This morning we remembered E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. It was first published in 1909! So eerily prescient that we decided that Forster must have had some sort of vision. Everyone lives in individual pods and communicates by, basically, Zoom, though nothing like video technology existed in 1909. And, as now, ‘Technopoly’ (the story’s term, anticipating Neil Postman’s 1992 book of that title) has become a quasi-religion. It does not end well.