Elon Musk may have told his fans and followers to vote Republican in the last big election, but that evidently doesn’t mean that Musk — like Ron DeSantis and other MAGA adherents — doesn’t want to hear from gay people.
In fact, Musk just recommended that everyone read a story by the late E.M. Forster, at one point the world’s most celebrated writer and frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Forster posthumously became even more famous because he was gay, a fact he was candid about among those in his inner circle, but quiet about publicly — in tune with times where the rule really was “don’t say gay.” Homosexuality in England in Forster’s era was a crime.
(Forster’s groundbreaking novel Maurice, notable for featuring a happy ending for gay men, was finished in 1914 but not published until 1971, after his death.)
Musk tweeted “Worth reading The Machine Stops by EM Forster if you haven’t already” and includes a link to the tale.
Worth reading The Machine Stops by EM Forster if you haven’t alreadyhttps://t.co/sNtP0k1Qug
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2023
Written in 1909, “The Machine Stops” is a harrowing tale of technological terror with humans forced to live underground after the surface of the earth has become uninhabitable. A science fiction story, it features predictive versions of modern technology like video conferencing and social media.
The Fantasy Book Review said that Forster’s dystopia “holds more horror than any number of gothic ghost stories,” while the BBC, considering it during the COVID pandemic, said it was “jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breathtakingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020.”
That living underground was analogous in many ways to living a closeted life, as Forster did in public, is a fact believed to have informed Forster’s incisive and terrifying depictions of rule-bound desolation and technology-infringed freedoms.
Musk, who has been cautioning against the mass dangers of Artificial Intelligence for more than a decade, also has an intimate knowledge of what might happen if the machine is ultimately in charge.
Near the end of the story, Forster writes: “They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. ”