Machine

A quick one today, a minor prediction success:

... All the accumulations of the last three minutes burst in on her. The room was filled with the noise of bells and speaking tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? 

The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

In this story, the titular Machine connects the members of civilized humanity, most of whom never leave their small, hexagonal rooms - and never want to. The Machine delivers food, handles hygienic matters (baths are particularly mentioned) and allows people to connect to all their friends, nearby or around the world. Not that any of these folks pay attention to something like distance, when the Machine keeps them together. In fact....

"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “Space is annihliated, but we annihilated not space, but the sense thereof.....‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet...‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet."

The focus is on a woman who gives lectures on music - evidently not on playing music, nor listening to it, but simply on ideas about music. This focus on ideas makes her much like the rest of the civilized world, which is connected through the Machine and talks one to another about what they know and what ideas they have. Her son  - who considers "space" as described above - decides to go beyond the boundaries that the Machine guards Supposedly to go onto the surface of the earth is deadly, but he pursues that goal because of his doubts about the Machine-led society. 

All of that is a lot to mention for a simple prediction, while not nearly enough to really describe the story. In any case, there is a focus on individualism that makes it seem very much a part of a Third Turning. The mother on her own, the son attempting to escape, the interactions that strive neither for conformity nor opposition nor destruction...And it turns out that it was published in 1909, after the Progressive Era, before the Great Depression. Which works.