Weschler & Bob Garfield consider
E M Forster’s uncannily prescient 1909 story,
“The Machine Stops.”

Someday, decades and decades hence, following some sort of terrible ecological collapse, all mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures and throbbing ventilation, each cell containing a single individual, though everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of intermeshed video screens. Zoom, as it were, avant la lettre.  
For this is how the great E. M. Forster’s visionary 1909 story “The Machine Stops” begins, with a son calling out to videoconference with his mother on the other side of the globe, to chat and to complain,

“The Machine is much, but it is not everything.I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you.I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”

And the tale unfurls from there, a story the implication of whose eerily dismaying anticipations will constitute the launching off point for Weschler’s conversation with Bob Garfield, veteran of both NPR’s “All Things Considered” and ABC-News, and cofounder and for twenty years the cohost of WNYC’s award-winning “On the Media” weekly radio broadcast.  He has authored a half dozen books, ranging from his first Waking up Screaming from the American Dream (1997) through his most recent American Manifesto: Saving Democracy from Villains, Vandals and Ourselves (2020). Soon after leaving WNYC earlier this year, he launched a Booksmart substack subscription site, “The Bully Pulpit,” across which this conversation will broadcast as a coproduction.