We discuss two technological catastrophes—one imagined in a brilliant fiction, The Machine Stops, written more than a century ago by E.M. Forster; the second having played out in real life culminating in the global rise of fascism. Forster’s premonitory intuition concerning the fragility of massive and complex sociotechnical systems provides a rich retrospective on problems in computer and information ethics. We discuss The Machine Stops and its place in the curriculum of computer ethics. We identify connections between The Machine in Forster’s story, contemporary social media platforms, and broader sociotechnical systems, culminating in a new critical framework for analyzing machine evolution. Drawing on the work of scholar-actvists, we propose a pivot from corporate-scale regulatory interventions to human-scale abolitionist interventions, which can grow resistance and resilience to machine-facilitated fascist authoritarianism from the roots up.