Forster’s Machine Stops anticipated Heidegger’s critique of technology in 1909

Evidence

‘I see something like you’ and ‘The imponderable bloom’: E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’, in Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1954), 109–46, this 110–11. Originally published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review (Nov. 1909). — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1950

Categorization

• XREF: Connects proto-existentialist technological dread to early science fiction; ‘The Machine Stops’ as a literary antecedent. — connects to: Heidegger characterized technology’s danger as ontological rather than merely catastrophic — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 584; Forster’s 1909 story presciently predicted that mediated communication loses embodied presence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1024; Heidegger contrasted traditional farming with modern technology as unforced versus forced extraction of nature — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 581

Broader Connections

• Heidegger contrasted traditional farming with modern technology as unforced versus forced extraction of nature #exemplifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 581