“You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time…there will come a generation…which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.” E.M. Forster wrote his one work of dystopian science fiction, The ...

Until recently, there has been a subtle but firm stigma around speaking against the Machine. (Specifically, the Internet.) Since the successful counter-revolution of neoliberal capital, launched in the 1980s against the organicist counter-cultural experiments of the 1960s and 70s, any voices raised against the digital revolution have been dismissed as romantically nostalgic at best, and conservatively neo-Luddite at worst. (Never mind that Ned Lud’s followers, protesting against weaving machines at the beginning of the 19th century, were not necessarily our first “technophobes” but rather an activist group especially attuned to the economic consequences of out- sourcing labor to automated contraptions.) ...