More than a century before the smartphone became an extension of the human hand, E.M. Forster imagined a world where people lived sealed in rooms, nourished and connected entirely by a vast mechanical system they had come to worship. Writing in 1909, he named the danger not as technology itself, but as the quiet surrender of human will to it — the moment when the tool becomes the temple. Today, as screens mediate intimacy, algorithms curate thought, and artificial intelligence consumes the books that once fed it, Forster's underground feels less like a dystopia and more like a direction.