When the Machine Stops

We Still Have Each Other

The afternoon of September 25, 2021, seemed like an ordinary weekend for residents outside the sleepy town of Joplin, Montana. With a population of only 200, nothing much happens in this small farming community 150 miles northeast of Helena.

Around 4:00 pm in the afternoon, Joplin farmer Trevor Fossen was traveling on a dirt road near rail tracks when he saw an unusual site: a wall of dust hundreds of feet high.

“I started looking at that, wondering what it was and then I saw the train had tipped over and derailed,” Fossen later recounted.

The derailed train was Amtrak’s “Empire Builder,” traveling from Chicago to Seattle with 141 passengers and 16 crew members. Due to worn out rails, the train had veered off the tracks after crossing a switch where the track narrows from a double track to a single one. The two cars in the front of the train continued as normal while the remaining eight derailed. Some of the derailed cars remained upright while others toppled on their sides, creating chaos for the passengers within. At least 50 people were injured while 3 were killed.

As Fossen approached the disaster, he saw passengers climbing through the windows of the cars tipped on their sides. He called 911, then phoned his brother to bring ladders to help the stranded passengers climb off the top of the toppled cars.

Soon Fossen and his brother were joined by other residents of Joplin and the nearby village of Chester as they worked to evacuate the passengers and tend to the injured. Local inhabitants showed up with food and water, doing everything they could to help, from wiping dirt off the stunned faces of the passengers to providing emotional support. The injured were taken to hospitals while the rest were put in hotels and a make-shift shelter set up at a school. A grocery store and church provided food.

Jacob Cordeiro, a passenger in the crash, commented, “The locals have been so amazing and accommodating. They provided us with food, drinks, and wonderful hospitality.”

The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

Our world has seen enormous changes over the last hundred years. But the glue that holds us together is the same as it has been for centuries: local community. Jesus addressed the importance of community when he placed the injunction to love our neighbors right next to loving God (Matthew 22:36-38).

This is not a popular truth in the modern world, which fosters the illusion of self-sufficiency and individual autonomy. As we increasingly look to experts, technology, and government to make problems go away, it is easy to forget our need for local community. Sometimes it takes a tragic event to remind us that we still need one another and always will.

After the Amtrak disaster, nobody told these men and women to come to the derailment site and help. Nobody paid them to open their kitchens and hearts to the stranded passengers. They acted as good Samaritans because that is the normal human thing to do.

Today we are creating a technologically-dependent state of affairs that offers the illusion that we do not need one another. Services, activities and tasks that at one time required relationships with people are now provided by machines. But more than that, contemporary life is increasingly built atop a substructure known as the “internet of things,” whereby physical and digital objects constantly communicate with one another—and often make decisions for us—in a sprawling network of interoperability. As I explained in my Salvo feature, “Serving the Machine: AI & the Specter of Digital Totalitarianism,” the technologies that facilitate everything from commerce to driving are increasingly built on a foundation of ubiquitous computing, embedded systems, and wireless sensor networks. These systems now comprise an entire ecosystem of semi-autonomous processes that regulate our lives and could not be easily stopped without massive disruption.

Someday our Machine will break down, and with it the invisible systems that regulate our lives. It might be because of power failure, a cybersecurity breach, a chain reaction triggered by computer malfunction, or a Carrington Event (a type of geomagnetic storm causing massive electrical disruptions), such as the one that occurred in 1859 and destroyed telegraph wires. But whenever the Machine stops, our flourishing—perhaps even survival—will depend on our relationships with one another. It will depend on the traits, practices, and virtues that enable us to flourish in distinctively human ways, and not as mere cogs of the Machine.

The Dark Side of Machine Dependence

This digital ecosystem on which modern life is built is no more immune to error than the tracks outside Joplin, Montana. In fact, the greater our dependence on this interconnected digital ecosystem, the greater the risk of societal disruption should the system break down.

We saw the dark side of machine dependence in the 2023 FAA system outage that led to the grounding of tens of thousands of flights, impacting people’s holiday travel. This was the first time since September 11 2001 that the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop. But this time it was not because of terrorists but a damaged database file. According to the FAA, a contractor unintentionally deleted files while "working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database.”

This reminds me of what happened when my car wouldn’t drive, not because anything was actually wrong with the engine, but because the car’s computer mistakenly “thought” there was a problem.

Even our food systems are not immune to this type of computer-triggered standstill. In 2021, the Washington Post reported that restaurants were facing bankruptcy because of insufficient semiconductor chips. A year ago, the food supplier Dole had to halt food shipments to grocery stores following a cyberattack. In both cases, there was not less actual food to go around, only a failure in the digital systems in which our food supply has become enmeshed.

Our reliance on digital systems has made life easier in many ways, but it has also introduced fragility. Someday our Machine will break down, and with it the invisible systems that regulate our lives. It might be because of power failure, a cybersecurity breach, a chain reaction triggered by computer malfunction, or a Carrington Event (a type of geomagnetic storm causing massive electrical disruptions), such as the one that occurred in 1859 and destroyed telegraph wires. (The world actually experienced a near miss of another Carrington Event in July 2012, but hardly anyone took notice.)

“Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself”

Yesterday I read E.M. Forster’s 1909 novella, The Machine Stops. This story described a future generation of humans who worship “the Machine,” – a near-omnipotent global system that controls human beings and prevents them from living on the surface of the earth. Humans have come to hate in-person presence and touch, while enjoying the illusion of community through a vast interconnected web of gramophones. As in Disney’s 2008 WALL-E inspired by Forster’s story, the machine’s sinister agenda is masked by its provision of comfort and all the trappings of a sedentary lifestyle.

In WALL-E, the machine keeps the human race confined to an airship, where men and women become enslaved to food and entertainment. The machine’s control of the human race is broken in a magnificent scene, set to the music of Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” when the captain stands up for the first time to deactivate his robot overlord, “auto.” Once the machine’s control is broken, humans are able to return to earth (with the help, we should note, of two anthropomorphized robots—Disney’s nod to techno-utopianism).

Forster’s version doesn’t end so nicely. When the machine in Forster’s story collapses, the civilization depending on it perishes. But before the final collapse, a man named Kuno realizes what was truly important, which is our relationship to each other and the earth. The rest of the human race never realized this until it was too late. From the final chapter of The Machine Stops:

Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress. No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

The idea of overreaching our limits is a key theme here at The Epimethean. I said in the introductory article that we often want to be Promethean and assert mastery over reality, even if that means transgressing God-given limits. But sometimes our greatest strength is in the more human virtues, as exhibited by Prometheus’s lesser-known younger brother, Epimetheus, who embraced a life of conviviality and domesticity with Pandora. Epimetheus found meaning, not in the lifestyle of a Titan, but in the joys, virtues, and vulnerability of life on a humane scale.

Painting of Pandora by Charles Edward Perugini. My earlier article sought to resuscitate Pandora and Epimetheus as exemplars of a distinctly human way of life against the Promethean impulse of techno-utopianism.

Our Greatest Resource is Each Other

As our society follows the Promethean urge to achieve wealth and comfort at all costs, are we chaining ourselves to systems and ways of life that are ultimately brittle and easily broken?

Someday our Machine will stop, and when it does, our flourishing—perhaps even survival—will depend on our relationships with one another. It will depend on the traits, practices, and virtues that enable us to flourish in distinctively human ways, and not as mere cogs of the Machine. And that means “love your neighbor.”

But where to start? Don’t wait for a disaster to underscore the importance of local community. Start today by strengthening the connections with those in your town, your street, and your parish. Here are nine tips.

1. Get to know your neighbors by inviting them to dinner, coffee, or perhaps initiating a local book club.

2. Support local businesses even if you have to pay a little extra.

3. Try to be friends with the people God has placed in your life, even if they aren’t the friends you would have chosen, or that wouldn’t have been chosen for you by an algorithm.

4. Oppose policies and ideologies that create division and undermine local community and relationships.

5. Find out what the needs are for the people in your life, especially people who may be suffering quietly. Then look for ways to reach out in love.

6. Privilege embodied, in-person friendships over those that are disembodied and online.

7. Learn the ancient practice of bartering for goods and services outside the official economic channels.

8. If you are part of a church, don’t approach the sacraments like magic, but understand that it takes work (divine-human synergy) for what happens in worship to spill into the parish community. That means practicing hospitality, accountability, friendships, putting up with one another, hanging around after church to visit, and working to create intentional communities around the rhythms and services of the church. Of course, church is more than just a social club, but it certainly isn’t less. (I guess that means I’m a fan of the Benedict Option, and no, that doesn’t mean flee to the hills.)

When the Machine does finally stop, we still have each other!