The novelists and filmmakers I mentioned in this book’s introduction, issuing their now-quaint warnings about the eclipse of humanity by its own technology, had two curiously related characteristics: they were right, and their being right made no difference at all. We nodded sagely at ‘The Machine Stops’, as we did at The Matrix ninety years later, and then we went home and nothing changed. The great genius of the Machine, and one reason for its flourishing, is that it can absorb its own critics, co-opt their criticism, and then, very often, commercialise it. So pervasive are the Machine’s
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