Forster appears to conflate nakedness and fleshly connection with unmediated contact or “full presence,” a view that raises many potential criticisms and questions. The narrator’s apology on behalf of “beautiful naked man” (122) and his nostalgia for the robust, technology-free body are, however, both problematic. As a prescient critique of telepresence technologies like the Internet, “The Machine Stops” satirizes hypermediated contact and in its place valorizes contact made with the fleshly body-so much so, that it fantasizes the removal of all technological mediations between that body and the “real.” This move carries strong ecocritical implications in its suggestion that all authentic connection-whether between people themselves or between people and the earth-must be corporeal.
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