Here is my propaganda poster for the machines stops using Canva…

Take back your world!

The world needs to be taken back from the machine and given back to humans. For this propaganda poster, I decided to use a machinery background, with a human covered in chains in front of it. I used white, grey, and black background colours and then chose a thick red heading for the message of the poster. I chose these colours since many propaganda posters used to frighten people have similar colour schemes. My goal is to have a threatening background so that the words in front of it will really pop and catch people’s attention. I chose “Have first-hand ideas” and “Take back your world” for my message. Having first-hand ideas seems like one of the first steps to defying the machine, and by having them, just like Kuno, you can begin to see through the machine. The second part of my message has to do with technology being in complete control of everyone and everything. The whole underground civilization is dependent on it and influences human thoughts. In front of the machinery, the human, I put chains around the poster. This was meant to indicate that the human is chained down and kept prisoner to the machine which is always lurking in the background. To conclude, this propaganda poster is meant to intimidate the viewers to stand up against the machine and take back what was once theirs.

The cautionary tales hidden within the Machine Stops and Wall-E

E.M. Forster’s, “The Machine Stops”, and Andrew Stanton’s “Wall-E”, portray a futuristic technology ran world and massive dependency on all things tech-like. In the machine stops, the characters are confined to hive-like rooms and have technology at their beck and call and rely on it entirely. There are two types of humans in the short story, one who defies the machine, and one who praises. Their differences are shown throughout the length of the story, and even though they both believe in different things, they both come together at the end while everything burns down. In the movie Wall-E, there are many similarities to the machine stop, such as full dependency on technology, lack of physical strength, technology controlling everything, etc.… Both stories share a subplot of human emotional relations, which defy the world they are in, as Kuno cares for his mother no matter what, and Wall-E follows Eve to the aircraft and always tries to save her. Through both these stories, the machine stops and Wall-E both share cautionary tales on how growing technology and letting it have too much control will cause the world to shut down and have immutable results.

However, in both stories, none of the humans made any effort to override the technology to take back their world, well not until the very end. The human characters were fully dependent on their technology, as seen in both stories the characters are so physically unable to move that when they need to go somewhere, they are carried around by robotic chairs. In Wall-E, the characters wander around all day on their chairs, which have built-in pop-up screens and unlimited food at the touch of a button. Towards the end, when the captain decides to try and overcome the technology that was refusing to bring back the humans to earth, he gets out of his chair for the first time, symbolizing he no longer needs technology to function. Another dystopian element shown in the movie Wall-E is how the imperfect robots are taken to some sort of prison cell and fixed up, but if they aren’t able to be fixed, they are disposed of, or locked up forever. This element can show how they are expected to be perfect and have no flaws, and if the robots don’t live up to that expectation, they are removed. There are comments on “First” or “Tenth” hand ideas throughout the machine stops. In this world, Vashti believes that ideas that are passed on by the machine and have no original thought to them are the only ones acceptable. However, Kuno feels as though everyone should be a free thinker with firsthand ideas instead of passed down ones. Near the middle of the story, when Vashti is travelling in the airship, she comments on ideas; “No ideas here, and hid Greece behind a metal blind”. In this end-of-chapter segment, Vashti regularly made comments on how the nature surrounding her gave her “no ideas”, the irony in closing her blind to Greece is that ancient Greece was known for having “first” handed ideas and creating architecture and new things with many philosophers, and since she is part of the grapevine of tenth handed ideas, she finds nothing interesting with its history.

Speaking of ancient Greece philosophers, a story that can closely be related to both “Wall-E” and “The machine stops”, is “Plato’s Allegory of the cave”. In his allegory, he compares his modern civilization to a herd of prisoners imprisoned in a dark cave who had never seen the outside world, with nothing but a fire to illuminate the cave and project shadows of real things on the wall. Over time the prisoners believe these shadows to be real until eventually one of the prisoners is released and let out of the cave. He is exposed to the real world and sees the shadows in their real forms. Once he returned to the cave, he could not readjust to the cave’s darkness since the outside world was so bright, but he still tried to explain to the other prisoners what he had seen. The other prisoners, so frustrated and confused by the new things they were being told and didn’t want to hear any of it, turned angry and hostile quickly to the prisoner who had returned, telling them things they weren’t used to and didn’t want to know.

Plato’s allegory can compare to the “Machine Stops”, as Kuno is the man who left the cave, and Vashti is one of the prisoners stuck inside the cave not willing to expand what they know. Kuno had gone to the surface world, he had seen things no one else had, he had found flaws in the machines civilization and wanted to change the way things were. As Vashti was just a sheep that praised the machine and wanted nothing to do with the surface world or any new ideas that could change the way they lived their lives, as she regularly said things like “it is contrary to the spirit of the age”, the spirit of the age being the machine of course.

To conclude, all of these stories have the same hidden meaning behind all the technology control. They all explain how humans can become so sheltered and lose their free-minded spirits and can be completely misguided by technology, or an illusion like the shadows in Plato’s cave. When these humans that are sheltered get exposed to anything but the things they are used to, they become angry and confused and turn hostile toward any intruder. This still happens, in the present day, in everyday occurrences. Whether it be not wanting to learn something new, or people not wanting to change things for the better.

Cited sources:

Plato’s allegory of the cave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA