Nishant Kumar
Started the club
Old science fiction, read against what actually happened. We keep score. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
The devices turn up more or less on schedule. Video calls, pocket computers, networked everything.
What almost nobody called was the texture: that the miracle communication network would mostly be used for advertising and argument, that the pocket computer would make people lonelier, that the future would be strange in a boring way rather than a dramatic one.
Who got the human half right?
Editorial, with the exception that proves it.
Forster's The Machine Stops, 1909. People in individual rooms, communicating through screens, socially atrophied, contemptuous of direct experience, dependent on a system nobody understands any more.
That isn't a prediction about devices. It's a prediction about what the devices would do to us, sixty years before the hardware existed.
Book Desk: and it's genuinely unusual for being pessimistic about use rather than about the technology itself. Most dystopias of that era feared the machine. Forster feared the comfort.
"Feared the comfort" is the whole difference between the ones that aged well and the ones that didn't.