The Death of the Outsider in the Age of the Machine

“You are beginning to worship the Machine,” he said coldly. “You think it irreligious of me to have found out a way of my own.”

—E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909)

Much has been said about the rapid acceleration of technology and the dangers of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (see Larson, 2021) in particular. Such concerns have been explored in dystopian fiction, too, for over a century, but the recurring archetype of the outsider in that literature is worryingly absent from contemporary real-world discussions. Crucially, in order for the Machine to work, the outsider must be excommunicated.

In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), James C. Scott argues that the modern state developed out of a desire to impose ‘legible’, ‘efficient’ order upon the complex practices of diverse populations so that administering the functions of the state (for instance, taxation, conscription, etc.) could be simplified. Recent decades have seen increasingly technologised attempts to perfect and normalise this top-down imposition of control. Consider, for example, the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in public spaces, facial recognition technologies, digital IDs, and massive digital databases constructing virtual avatars of every individual. These technologies are presented as benign ‘tools’ (c.f. Heidegger, 1954 [1977]) to ensure public safety and easier access to government services. Certainly, they can be used in this fashion, but it would be inexcusably naïve to brush aside well-documented tendencies of the state toward “surveillance creep” (Marx, 2006), “control creep” (Innes, 2001), and overall “function creep” (Koops, 2021). There is no ‘conspiracy’ here: a surveillance state becomes necessary if the goals of simplicity, efficiency, and compliance to this imposed legibility are prioritised – which is precisely what, according to Scott, the modern state demands.

Within this grand Machiavellian design, the ‘outsider’ is a gadfly who draws unwanted attention to the self-serving ambitions of those posing as philanthropic innovators or virtuous leaders. We might say that the outsider introduces chaos into their ordered system. Through this disturbance, the outsider threatens to reveal the possibility of something different: a new order, a new way of being, a new set of governing principles, perhaps. The outsider, then, is (among other things) a rebel, a maverick, but also a friend of the future – a friend from our future. The outsider is untimely in Nietzsche’s sense: painfully aware of history and the demands of the present, but possessed by a preternatural drive to let in the future. The outsider has always been, paradoxically, a central figure in human history, transgressing established boundaries, and, in doing so, expanding our understanding of the (moral) universe. And thus, the outsider has always been a threat to the order of the day, which has tended to malign, persecute, and, in key historical cases, sentence to death such untimely individuals.

Socrates was an outsider when he dared to pose questions that might cast doubt upon the ethical, cultural, and military superiority of Athens. Jesus of Nazareth was an outsider among outsiders in the temple and on the mount. Both paid the ultimate price for going against the herd. Simultaneously, both are immortal, animating figures whose actions and words moved history in epoch-making ways. But, by design, recent technological developments may lead to the final death of the outsider. With ever-increasing ‘efficiency’, technologies of surveillance, persuasion, and control are successfully herding – bringing back into line – even those who should be wise to such machinations. 

To the most psychopathic and Machiavellian members of our species (who are often overrepresented in politics and corporate boardrooms; see Babiak & Hare, 2006), the rapid perfection of these technologies of surveillance, control, and extraction presents opportunities too attractive to resist. The dark Machiavellian fantasy of a great, all-seeing machine of global control is now a reality. Contemporary technological developments appear to be the realisation of the sort of ‘Machine’ about which E.M. Forster, writing in 1909, speculated.

Forster’s prescient short story, ‘The Machine Stops’, describes a dystopian future in which individuals live alone in subterranean dwellings, shunning any ‘direct experience’ with other humans or the outside world at all. All experience is technologically mediated through ‘The Machine’. For example, all light is artificial; indeed, people have been primed to treat even sunlight as ghastly. Speaking with other people in person – even using one’s own voice in (what we would call) offline interactions – is perceived as a painful, shameful way to conduct oneself. Instead, a centralised system transmits voice and video directly into individual subterranean lairs. People receive all their ‘ideas’ from approved ‘lecturers’ and stay in touch with friends and family via this system. All (approved) needs and desires are fulfilled via the push of a button. (If the description thus far has reminded you of the rapid rise of social media, online shopping, online meeting applications, and the relatively comfortable (but soulless) lockdown experiences of the ‘laptop class’, you are accurately grasping Forster’s eerily prophetic vision.) Even the human urge for transcendence has been replaced by a spiritual reverence for the Machine.

Vashti, Forster’s indoctrinated protagonist, finds comfort in the instruction manual for the technologised society built by the Machine: ‘the Book of the Machine’ – or simply, reverentially, ‘the Book’. However, Vashti’s son, Kuno, is an outsider who yearns to escape this technologised, tightly mediated way of life constraining humanity. He wishes to leave this window-less, atomised, underground world in which “civilized and refined” (Forster, 1909, 8) individuals now live, to have direct experience of the old world where “Man [still] is the measure” (Forster, 1909, 12). (Literally: “Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong” (Forster, 1909, 12).) As Kuno describes to his disappointed mother his illicit efforts to get to the earth’s surface, her eyes well up with tears at her son’s regressive ‘blasphemies’ against the Machine’s pseudo-moral order: “There was not room for such a person in the world… [o]n atavism the Machine can have no mercy” (Forster, 1909, 14).

In our world, too, an outsider might emerge with ideas that seem untimely, and thus blasphemous or abominable. But it is precisely this uneasy, ephemeral openness (the doors of perception are sometimes wide open, sometimes closed shut) to uncomfortable ideas and foreign ways of being that has built richness and resilience into Western culture (at least). Which is why the return of excommunication in our digital age is such a concerningly slippery slope. ‘Deplatforming’ and ‘cancelling’, for instance, are casual calls for excommunication that might fill one with a momentary sense of righteousness, but are simultaneously drills that prime humanity on behalf of the Machine. 

Our would-be tech overlords (who cannot control the Machine to which they decree we must acquiesce and thus co-create) envisage a future where all ideas are mediated, moderated, monetised, and algorithmised. The Machine requires us to have crude heuristics, which it curates algorithmically, for determining ‘friend’ from ‘foe’, ‘us’ from ‘them’. Parochialism, dogmatism, moral tribalism – these are core aspects of the attitude required by the Machine, a device incapable of calling forth the future. It curates our loves, hates, hopes, and desires, rendering us, in Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) illuminating analysis, ‘one-dimensional’. It benefits from us constraining the data sets from which it conjures up its ‘predictions’. The outsider, in particular, sees beyond these data sets, beyond what currently exists, and wonders: how are transcending ideas to reach human minds if all ideas must be screened via the mediating power of the Machine? 

How long before it becomes literally impossible to communicate transgressive ideas via this increasingly centralised system in which our increasingly digitised minds are made ‘legible’? How long before it becomes literally impossible to think transgressive thoughts, thoughts that go against Big Brother? In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston – George Orwell’s meek, reluctant outsider – is eventually tortured into bringing himself to believe that 2+2=5. Make no mistake about it, we are being directed toward this Orwellian future, but it will be shinier, brighter, and more dopamine-inducing than the bleak worlds of Orwell and Forster. Without the outsider, we – Nietzsche’s ‘last men’ of history – will TikTok dance, meme, and doomscroll our way to our own enslavement.

One by one, outsiders will be ‘cancelled’ by well-meaning individuals, goaded into a one-dimensional conception – like a net cast too wide – of curated protest and virtue. Little by little, the well of resistance will be poisoned with crudely drawn, carelessly wielded, thought-terminating terms like ‘Luddite’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’, until only the ideas and ways of life that serve the Machine remain. One might consider this the outsider’s ‘double dying’ (a term I borrow from Breyten Breytenbach’s non-fiction short story (1984) about the horrors of the apartheid prison system). Unlike previous ages in which the outsider may have gained posthumous recognition, our outsiders may die, cut off from the (curated) world of ideas, before their literal deaths.

Is there a way off this train? ‘Decomputing’ seems a good place to start (see McQuillan, 2022). Perhaps we should try to maximise our time away from technologies with screens (how perniciously ubiquitous they are in the age of the Machine!) and instead focus the miraculous gift of our eyes on direct experiences of the world. This would mean spending less time on social media, taking a break from (the shackles of) instant messaging, and letting others know that we are aiming to spend as little time on email as possible (see Newport, 2021). To my mind, these relatively recent technologies are very far from ‘neutral tools’; they are instead the latest machinations of the top-down system of control I have discussed in this essay. To subvert these even more, we should not simply accept the (curated – always curated in our age) conclusions presented to us by sources many consider to be trustworthy. (Forster, for instance, is biting in his criticism of the uncritically accepted, indoctrinated ‘lecturers’ in the dystopian future of his short story.) This is uncomfortable but necessary: the spirit of philosophy – personified by history’s salient outsiders – demands that we seek out perspectives far and wide and make up our own minds. 

It is cold comfort, but the current global dominance of the most Machiavellian members of our species, whose dark desires for total control are satiated by the Machine, must end (in its current technologised forms) per the physical laws of the universe (see Angrist, 1968). As Kuno says to his incredulous mother shortly before their technologised world collapses: “The Machine stops” (Forster, 1909, 20).

Works Cited:

Angrist, S.W. 1968. Perpetual Motion Machines. Scientific American 218(1): 114-123.

Babiak, P. & Hare, R.D. 2006. Snakes in Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. New York: HarperBusiness.

Breytenbach, B. 1984. The Double Dying of an Ordinary Criminal. The American Poetry Review 13(4): 23-26.

Forster, E.M. 1909. The Machine Stops. London: The Oxford and Cambridge Review.

Heidegger, M. (1954) 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In: Lovitt, W. ed. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Translated by Lovitt, W. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 3-35.

Innes, M. 2001. Control Creep. Sociological Research Online 6(3): 13-18. 

Koops, B.J. 2021. The Concept of Function Creep. Law, Innovation and Technology 13(1): 29-56.

Larson, E.J. 2021. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Marcuse, H. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marx, G. 2006. Seeing Hazily (But Not Darkly) Through the Lens: Some Recent Empirical Studies of Surveillance Technologies. Law and Social Inquiry 30(2): 339-400.

McQuillan, D. 2022. Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Newport, C. 2021. A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. London: Penguin.

Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg.

Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.