing and other aspects of 21st-century reality, Will Gompertz, writing on the BBC website on 30 May 2020, observed, "'The Machine Stops' is not simply prescient; it is a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breathtakingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020."

 

[woops]

Also EM Forster in 1909

The Machine Stops - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

worth a read it's not long

 

[version]

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