The Ghost In The Machine

Exactly one century ago, in January 1908, the rigorously sensitive English novelist E. M. Forster, who would go on to write "Howards End" and "A Passage to India," learned that a heavier-than-air machine had flown successfully around a one-kilometer circuit in just 90 seconds. The event gave him a glimpse of the future that left him despondent. In the high-speed world he saw coming, he wrote in his diary, "Man may get a new and perhaps a greater soul for the new condition. But such a soul as mine will be crushed out."

In a lingering moment of foreboding, Forster sat down to write a story that reads today as one of the most prescient and disturbing works of science fantasy I know. Largely forgotten or ignored by literati, "The Machine Stops" has been embraced in recent years by the technology-minded crowd as a sinister vision of a completely wired and globalized society. In it, all the people on earth live their lives through an omniscient-seeming mechanism that handles their communications over bluish screens and, indeed, addresses the needs of all their senses. The potential the Machine offers for experience is vast, but all of it is derivative. "There will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions," one of the Machine's impassioned apologists tells a vast videoconference call, "a generation absolutely colorless, 'seraphically free/From taint of personality'."

Of course, we're not there yet, but a trend in that direction seems much easier to discern now than it did 100 years ago. Today, at the touch of a remote control or the click of a mouse, people everywhere can experience what people anywhere experience. This ought to be enormously stimulating, opening all sorts of new creative outlets. And it is and it has. But there's also this risk: that the ever-accelerating interactions of people everywhere in the world will destroy the?uniqueness of their societies, offering tastes of seemingly infinite variety, but?also?creating?a single global culture of common denominators that evolve ever lower.

The United States, as the biggest and most voracious market on earth, has long been the real-world machine that drives this global process of appropriation, absorption, marketing and redistribution. Inevitably, those elsewhere who believe their own distinct ways of life—whether they are indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Islamic preachers in Cairo or Parisian intellectuals extolling French "exceptionalism"—focus their ire on the United States as the source of this culture-corrupting juggernaut.

But if Americans are its most powerful purveyors today, they are not the original creators of this phenomenon. Not at all. For as long as history has been recorded, cultural strains have been blended to reinvent art, architecture, music, literature, haute couture and even fast-food cuisine. Alexander the Great and his Greeks were in many ways absorbed by the civilizations they conquered. When all roads led to Rome, all the known world's art and culture found its way there, too. It's impossible to imagine the Renaissance without the clash—and the synthesis—of Western and Muslim civilization that was begun during the Crusades and was exploited for generations by the traders of Venice. The opening of Japan in the 19th century had a profound effect on French impressionist painters, and "primitive" African masks and sculptures vastly expanded the horizons of Picasso and other modern artists.

What's different today is not the process of the cultural remix, but the speed at which it takes place. Thanks to air travel, satellite communications and the Internet—all pioneered as mass-market phenomena by the Americans—crosscurrents flow much faster than ever before, almost instantaneously, and in almost every direction. The risk, of course, is that instead of becoming considered elements in new art, they just get blended into mud. If you churn together paint from?all the colors of the rainbow, after all, you might hope to duplicate the spectrum of white light, but what you get in fact is brown, or what Forster called "sloshy stirrings."