J. R. R. Tolkien told Milton Waldman of Collins Publishing that his work was was mainly “concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine.”((J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. HarperCollins Publishers, 145.))
Anyone who has spent much time reading Tolkien’s fiction knows he struggled to reconcile with modernity and the resultant effects of technological progress on the human condition. Having served in WWI as a Battalion Signalling Officer at the Battle of the Somme until a severe illness took him out of the trenches, he witnessed firsthand the brutality of modern killing Machines. Writing to his son, Christopher in January of 1945, he lamented that,
Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?((J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. HarperCollins Publishers, 111.))
For Tolkien, the Machine was a modern form of magic, the ability to exert power over another through the “use of external plans or devices (apparatus).” The Machine provided for those who lusted for power a means of making their will “more quickly effective” in “dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”
And while various group of power-hungry men continue to grow in their ability to better dominate other men with their Machines, it’s ultimately the Machines that will triumph, leaving people poorer, bereaved, maimed, or dead.
In an ironic rejoinder, men become the servants of Machines. But that is not the end of the story, as those servants of the Machines become the privileged class of society (technocrats anyone?), the Machines continue to grow enormously more powerful.
Tolkien concludes by asking, what is their next move?
He might as well of asked whether the Machines would come to dominate the free market? If they will eventually decide the medical fate of humans? If they will determine a human being’s credit or social score? Or, if it would ever be possible that Machines will abide the pockets of every human being on the planet, telling them what to think, how to feel, what to buy, whom to cancel, and whom to elect to government?
I definitely feel as if I’m a slave to my computer at work. Less and less I am required to follow my own common sense and experience, and only do what the machine tells me to do.