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Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
“England’s greatest living writer” (unHerd) examines the technological, historical, and--above all--spiritual currents driving the global industrial economy and prophesies what’s next for a dead civilization.
In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth recounts how the Machine, a combination of technological, political, economic, and spiritual forces, is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself. He examines the Machine's way of homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial juggernaut. Most importantly, he identifies how this "progress" and its ideologies put humanity in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as "freedom."
In the age of the Machine, it takes effort to remain truly human. Drawing on deep readings of philosophers, poets, and mystics like Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, and Simone Weil, Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; a deep attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty. Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for Kingsnorth's fellow madmen.
In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth recounts how the Machine, a combination of technological, political, economic, and spiritual forces, is destroying the life support systems of the Earth itself. He examines the Machine's way of homogenising the mosaic of human cultures and using humans as fodder in a techno-industrial juggernaut. Most importantly, he identifies how this "progress" and its ideologies put humanity in a headlong plunge towards what looks to be a glorified nihilism disguised as "freedom."
In the age of the Machine, it takes effort to remain truly human. Drawing on deep readings of philosophers, poets, and mystics like Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, and Simone Weil, Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; a deep attention to matters of the spirit; heterodox tolerance, freedom of expression and an appreciation of beauty. Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for Kingsnorth's fellow madmen.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published September 23, 2025
1293 people are currently reading
8739 people want to read
About the author
Paul Kingsnorth
41 books655 followersPaul Kingsnorth is an English writer and thinker. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. He lives in the west of Ireland.
He studied modern history at Oxford University, where he was also heavily involved in the road protest movement of the early 1990s.
After graduating, Paul spent two months in Indonesia working on conservation projects in Borneo and Java. Back in the UK, he worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper. Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist, where he worked for two years under the editorship of Zac Goldsmith.
He left the Ecologist in 2001 to write his first book One No, Many Yeses, a political travelogue which explored the growing anti-capitalist movement around the world. The book was published in 2003 by Simon and Schuster, in six languages across 13 countries.
In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, Paul was instrumental in setting up the Free West Papua Campaign, which he also helped to run for a time.
Paul’s second book, Real England, was published in 2008 by Portobello. An exploration of the changing face of his home country in an age of globalisation, the book was quoted in speeches by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, helped inspire the success of the hit West End play ‘Jerusalem’ and saw its author compared to Cobbett and Orwell by more than one newspaper.
In 2009, Paul launched, with Dougald Hine, the Dark Mountain Project – a call for a literary movement to respond to the ongoing collapse of the world’s ecological and economic certainties. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s director and one of its editors.
In 2011, Paul’s first collection of poetry, Kidland, was published by Salmon. Since the mid-1990s, Paul’s poetry has been published in magazines including Envoi, Iota, Poetry Life and nthposition. He has been awarded the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Award and the Poetry Life Prize, and was narrowly pipped to the post in the Thomas Hardy Society’s annual competition.
Paul’s journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, Ecologist, New Internationalist, Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Wildlife and openDemocracy, for which he has also worked as a commissioning editor. He has appeared on various TV and radio programmes, most shamefully ‘This Morning with Richard and Judy.’ He is also the author of ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’, a report on the future of the countryside, published in 2005 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
He studied modern history at Oxford University, where he was also heavily involved in the road protest movement of the early 1990s.
After graduating, Paul spent two months in Indonesia working on conservation projects in Borneo and Java. Back in the UK, he worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper. Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist, where he worked for two years under the editorship of Zac Goldsmith.
He left the Ecologist in 2001 to write his first book One No, Many Yeses, a political travelogue which explored the growing anti-capitalist movement around the world. The book was published in 2003 by Simon and Schuster, in six languages across 13 countries.
In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, Paul was instrumental in setting up the Free West Papua Campaign, which he also helped to run for a time.
Paul’s second book, Real England, was published in 2008 by Portobello. An exploration of the changing face of his home country in an age of globalisation, the book was quoted in speeches by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, helped inspire the success of the hit West End play ‘Jerusalem’ and saw its author compared to Cobbett and Orwell by more than one newspaper.
In 2009, Paul launched, with Dougald Hine, the Dark Mountain Project – a call for a literary movement to respond to the ongoing collapse of the world’s ecological and economic certainties. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s director and one of its editors.
In 2011, Paul’s first collection of poetry, Kidland, was published by Salmon. Since the mid-1990s, Paul’s poetry has been published in magazines including Envoi, Iota, Poetry Life and nthposition. He has been awarded the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Award and the Poetry Life Prize, and was narrowly pipped to the post in the Thomas Hardy Society’s annual competition.
Paul’s journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, Ecologist, New Internationalist, Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Wildlife and openDemocracy, for which he has also worked as a commissioning editor. He has appeared on various TV and radio programmes, most shamefully ‘This Morning with Richard and Judy.’ He is also the author of ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’, a report on the future of the countryside, published in 2005 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
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January 22, 2026
Oh boy.
The experience of reading this book was wild. Parts I and II do a decent job of collating secondary sources to trace the rise of what Kingsnorth calls “The Machine,” which encompasses modern culture’s dependent relationship with technology, the demands of capitalism, and the system’s efficacy at cannibalizing its defectors. He discusses our over-reliance on technology and convenience, as well as how a rise in secularism left space for money to grab hold as the primary motivating force in society. There are a few instances where Kingsnorth proves to be a grown adult who actively resents teens on Twitter (weird for someone who claims to be purposefully low-tech, but we all have our vices I guess), but otherwise I was willing to see where this is going.
And then in Part III we dive head-first, mask-off into conspiracy theories. Kingsnorth sets the stage by claiming that he used to be a liberal but that they no longer represent the needs of the common working man. I think the nuance between liberal and leftist is lost here (we barely engage with leftists except to call Marxism passé, and they do seem to be lumped in with liberals for all intents and purposes), but I certainly don’t need to agree with someone on every political issue to think they have valuable things to say. But then... this man goes on to spend a full chapter talking about how the “liberal elite” are evil and actually they’re part of The Machine. This conveniently disregards the fact that much of the time period he’s concerned with in this work has been led by conservative governments in the U.K. and the U.S., his two major points of reference. This goes off the rails so quickly.
Chapter XIII attempts to make the claim that it was widely accepted for college students to stage racial justice protests, while the Trucker Convoy was unfairly condemned. This framing sucks on multiple levels:
First, it overlooks the significant backlash BLM protesters faced at the time and also subtly demeans the movement as having been one for college students and not the wider public. Kingsnorth argues that the racial justice protests were celebrated because diversity is trendy or something, but current events do not support his argument at all. I’m not sure when this section was written or edited, but we’ve now been witnessing for two years even harsher treatment of pro-Palestine protesters, many of whom are being arrested and/or labeled as terrorists. We've also seen significant rises in racialized violence across multiple racial groups in the last several years.
Support for workers’ rights being somehow out of fashion also doesn’t hold up. Just this year, the Air Canada strikes have demonstrated widespread public backing for unions and labor actions in Canada, where the Convoy took place. There’s no clear evidence (certainly none provided by the author) that working-class movements are inherently ignored or unsupported, and to frame the Freedom Convoy as merely a matter of blue collar working conditions conveniently omits the global pandemic at the core of the issue. (Kingsnorth does not outright state that he is anti-vax, but he does tell an anecdote about being unable to enter a bar because he didn’t have proof of vaccination, so it does seem he has a proverbial dog in this race.)
What bothers me about Kingsnorth’s assertion here is that he simply does not do the work required to validate this claim. By what metric is he arguing that racial justice protests were treated more favourably than the truckers were? Whose perspective is he relying on? Is there any data comparing consequences like job loss or arrests between the two groups? To make a claim like this without anything to substantiate it except vibes is, at best, sloppy thinking and, at worst, intentionally misleading.
Things only devolve from there. We're then treated to an unconvincing anecdote about a stranger lamenting to Paul about their child who expressed a desire to transition. Suddenly the secondary sources are gone, and instead, Kingsnorth notes an abstract feeling of danger rather than citing anything real that would suggest there’s anything wrong with this child choosing a different gender expression. It isn’t lost on me that even embellished for a book, the most this man can claim that this issue affects him is through a discussion about a teenager he has never met and probably will never meet.
The “Transgender Movement” (which I guess is the trans equivalent of the Gay Agenda? Kingsnorth describes it as corrupting the minds of vulnerable youth but never attributes this movement to anyone specific) is apparently another step away towards the Machine and away from Nature. Like all transphobes, Kingsnorth doesn’t seem to question the ideological dissonance of framing trans individuals both as a looming malignant threat but also as hapless victims of “the culture war.”
There’s more. There’s so much more. He’s mad that people use the term “dead white men” derisively. He’s mad that people have called him an eco-fascist. He’s mad about pride month. It’s just absolutely insane to me because we can agree about the threat of technology depriving us of autonomy. We can be on the same page about the very real impact of that technology on the environment and our governments’ unwillingness or inability to legislate against those threats. And yet when we come down to it, Kingsnorth only uses this very real concern to complain about people he doesn’t like and to put forth conspiracy theories about a malevolent ruling class who want to degender our babies and put Amazon Alexas into our brains in an attempt to give us over to the Antichrist (I’m not kidding, the Antichrist claim is in Chapter XX). It’s nonsense. This book is nonsense.
The experience of reading this book was wild. Parts I and II do a decent job of collating secondary sources to trace the rise of what Kingsnorth calls “The Machine,” which encompasses modern culture’s dependent relationship with technology, the demands of capitalism, and the system’s efficacy at cannibalizing its defectors. He discusses our over-reliance on technology and convenience, as well as how a rise in secularism left space for money to grab hold as the primary motivating force in society. There are a few instances where Kingsnorth proves to be a grown adult who actively resents teens on Twitter (weird for someone who claims to be purposefully low-tech, but we all have our vices I guess), but otherwise I was willing to see where this is going.
And then in Part III we dive head-first, mask-off into conspiracy theories. Kingsnorth sets the stage by claiming that he used to be a liberal but that they no longer represent the needs of the common working man. I think the nuance between liberal and leftist is lost here (we barely engage with leftists except to call Marxism passé, and they do seem to be lumped in with liberals for all intents and purposes), but I certainly don’t need to agree with someone on every political issue to think they have valuable things to say. But then... this man goes on to spend a full chapter talking about how the “liberal elite” are evil and actually they’re part of The Machine. This conveniently disregards the fact that much of the time period he’s concerned with in this work has been led by conservative governments in the U.K. and the U.S., his two major points of reference. This goes off the rails so quickly.
Chapter XIII attempts to make the claim that it was widely accepted for college students to stage racial justice protests, while the Trucker Convoy was unfairly condemned. This framing sucks on multiple levels:
First, it overlooks the significant backlash BLM protesters faced at the time and also subtly demeans the movement as having been one for college students and not the wider public. Kingsnorth argues that the racial justice protests were celebrated because diversity is trendy or something, but current events do not support his argument at all. I’m not sure when this section was written or edited, but we’ve now been witnessing for two years even harsher treatment of pro-Palestine protesters, many of whom are being arrested and/or labeled as terrorists. We've also seen significant rises in racialized violence across multiple racial groups in the last several years.
Support for workers’ rights being somehow out of fashion also doesn’t hold up. Just this year, the Air Canada strikes have demonstrated widespread public backing for unions and labor actions in Canada, where the Convoy took place. There’s no clear evidence (certainly none provided by the author) that working-class movements are inherently ignored or unsupported, and to frame the Freedom Convoy as merely a matter of blue collar working conditions conveniently omits the global pandemic at the core of the issue. (Kingsnorth does not outright state that he is anti-vax, but he does tell an anecdote about being unable to enter a bar because he didn’t have proof of vaccination, so it does seem he has a proverbial dog in this race.)
What bothers me about Kingsnorth’s assertion here is that he simply does not do the work required to validate this claim. By what metric is he arguing that racial justice protests were treated more favourably than the truckers were? Whose perspective is he relying on? Is there any data comparing consequences like job loss or arrests between the two groups? To make a claim like this without anything to substantiate it except vibes is, at best, sloppy thinking and, at worst, intentionally misleading.
Things only devolve from there. We're then treated to an unconvincing anecdote about a stranger lamenting to Paul about their child who expressed a desire to transition. Suddenly the secondary sources are gone, and instead, Kingsnorth notes an abstract feeling of danger rather than citing anything real that would suggest there’s anything wrong with this child choosing a different gender expression. It isn’t lost on me that even embellished for a book, the most this man can claim that this issue affects him is through a discussion about a teenager he has never met and probably will never meet.
The “Transgender Movement” (which I guess is the trans equivalent of the Gay Agenda? Kingsnorth describes it as corrupting the minds of vulnerable youth but never attributes this movement to anyone specific) is apparently another step away towards the Machine and away from Nature. Like all transphobes, Kingsnorth doesn’t seem to question the ideological dissonance of framing trans individuals both as a looming malignant threat but also as hapless victims of “the culture war.”
There’s more. There’s so much more. He’s mad that people use the term “dead white men” derisively. He’s mad that people have called him an eco-fascist. He’s mad about pride month. It’s just absolutely insane to me because we can agree about the threat of technology depriving us of autonomy. We can be on the same page about the very real impact of that technology on the environment and our governments’ unwillingness or inability to legislate against those threats. And yet when we come down to it, Kingsnorth only uses this very real concern to complain about people he doesn’t like and to put forth conspiracy theories about a malevolent ruling class who want to degender our babies and put Amazon Alexas into our brains in an attempt to give us over to the Antichrist (I’m not kidding, the Antichrist claim is in Chapter XX). It’s nonsense. This book is nonsense.
October 31, 2025
While maybe not a perfect book, a positively perfect conversation!
It reminded me of all the ways I had stood against the machine in the past and how those things felt like failures sometimes but maybe, maybe they weren’t after all. It also gave me courage to make other choices like sitting on my porch on Halloween rather than putting a bowl of candy out there. I also pointed out the moon to a couple of kids, and chatted with my neighbors in my new neighborhood. As Paul would say I am cooked not raw but there is hope in these things.
Definitely one to reread!
It reminded me of all the ways I had stood against the machine in the past and how those things felt like failures sometimes but maybe, maybe they weren’t after all. It also gave me courage to make other choices like sitting on my porch on Halloween rather than putting a bowl of candy out there. I also pointed out the moon to a couple of kids, and chatted with my neighbors in my new neighborhood. As Paul would say I am cooked not raw but there is hope in these things.
Definitely one to reread!
September 8, 2025
Probably the most important book Paul has written yet, and a great distillation of where my political, social and environmental views have coalesced in recent years but without knowing how to put it into words. 'When people ask where I stand... not according to political positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from, and who they are.'
October 20, 2025
5 stars definitely do not mean an absolute endorsement. I think Kingsnorth is wrong on several points, and I have a sneaking suspicion that too many things are implicated under the umbrella of "the machine" (which sometimes feels like a blanket term to describe all things Kingsnorth finds personally distasteful). Yet this book is so thought-provoking. I feel seen. In this book, Kingsnorth is intuiting his way through this modern world in a powerful way; putting to stirring words so many of my own intuitions. While I might quibble about some of the particulars, the broad contours--both of what is wrong with this world and what it a resistance of "the machine" should look like--is difficult to dispute.
October 28, 2025
A fascinating, imminently frustrating experience that certainly made me think a lot, but is ultimately difficult to recommend. It's more a string of essays than a coherent text, and even as a Christian with Luddite tendencies, a love for prose, and a healthy (I think) skepticism of the political binary, I found the book to be utterly alienating.
I went with 2 instead of 3 stars because the most compelling ideas here are quotes, and because of how much of a slog it becomes as Kingsnorth constantly undercuts his own arguments with contradictions and absurdities.
I enjoyed his exploration of brain hemispheres and western sociology, and the way that capitalism and the myth of progress have worked tirelessly to flatten the world and the human being down into only what's measurable through data percentages and manipulable by science. I was challenged to question my assumptions about the broad narratives of liberalism and progressivism, and I do feel like I will henceforth see them as even more co-operative with capitalism and loss of meaning than I previously did. He makes a pretty irrefutable argument that our postmodern, radically individualized conceptions of personhood and truth are incompatible with the deep communal life and effective resistance to technocapitalism that we claim to want.
My frustration comes from where he chooses to find examples of this in modern movements, and where he chooses to ignore them.
The Machine is, ultimately, whatever he wants it to be - and it isn't (or at least isn't quite as much) in the movements or ideas he doesn't want it to be. He gives an enlightening early account of how Western capitalism has colonized everything through "development" and "progress", and astutely unsettles the idea that the goodness we want will emerge from our current systems. But it's telling which facets of the current system (and the culture war he sometimes humorously and accurately decries) he despises and villainizes, versus the facets that he hand-waves away or even embraces.
Kingsnorth seems to want to be considered - at least by potential audiences - as a political outsider and radical, an equal-opportunity critic of the political right and left. Of the right, there are passing references to its obvious long-standing greed and corporatism, and a late-chapter paragraph stating that a "flaw" of the right is that when it comes to "oligarchic capitalism... 'conservatives' have been the foremost defenders of this monstrosity". Of the left... there are a number of chapters that I think can honestly be summed up with this verbatim quote: "What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing?". I hope you can see the leak here. In his framing, the right claims to want what's traditional and good, but doesn't go far enough. The left is built on a "root stock" of destruction. The right has flaws, sure, but the left IS the machine.
As an American right now, it feels so uncanny to hear someone write about of the renaming of places, the destruction of historical buildings, book burning/banning, the public reviling of teachers and intellectuals, state interference with free speech, and the destruction of the boundaries that hold corperations and oligarchics back... and for all of these to be framed as examples, nearly exclusively, of what "the left" is like. He gives historical examples of communist movements that did these things - a salient critique that aught to prompt self-examination by any strident Leftist. But he doesn't ask: "Who currently holds the power of the state? Who is currently doing these things?" He speaks pretty didactically about the threat his destructivelu-framed left poses, but often trivializes or hand-waves any concern about right-wing power (which, by the way, holds nearly all state power in the US right now, and from what I know also in many Western states). He dismissively places the word "authoritarianism" in quotes, and frames it as something "they" want you to be worried about. The greatest benefit of the doubt I could give him is that he's perhaps completely out of touch with the US, and that perhaps the UK and Ireland face completely different political conditions.
I somehow doubt this, though, because in many moments, his tendency for affection toward a certain (oddly online-sounding) right-wing narrative is blinding. Kingsnorth is, for instance, upset about Luke Skywalker having a character arc in The Last Jedi, and about the suggestion of a black James Bond. He "instinctively dismisses" experts and fact the checking - though he "isn't defending" the impulse. He often dismisses socialism and systemically equalitable policies as utopian ideals that are unworkable andb which naturally fail (even though he elsewhere outlines real historical examples of capitalism weilding economic and military power to dismantle them in their cradle). Justice and equity (certainly more central to the Christian "moral economy" than his ardently-defended fireplace) are listed alongside other nefarious capitalist schemes, political props that only "elites and intellectuals" would even want - and that disingenuously. Also in scare quotes are concepts like "fascism", "Russian interference", "white supremacy", "hate speech", and "nationalism" - all things he believes The Machine has taught us to fear. "Diversity" is a way that our cultures are being Greatly Replaced (and he tries to qualify this by assuming his audience can parse the difference between blaming immigrants for replacing us, vs blaming "immigration" as a concept for doing so). COVID vaccines were traumatic for him.
These and more are sprinkled throughout the book, and it all begins to feel like the writing a Reddit-thread-attracted culture warrior trying his best to convince us, and himself, that he's more of a political outsider than he is. At the very least, it seems he's an "outsider" who fears and embraces the exact people and cultural ideas that the online political right does, but believes his dislike of capitalism sets him further afeild from them in his opinions about the world than it does.
All of this DOESN'T mean he's bad or this book is bad, or that I want to slap an "eco-fascist" label on him as he claims critics will. It doesn't mean no one should listen to his ideas, or that he doesn't also make valuable and unique critiques of capitalism, exponential technological progress and liberalism (which he tends to over-equate with leftism).
What all of this does mean is that I spent half my time reading it thinking "wow that's fascinating" and the other half thinking "oh C'MON, man", which left me more frustrated than enlightened, and more interested in his bibliography than in the actual book.
I went with 2 instead of 3 stars because the most compelling ideas here are quotes, and because of how much of a slog it becomes as Kingsnorth constantly undercuts his own arguments with contradictions and absurdities.
I enjoyed his exploration of brain hemispheres and western sociology, and the way that capitalism and the myth of progress have worked tirelessly to flatten the world and the human being down into only what's measurable through data percentages and manipulable by science. I was challenged to question my assumptions about the broad narratives of liberalism and progressivism, and I do feel like I will henceforth see them as even more co-operative with capitalism and loss of meaning than I previously did. He makes a pretty irrefutable argument that our postmodern, radically individualized conceptions of personhood and truth are incompatible with the deep communal life and effective resistance to technocapitalism that we claim to want.
My frustration comes from where he chooses to find examples of this in modern movements, and where he chooses to ignore them.
The Machine is, ultimately, whatever he wants it to be - and it isn't (or at least isn't quite as much) in the movements or ideas he doesn't want it to be. He gives an enlightening early account of how Western capitalism has colonized everything through "development" and "progress", and astutely unsettles the idea that the goodness we want will emerge from our current systems. But it's telling which facets of the current system (and the culture war he sometimes humorously and accurately decries) he despises and villainizes, versus the facets that he hand-waves away or even embraces.
Kingsnorth seems to want to be considered - at least by potential audiences - as a political outsider and radical, an equal-opportunity critic of the political right and left. Of the right, there are passing references to its obvious long-standing greed and corporatism, and a late-chapter paragraph stating that a "flaw" of the right is that when it comes to "oligarchic capitalism... 'conservatives' have been the foremost defenders of this monstrosity". Of the left... there are a number of chapters that I think can honestly be summed up with this verbatim quote: "What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing?". I hope you can see the leak here. In his framing, the right claims to want what's traditional and good, but doesn't go far enough. The left is built on a "root stock" of destruction. The right has flaws, sure, but the left IS the machine.
As an American right now, it feels so uncanny to hear someone write about of the renaming of places, the destruction of historical buildings, book burning/banning, the public reviling of teachers and intellectuals, state interference with free speech, and the destruction of the boundaries that hold corperations and oligarchics back... and for all of these to be framed as examples, nearly exclusively, of what "the left" is like. He gives historical examples of communist movements that did these things - a salient critique that aught to prompt self-examination by any strident Leftist. But he doesn't ask: "Who currently holds the power of the state? Who is currently doing these things?" He speaks pretty didactically about the threat his destructivelu-framed left poses, but often trivializes or hand-waves any concern about right-wing power (which, by the way, holds nearly all state power in the US right now, and from what I know also in many Western states). He dismissively places the word "authoritarianism" in quotes, and frames it as something "they" want you to be worried about. The greatest benefit of the doubt I could give him is that he's perhaps completely out of touch with the US, and that perhaps the UK and Ireland face completely different political conditions.
I somehow doubt this, though, because in many moments, his tendency for affection toward a certain (oddly online-sounding) right-wing narrative is blinding. Kingsnorth is, for instance, upset about Luke Skywalker having a character arc in The Last Jedi, and about the suggestion of a black James Bond. He "instinctively dismisses" experts and fact the checking - though he "isn't defending" the impulse. He often dismisses socialism and systemically equalitable policies as utopian ideals that are unworkable andb which naturally fail (even though he elsewhere outlines real historical examples of capitalism weilding economic and military power to dismantle them in their cradle). Justice and equity (certainly more central to the Christian "moral economy" than his ardently-defended fireplace) are listed alongside other nefarious capitalist schemes, political props that only "elites and intellectuals" would even want - and that disingenuously. Also in scare quotes are concepts like "fascism", "Russian interference", "white supremacy", "hate speech", and "nationalism" - all things he believes The Machine has taught us to fear. "Diversity" is a way that our cultures are being Greatly Replaced (and he tries to qualify this by assuming his audience can parse the difference between blaming immigrants for replacing us, vs blaming "immigration" as a concept for doing so). COVID vaccines were traumatic for him.
These and more are sprinkled throughout the book, and it all begins to feel like the writing a Reddit-thread-attracted culture warrior trying his best to convince us, and himself, that he's more of a political outsider than he is. At the very least, it seems he's an "outsider" who fears and embraces the exact people and cultural ideas that the online political right does, but believes his dislike of capitalism sets him further afeild from them in his opinions about the world than it does.
All of this DOESN'T mean he's bad or this book is bad, or that I want to slap an "eco-fascist" label on him as he claims critics will. It doesn't mean no one should listen to his ideas, or that he doesn't also make valuable and unique critiques of capitalism, exponential technological progress and liberalism (which he tends to over-equate with leftism).
What all of this does mean is that I spent half my time reading it thinking "wow that's fascinating" and the other half thinking "oh C'MON, man", which left me more frustrated than enlightened, and more interested in his bibliography than in the actual book.
October 16, 2025
Paul Kingsnorth’s new book is a fitting, prophetic, essential follow-up to Carl Truman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It focuses on technology, the “western machine”, the demonic dangers of Ai, our psychological epidemic, transgenderism’s next step toward tranhumanism, and the good of a sacramental Luddism.
Several chapters are exactly the anti-mechanistic critiques someone needs to understand our need for Christian Platonism’s metaphysical retrieval. It connects technology to a Truman/Taylor critique of enlightenment nominalism.
Easily in the top 3 books of 2025. Can’t recommend it enough.
Several chapters are exactly the anti-mechanistic critiques someone needs to understand our need for Christian Platonism’s metaphysical retrieval. It connects technology to a Truman/Taylor critique of enlightenment nominalism.
Easily in the top 3 books of 2025. Can’t recommend it enough.
October 8, 2025
A prescient critique of modernity, albeit a sprawling and unfocused one. I wanted to love this book, as I agree with much of it. However, it felt like a messy letdown. Kingsnorth doesn’t make many new arguments, nor does he deepen any old ones. And, for a book on the distorting of humanity, there is precious little positive understanding of what it even means to be human.
October 11, 2025
I found the first few chapters of this very compelling. The Marxist/Hegelian informed cultural analysis was backed up with several references to books and authors I was unfamiliar with, and this history of thinkers trying to anthropomorphize this “machine” humanity seems to have birthed into the world appeals to me.
But, after that historical framework, it all falls apart, and the book devolves into to a trite treatise on woke and mostly typical “kids these days” conservatism, though the author tries repeatedly to distance himself from run of the mill reactionaries. Paul spends several chapters trying to reconcile his more radical “leftist” youth with his disillusionment with modern life, and he somehow ends up coming back to conservative Christianity being something like a possible solution. All the book ends up amounting to is a slightly more researched version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.
Though I’m sure there’s going to be an equally conservative bent to much of the works cited, I’m going to continue down the rabbit hole the first half of this book introduces. So, I do still give the author some credit for setting me on that path. At the very least, you could say this was just an overly opinionated annotated bibliography.
But, after that historical framework, it all falls apart, and the book devolves into to a trite treatise on woke and mostly typical “kids these days” conservatism, though the author tries repeatedly to distance himself from run of the mill reactionaries. Paul spends several chapters trying to reconcile his more radical “leftist” youth with his disillusionment with modern life, and he somehow ends up coming back to conservative Christianity being something like a possible solution. All the book ends up amounting to is a slightly more researched version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.
Though I’m sure there’s going to be an equally conservative bent to much of the works cited, I’m going to continue down the rabbit hole the first half of this book introduces. So, I do still give the author some credit for setting me on that path. At the very least, you could say this was just an overly opinionated annotated bibliography.
February 9, 2026
Paul Kingsnorth is an intriguing - even eclectic - figure. A journalist, "recovering environmentalist," novelist, poet, and recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. His new book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, is his impassioned plea for mankind to resist the lure of "the Machine." What is the Machine? In Kingsnorth's telling, it is the modern ideology of the West, which favours "the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralised over the local, the system over the individual and the community." The Machine is our addiction to technology, our demand for efficiency and convenience over ordinary speed/production, frugality, and hard work, reason over romanticism, the panopticon-like surveillance of the state (which only increased during the COVID-19 lockdowns).
I do genuinely find myself in agreement with a lot of what Kingsnorth muses upon. Like many "postliberals," he decries the excesses of social liberalism while also turning a scathing eye to the ways conservatives have blithely promoted capitalism, unaware that it has polluted the globe, uprooted natives, and helped to erase the traditions that those on the right especially ought to hold dear. Kingsnorth joins the likes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt who warn of how technology and our digital devices are rewiring our brains. Kingsnorth even makes the suggestion that the Machine and AI are demonic, tools in the Enemy's arsenal; this might seem far-fetched, but I will give this to Kingsnorth - he takes the unseen realm more seriously than a lot of Christians in the West do. Throughout the book, Kingsnorth insists that we have a fundamental need for roots but that the Machine has cut us off from them (here I think of David Goodhart's conception of the "somewheres" and the "anywheres"; the somewheres belong to a particular place and they establish themselves there, forging connections with their neighbours and loyalty to their land, whereas the anywheres globe-trot around their country and around the world, happy to be mobile for the sake of wherever they will get the biggest paycheque). Kingsnorth nostalgically recalls the glories of the West's past but now believes it has been so thoroughly corrupted that it may be time to let it die.
While I agree with a lot of the sentiment of Against the Machine, I think it has some flaws. For one, it is highly ironic that an English thinker who groans about our lack of roots has left his homeland of England behind to live in western Ireland. Kingsnorth grumps about how, unfortunately, he has to type out his work on his laptop when one of his heroes literally wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (and has had a pretty darn successful literary career despite it!).
Kingsnorth draws upon the usual suspects that postliberals and conservatives like to invoke - Wendell Berry, Brad Gregory, Alasdair MacIntyre, Simone Weil, Christopher Lasch, Jacques Ellul. But he also turns to more shadowy, unorthodox, esoteric figures like René Guénon, Oswald Spengler, and John Moriarty. As much as I believe that Christians can "plunder the Egyptians" and glean valuable insights from non-Christian sources, I get wary when Christians turn to thinkers who have inspired the radical right. It is good, good news that Kingsnorth has converted to Christianity (just as it is encouraging that other notable public intellectuals like Louise Perry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Niall Ferguson have as well) and I don't want to be overly suspicious, but Eastern Orthodoxy in particular seems to be susceptible to reactionaries, especially those who hold to traditional values while rebuking the decadence and liberalism of the West.
Kingsnorth is a novelist but at times his narrative in Against the Machine is tilted far too much into the sweeping panache of a grand plot than it is to careful, nuanced reason (Kingsnorth actually sees the West as being too dominated by reason and he comes across as a nostalgic Romantic but I would argue that emotion and feeling are equally driving our culture; how much of transgenderism is based on cold, calculating rationality and how much by "I just feel like I am in the wrong body!"?). Kingsnorth is certainly a visionary but visionaries have an awful habit of being too vague and macro-level in their thinking - even lazy. For instance, he rails against cities (citing Spengler's analysis in The Decline of the West) for uprooting peoples from the land and confining them in cosmopolis but cities also create their own cultures. There is a culture to Jimbōchō in Tokyo, to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, to Commercial Drive in Vancouver; the culture may not be good (just look at the Downtown Eastside), but it exists nonetheless. Cities are places of culture, as Timothy Keller so often said. I do hope Kingsnorth will enjoy living in the New Jerusalem for all eternity. Kingsnorth laments the excesses of capitalism but in order to make the market more humane I would argue would require state intervention but Kingsnorth also gripes about how powerful and large the state has become.
Kingsnorth is also rather inconsistent in our relationship to technology. There are definitely negative things about technology - pornography is ubiquitous, schoolyard villains can doggedly pursue their victims home through cyberbullying, people's finances can be hacked into. As a bookseller, I can't count how many times a customer will say they will order their book on Amazon because it will arrive faster - and so our sense of patience erodes. But technology also holds potential for much good. Do I think we should use technology to create "perfect" designer babies? No. But do I think it would be good to be able to cure cancer in an infant in the womb? Yes. Would I prefer to eat an organic steak? Yes. But do I think it would be morally wrong to produce lab-grown foodstuffs so that everyone in the Downtown Eastside could eat a meal ("a succulent Chinese meal!")? No. Frankly, even "primitive" technology is technology but Kingsnorth often fails to draw distinctions between what is good technology and what is the Machine.
Towards the end of his book, Kingsnorth speaks of how humans require multiple kinds of roots. I do think there is truth to us needing roots, though as a Christian, I am more convinced that my essential rootedness is in Christ and his Church. I do appreciate a "nationalism" that invests in a country's culture (I probably should listen to more Canadian artists than Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn and I probably should read Miriam Toews, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Joseph Boyden, Alice Munro, and Robertson Davies) but are "my people" the Quebecois social democrat who majored in art history and who is "ethically non-monogamous" or is it the Kenyan Anglican living in Malindi? As Richard Mouw puts it in Political Evangelism, “The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.”
I wish Jesus showed up more in Against the Machine; at times, Christianity comes across as more instrumental to Kingsnorth’s worldview rather than as a personal relationship and life of discipleship. Certainly, Kingsnorth urges us to practice "ascesis," discipline, in order to wean ourselves off of addiction to technology and the Machine, but I wish there was more of an urging to turn towards Christ. The call for discipline, for recognizing and abiding in limitations, is good counsel, though sometimes Kingsnorth's critique of globalization is a bit silly; he is upset that shoppers can now buy avocados in Britain in the winter when it wasn't like that a few decades ago!
Lastly, there is Kingsnorth's "anthropology." Kingsnorth asserts that "The Machine exists to create dependency" and so he has set out to make himself more self-sufficient (p. 183). This is a noble aspiration and he recounts how, since moving to his small farm in western Ireland, he has learned skills our rural ancestors once took for granted, such as growing food, composting, building, fixing. Frankly, I am pretty inept at basic home maintenance and I should learn a lot of these skills too (and I could use YouTube to view a tutorial!). But I am not so sure that the drive towards self-sufficiency is adequate for a robust, faithful anthropology. Indeed, Leah Libresco Sargeant has recently written The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. I see emerging among the right a call to be something like a "rugged frontiersman," especially among men, when in reality, most of us don't need to be that in the 21st century. I don't think librarians, accountants, nurses, and therapists need to move to the country and live on a farmstead. Discipline is hard and there will be growing pains necessarily, but I also don't think we need to suffer for the sake of rugged individualism. Have your avocado toast in January!
Against the Machine is a good summation of Kingsnorth's thought and I appreciate his dire warnings about the Machine. But this book belongs in the lineage of "cultural apocalpyticisms" like The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation but where Rod Dreher sees the threat of extreme secularism as the West's fundamental problem, for Kingsnorth it's the totalizing power of technopoly. And yet, we really can't evade technology; rather, we need to learn how to discipline our use of it.
I do genuinely find myself in agreement with a lot of what Kingsnorth muses upon. Like many "postliberals," he decries the excesses of social liberalism while also turning a scathing eye to the ways conservatives have blithely promoted capitalism, unaware that it has polluted the globe, uprooted natives, and helped to erase the traditions that those on the right especially ought to hold dear. Kingsnorth joins the likes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt who warn of how technology and our digital devices are rewiring our brains. Kingsnorth even makes the suggestion that the Machine and AI are demonic, tools in the Enemy's arsenal; this might seem far-fetched, but I will give this to Kingsnorth - he takes the unseen realm more seriously than a lot of Christians in the West do. Throughout the book, Kingsnorth insists that we have a fundamental need for roots but that the Machine has cut us off from them (here I think of David Goodhart's conception of the "somewheres" and the "anywheres"; the somewheres belong to a particular place and they establish themselves there, forging connections with their neighbours and loyalty to their land, whereas the anywheres globe-trot around their country and around the world, happy to be mobile for the sake of wherever they will get the biggest paycheque). Kingsnorth nostalgically recalls the glories of the West's past but now believes it has been so thoroughly corrupted that it may be time to let it die.
While I agree with a lot of the sentiment of Against the Machine, I think it has some flaws. For one, it is highly ironic that an English thinker who groans about our lack of roots has left his homeland of England behind to live in western Ireland. Kingsnorth grumps about how, unfortunately, he has to type out his work on his laptop when one of his heroes literally wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (and has had a pretty darn successful literary career despite it!).
Kingsnorth draws upon the usual suspects that postliberals and conservatives like to invoke - Wendell Berry, Brad Gregory, Alasdair MacIntyre, Simone Weil, Christopher Lasch, Jacques Ellul. But he also turns to more shadowy, unorthodox, esoteric figures like René Guénon, Oswald Spengler, and John Moriarty. As much as I believe that Christians can "plunder the Egyptians" and glean valuable insights from non-Christian sources, I get wary when Christians turn to thinkers who have inspired the radical right. It is good, good news that Kingsnorth has converted to Christianity (just as it is encouraging that other notable public intellectuals like Louise Perry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Niall Ferguson have as well) and I don't want to be overly suspicious, but Eastern Orthodoxy in particular seems to be susceptible to reactionaries, especially those who hold to traditional values while rebuking the decadence and liberalism of the West.
Kingsnorth is a novelist but at times his narrative in Against the Machine is tilted far too much into the sweeping panache of a grand plot than it is to careful, nuanced reason (Kingsnorth actually sees the West as being too dominated by reason and he comes across as a nostalgic Romantic but I would argue that emotion and feeling are equally driving our culture; how much of transgenderism is based on cold, calculating rationality and how much by "I just feel like I am in the wrong body!"?). Kingsnorth is certainly a visionary but visionaries have an awful habit of being too vague and macro-level in their thinking - even lazy. For instance, he rails against cities (citing Spengler's analysis in The Decline of the West) for uprooting peoples from the land and confining them in cosmopolis but cities also create their own cultures. There is a culture to Jimbōchō in Tokyo, to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, to Commercial Drive in Vancouver; the culture may not be good (just look at the Downtown Eastside), but it exists nonetheless. Cities are places of culture, as Timothy Keller so often said. I do hope Kingsnorth will enjoy living in the New Jerusalem for all eternity. Kingsnorth laments the excesses of capitalism but in order to make the market more humane I would argue would require state intervention but Kingsnorth also gripes about how powerful and large the state has become.
Kingsnorth is also rather inconsistent in our relationship to technology. There are definitely negative things about technology - pornography is ubiquitous, schoolyard villains can doggedly pursue their victims home through cyberbullying, people's finances can be hacked into. As a bookseller, I can't count how many times a customer will say they will order their book on Amazon because it will arrive faster - and so our sense of patience erodes. But technology also holds potential for much good. Do I think we should use technology to create "perfect" designer babies? No. But do I think it would be good to be able to cure cancer in an infant in the womb? Yes. Would I prefer to eat an organic steak? Yes. But do I think it would be morally wrong to produce lab-grown foodstuffs so that everyone in the Downtown Eastside could eat a meal ("a succulent Chinese meal!")? No. Frankly, even "primitive" technology is technology but Kingsnorth often fails to draw distinctions between what is good technology and what is the Machine.
Towards the end of his book, Kingsnorth speaks of how humans require multiple kinds of roots. I do think there is truth to us needing roots, though as a Christian, I am more convinced that my essential rootedness is in Christ and his Church. I do appreciate a "nationalism" that invests in a country's culture (I probably should listen to more Canadian artists than Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn and I probably should read Miriam Toews, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Joseph Boyden, Alice Munro, and Robertson Davies) but are "my people" the Quebecois social democrat who majored in art history and who is "ethically non-monogamous" or is it the Kenyan Anglican living in Malindi? As Richard Mouw puts it in Political Evangelism, “The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.”
I wish Jesus showed up more in Against the Machine; at times, Christianity comes across as more instrumental to Kingsnorth’s worldview rather than as a personal relationship and life of discipleship. Certainly, Kingsnorth urges us to practice "ascesis," discipline, in order to wean ourselves off of addiction to technology and the Machine, but I wish there was more of an urging to turn towards Christ. The call for discipline, for recognizing and abiding in limitations, is good counsel, though sometimes Kingsnorth's critique of globalization is a bit silly; he is upset that shoppers can now buy avocados in Britain in the winter when it wasn't like that a few decades ago!
Lastly, there is Kingsnorth's "anthropology." Kingsnorth asserts that "The Machine exists to create dependency" and so he has set out to make himself more self-sufficient (p. 183). This is a noble aspiration and he recounts how, since moving to his small farm in western Ireland, he has learned skills our rural ancestors once took for granted, such as growing food, composting, building, fixing. Frankly, I am pretty inept at basic home maintenance and I should learn a lot of these skills too (and I could use YouTube to view a tutorial!). But I am not so sure that the drive towards self-sufficiency is adequate for a robust, faithful anthropology. Indeed, Leah Libresco Sargeant has recently written The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. I see emerging among the right a call to be something like a "rugged frontiersman," especially among men, when in reality, most of us don't need to be that in the 21st century. I don't think librarians, accountants, nurses, and therapists need to move to the country and live on a farmstead. Discipline is hard and there will be growing pains necessarily, but I also don't think we need to suffer for the sake of rugged individualism. Have your avocado toast in January!
Against the Machine is a good summation of Kingsnorth's thought and I appreciate his dire warnings about the Machine. But this book belongs in the lineage of "cultural apocalpyticisms" like The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation but where Rod Dreher sees the threat of extreme secularism as the West's fundamental problem, for Kingsnorth it's the totalizing power of technopoly. And yet, we really can't evade technology; rather, we need to learn how to discipline our use of it.
Read
December 20, 2025I appreciated Kingsnorth's look at how capitalism has affected things that we now experience as normal. His take on the Luddites, enclosure, and stealing the common from the goose provided helpful context for the world that I'm trying to navigate. The book is a beautiful weave of ideas and words from familiar writers like Chesterton and Ellul. It's the most coherent synthesis of the political and economic visions from the intellectual waters that I've been swimming in that I've yet encountered. Therefore, it was gratifying to read.
As a Mennonite, I'm often around economic radicals. I hear terms like "doctrine of nonaccumulation," I bump into Hutterites here and there, and I subscribe to Plough. The ideals are in the religious air that I breath, but they're not often applicable in the real experience of life in a capitalist world where the machine is supreme. The days of my grandfathers who had a life that integrated land, family, work, and church is past and cannot be quickly rebuilt. Sometimes I wonder what resources my religious tradition has much to offer to in achieving a Jesus-ish economic life in 2025. Kingsnorth is helping to fill this lack for me.
The framework of people, place, prayer, and the past as an alternative to sex, science, self, and the screen gives me a way to think about how to pursue life that isn't enslaved to the machine.
Kingsnorth seems interested in freedom and autonomy. I wish that I knew what he is looking for in these things.
As a Mennonite, I'm often around economic radicals. I hear terms like "doctrine of nonaccumulation," I bump into Hutterites here and there, and I subscribe to Plough. The ideals are in the religious air that I breath, but they're not often applicable in the real experience of life in a capitalist world where the machine is supreme. The days of my grandfathers who had a life that integrated land, family, work, and church is past and cannot be quickly rebuilt. Sometimes I wonder what resources my religious tradition has much to offer to in achieving a Jesus-ish economic life in 2025. Kingsnorth is helping to fill this lack for me.
The framework of people, place, prayer, and the past as an alternative to sex, science, self, and the screen gives me a way to think about how to pursue life that isn't enslaved to the machine.
Kingsnorth seems interested in freedom and autonomy. I wish that I knew what he is looking for in these things.
December 31, 2025
This is epistemologically-unwarranted nonsense masking as environmentalism. Paul Kingsnorth is a good writer. He writes with the eloquence of many environmental writers, which helps disguise this book from what it really is. It was deceiving enough that I picked this book up on an impulse after reading the synopsis and made it through half the book before fully realizing where Kingsnorth really stands (there were some red flags along the way that make sense in hindsight). Full disclosure, I stopped reading in the middle of part 3. I'm not going to waste my time reading non-fiction that can't be backed up by logic and evidence and I'm certainly not going to waste my time reading bigotry. Instead, I'd rather spend time explaining why you shouldn't read this book.
I want to start with explaining the notion of something being epistemologically unwarranted. This describes beliefs that cannot be backed up by evidence and logic. They include things like superstitions and conspiracy theories, but also worldviews based on myth rather than reality. For a non-fiction book to be credible, the author must put in a lot of work. This is where evidence comes in. Non-fiction requires a ton of research and investigation, including verifying that research is valid. You can often tell how serious an author's research is by the notes/references section in the back. If the author did their research, this section should be substantial, amounting to a large percentage of book. Sometimes it may be as long as writing itself! The notes section in this book is 11 pages. That's not surprising given Kingsnorth's approach, which instead of drawing on many sources to formulate his own opinions, he instead focuses on regurgitating the beliefs of other thinkers and writers. Most chapters focus on a single person's beliefs. This leads into the second problem, which is one of logic.
In a good non-fiction book, the author cross references many sources to gain as much knowledge about a subject prior to making conclusions. When relying on a single source or a few sources, there is a much greater chance for biases like fundamental attribution error. When drawing from many sources, you can start to see the bigger picture. You can look for contradictions, inconsistencies, and see why expert opinions vary. Trusting a single source opens the author up to being completely wrong, whereas referencing many sources provides a stronger base to draw from. Without that foundation, there is often missing information that undermines the ability to be logical. That's the realm Kingsnorth lives in. It's a narrow worldview built on relatively few sources that ends up being largely epistemologically unwarranted. That's a nicer way of me saying "bullshit".
Kingsnorth's biggest area of neglected knowledge is evolutionary biology. It is the basis of nearly any study regarding humans. Evolution is fact and without a foundation in evolutionary biology, it's easy to descend into the realm of myth and bias. His ignorance is exposed quite early on, stating that culture is spiritual, giving them implication that it stems from a higher power. This is nonsense. Culture comes from the same evolutionary mechanisms that spirituality does, most specifically, our capacity for symbolic thought. Believing that culture is spiritual is a foundational belief that invalidates many subsequent parts of Kingsnorth's worldview. This becomes evident as he claims that liberalism and the machine are what he calls "anti-culture". Shortly after, he claims that liberal economics didn't "evolve" and had to be forced upon society. Neither of these things is remotely true. All culture comes from evolution. What he believes is a negation is simply culture evolving into new culture. What he calls "forced" is cultural evolution via artificial selection. It's the same mechanism - albeit for culture - that we use when breeding animals for desirable outcomes.
A large part of his problem - including the belief that culture is spiritual - stems from a weird combination of the naturalistic fallacy paired with epistemologically-unwarranted lines of thought. Because he doesn't understand that culture is a product of evolution, he believes that the culture of the past is sacred. In that belief, he conflates myth with nature and then applies sanctity to a perverted use of nature. This is not Darwin's nature. It's religiously-influenced myth masquerading as nature. That introduced all sorts of the worst cultural constructs humans have created: transphobia, homophobia, racism, and so on. It's not surprising that because Kingsnorth thinks this way that he falls victim to these bigoted impulses. It doesn't get bad until the third part.
There are two chapters I want to debunk specifically to discredit his bigoted stances. The first is one called "The Abolition of Man (and Woman)". In it, he resorts to the same old rightwing talking points about how modern society has been destroyed by gender usurping traditional roles. The transphobia comes full out here, resorting to the simple-minded worldview that people are being tricked into becoming transgender. If he studied any evolutionary biology, he could have avoided coming off as an ignorant bigot. Gender is a cultural construct, as much as any other creation of symbolic thought. Human brains are complex. They do not exist in a binary, just as our sexual reproductive organs don't exist in binary. Gender evolved to describe the numerous iterations that can exist between our brains and bodies. What he describes as spiritual and sacred culture is actually a piss-poor version of culture that tried to eliminate and ignore the diversity that is the human brain and body. Many iterations of gender we see today have existed long before doctrines like Christianity tried to suppress them. Transphobia is only an issue today because indoctrinated individuals like Kingsnorth have been conditioned to fear a fundamental evolutionary truth: that our brains may have characteristics of the sex opposite of our reproductive organs.
In a later chapter, he dives into sexuality. He claims that modern society has been forcefully turned into a sexually obsessed and perverse culture, revolving around queerness and other things like hook-up culture and birth control. Once again, this all stems from Kingsnorth's complete ignorance when it comes to evolutionary biology. Sex is the most fundamental part of natural existence. Sexual reproduction lies at the core of evolution for many species, including ours. No animal other than humans knows sex leads to offspring. Humans, like many animals, have sex because it feels good and because it is evolutionarily necessary to do so. Religion has been the primary driver of the incorrect beliefs that Kingsnorth thinks are natural. In nature, homosexuality is normal and common. Polyamory is common. Abortion (via forced miscarriage) is normal in many mammalian species and humans have engaged in birth control methods long before religion was a thing.
It's not surprising that he rails against science. Science has provided us with the capability to create a worldview based on evidence and logic. While I completely agree that science has allowed technology to destroy the world, that's a different discussion. Instead, Kingsnorth demeans the scientific mentality in order to promote the kind of worldview we had before science; one based on myth and superstition. He does so to promote the idea that culture from a particular period of human existence - and a tiny one at that - is the culture that nature (god) intended us to have. What about the culture before that? What about the culture since? It is apt that Kingsnorth describes himself in his bio as a "thinker". Being a thinker doesn't require the use of logic like a philosopher. It doesn't require the use of evidence like a scientist. He is a thinker in the vein of the religious ones of centuries past that helped push so many unsubstantiated narratives and beliefs onto this world, no matter how epistemologically unwarranted they were. At the end of the day, they're not really thinkers. They're simply incredibly biased and ignorant individuals with a bloated sense of self importance.
I want to start with explaining the notion of something being epistemologically unwarranted. This describes beliefs that cannot be backed up by evidence and logic. They include things like superstitions and conspiracy theories, but also worldviews based on myth rather than reality. For a non-fiction book to be credible, the author must put in a lot of work. This is where evidence comes in. Non-fiction requires a ton of research and investigation, including verifying that research is valid. You can often tell how serious an author's research is by the notes/references section in the back. If the author did their research, this section should be substantial, amounting to a large percentage of book. Sometimes it may be as long as writing itself! The notes section in this book is 11 pages. That's not surprising given Kingsnorth's approach, which instead of drawing on many sources to formulate his own opinions, he instead focuses on regurgitating the beliefs of other thinkers and writers. Most chapters focus on a single person's beliefs. This leads into the second problem, which is one of logic.
In a good non-fiction book, the author cross references many sources to gain as much knowledge about a subject prior to making conclusions. When relying on a single source or a few sources, there is a much greater chance for biases like fundamental attribution error. When drawing from many sources, you can start to see the bigger picture. You can look for contradictions, inconsistencies, and see why expert opinions vary. Trusting a single source opens the author up to being completely wrong, whereas referencing many sources provides a stronger base to draw from. Without that foundation, there is often missing information that undermines the ability to be logical. That's the realm Kingsnorth lives in. It's a narrow worldview built on relatively few sources that ends up being largely epistemologically unwarranted. That's a nicer way of me saying "bullshit".
Kingsnorth's biggest area of neglected knowledge is evolutionary biology. It is the basis of nearly any study regarding humans. Evolution is fact and without a foundation in evolutionary biology, it's easy to descend into the realm of myth and bias. His ignorance is exposed quite early on, stating that culture is spiritual, giving them implication that it stems from a higher power. This is nonsense. Culture comes from the same evolutionary mechanisms that spirituality does, most specifically, our capacity for symbolic thought. Believing that culture is spiritual is a foundational belief that invalidates many subsequent parts of Kingsnorth's worldview. This becomes evident as he claims that liberalism and the machine are what he calls "anti-culture". Shortly after, he claims that liberal economics didn't "evolve" and had to be forced upon society. Neither of these things is remotely true. All culture comes from evolution. What he believes is a negation is simply culture evolving into new culture. What he calls "forced" is cultural evolution via artificial selection. It's the same mechanism - albeit for culture - that we use when breeding animals for desirable outcomes.
A large part of his problem - including the belief that culture is spiritual - stems from a weird combination of the naturalistic fallacy paired with epistemologically-unwarranted lines of thought. Because he doesn't understand that culture is a product of evolution, he believes that the culture of the past is sacred. In that belief, he conflates myth with nature and then applies sanctity to a perverted use of nature. This is not Darwin's nature. It's religiously-influenced myth masquerading as nature. That introduced all sorts of the worst cultural constructs humans have created: transphobia, homophobia, racism, and so on. It's not surprising that because Kingsnorth thinks this way that he falls victim to these bigoted impulses. It doesn't get bad until the third part.
There are two chapters I want to debunk specifically to discredit his bigoted stances. The first is one called "The Abolition of Man (and Woman)". In it, he resorts to the same old rightwing talking points about how modern society has been destroyed by gender usurping traditional roles. The transphobia comes full out here, resorting to the simple-minded worldview that people are being tricked into becoming transgender. If he studied any evolutionary biology, he could have avoided coming off as an ignorant bigot. Gender is a cultural construct, as much as any other creation of symbolic thought. Human brains are complex. They do not exist in a binary, just as our sexual reproductive organs don't exist in binary. Gender evolved to describe the numerous iterations that can exist between our brains and bodies. What he describes as spiritual and sacred culture is actually a piss-poor version of culture that tried to eliminate and ignore the diversity that is the human brain and body. Many iterations of gender we see today have existed long before doctrines like Christianity tried to suppress them. Transphobia is only an issue today because indoctrinated individuals like Kingsnorth have been conditioned to fear a fundamental evolutionary truth: that our brains may have characteristics of the sex opposite of our reproductive organs.
In a later chapter, he dives into sexuality. He claims that modern society has been forcefully turned into a sexually obsessed and perverse culture, revolving around queerness and other things like hook-up culture and birth control. Once again, this all stems from Kingsnorth's complete ignorance when it comes to evolutionary biology. Sex is the most fundamental part of natural existence. Sexual reproduction lies at the core of evolution for many species, including ours. No animal other than humans knows sex leads to offspring. Humans, like many animals, have sex because it feels good and because it is evolutionarily necessary to do so. Religion has been the primary driver of the incorrect beliefs that Kingsnorth thinks are natural. In nature, homosexuality is normal and common. Polyamory is common. Abortion (via forced miscarriage) is normal in many mammalian species and humans have engaged in birth control methods long before religion was a thing.
It's not surprising that he rails against science. Science has provided us with the capability to create a worldview based on evidence and logic. While I completely agree that science has allowed technology to destroy the world, that's a different discussion. Instead, Kingsnorth demeans the scientific mentality in order to promote the kind of worldview we had before science; one based on myth and superstition. He does so to promote the idea that culture from a particular period of human existence - and a tiny one at that - is the culture that nature (god) intended us to have. What about the culture before that? What about the culture since? It is apt that Kingsnorth describes himself in his bio as a "thinker". Being a thinker doesn't require the use of logic like a philosopher. It doesn't require the use of evidence like a scientist. He is a thinker in the vein of the religious ones of centuries past that helped push so many unsubstantiated narratives and beliefs onto this world, no matter how epistemologically unwarranted they were. At the end of the day, they're not really thinkers. They're simply incredibly biased and ignorant individuals with a bloated sense of self importance.
February 28, 2026
A Texan would NEVER write this book!!! It was so annoying to read because I agree with almost all of his micro points but his larger intellectual project just does not work for me.
I don’t think Christians can be anti-civilization or anti-city given that the Kingdom of God is a city, Babel restored in the New Jerusalem?? His final charge to the reader is to “rain dance” on your iPhone until it is smashed, which is certainly a vibe but can’t we all agree that there are higher heights and richer depths of moral guidance offered to us by the Church?
And, just from the bottom of my heart, this is a book by and about the UK. Tiny cars, tiny passions, a dying civilization, and not a whiff of Thumos. He doesn’t know any folk songs and blames the city for that?
He should move to Texas and buy a Tundra, and I promise he would feel a lot better!!!
And finally, girls, I think that enchantment and solidarity is a much better path through our Machine age than his plan (kill the west, forage mushrooms, rain dance). He talks about going to the grocery store and seeing beans advertised as being about love or being at a little ice cream shop in a touristy town and having these radical existential visions of everything around him and how it is all totally fake and bankrupt and nothingness. In that moment, another perfectly licit and much better option is to look around and find another human being or Thing and to open yourself up to a true connection/experience with the person or Thing. Love is the way through! Enchantment! Beans ARE actually about love!!!
I don’t think Christians can be anti-civilization or anti-city given that the Kingdom of God is a city, Babel restored in the New Jerusalem?? His final charge to the reader is to “rain dance” on your iPhone until it is smashed, which is certainly a vibe but can’t we all agree that there are higher heights and richer depths of moral guidance offered to us by the Church?
And, just from the bottom of my heart, this is a book by and about the UK. Tiny cars, tiny passions, a dying civilization, and not a whiff of Thumos. He doesn’t know any folk songs and blames the city for that?
He should move to Texas and buy a Tundra, and I promise he would feel a lot better!!!
And finally, girls, I think that enchantment and solidarity is a much better path through our Machine age than his plan (kill the west, forage mushrooms, rain dance). He talks about going to the grocery store and seeing beans advertised as being about love or being at a little ice cream shop in a touristy town and having these radical existential visions of everything around him and how it is all totally fake and bankrupt and nothingness. In that moment, another perfectly licit and much better option is to look around and find another human being or Thing and to open yourself up to a true connection/experience with the person or Thing. Love is the way through! Enchantment! Beans ARE actually about love!!!
Read
January 31, 2026This book verges on the ravings of a mad man, but as insulting as that may seem, I don't mean it as one. The times we live in—with the uninhibited drive for technological progress, the obliteration of small entities by large corporations, the consolidation of power into an increasingly small group of people, mass psychological degredation by certain digital technologies, the reduction of human life into that of consumer and worker, and the rampant destruction of the earth in the name of the "economy"—all these forces, just to name a few, are sufficient to break a person's sanity. And the specious obviousness and naturalness of these forces makes the person raging against them sound hysterical.
Initially, I expected to love this book, but that shifted the longer I read. It's impressive in the range of authors it engages and the depth of analysis it attempts to offer the modern age. Our current societal issues are much deeper than any mere political analysis and have been hundreds of years in the making. Kingsnorth's emphasis on people, place, and cultural mythology seems exactly correct to me and has been helpful to me in making sense of my own experience. There's a lot I liked.
But the overall argument lacks coherence and at points rides on equivocation, ambiguity, and rank speculation. I was bit weirded out by his thoughts on AI and demonic manifestation. I was unnerved by his points that sounded much like what I've heard on the authoritarian right (although he would oppose this). Ultimately, though, it's too convenient for everything a person hates about the modern age to be a manifestation of one, singular, entity which is "the machine." And if he wanted a cogent and successful argument, he should have paid more attention to the underlying logic of "the machine" and everything he hates about the modern age to show how they are intrinsically linked. He raises many issues but sometimes fails to offer much rigorous argumentation. A skeptical reader likely wouldn't be convinced without more careful treatment. If you didn't already agree with Kingsnorth, good chance you would find portions off-putting.
Hopefully my criticisms aren't too harsh because I would actually like to reread this with others, and I did benefit from it.
Initially, I expected to love this book, but that shifted the longer I read. It's impressive in the range of authors it engages and the depth of analysis it attempts to offer the modern age. Our current societal issues are much deeper than any mere political analysis and have been hundreds of years in the making. Kingsnorth's emphasis on people, place, and cultural mythology seems exactly correct to me and has been helpful to me in making sense of my own experience. There's a lot I liked.
But the overall argument lacks coherence and at points rides on equivocation, ambiguity, and rank speculation. I was bit weirded out by his thoughts on AI and demonic manifestation. I was unnerved by his points that sounded much like what I've heard on the authoritarian right (although he would oppose this). Ultimately, though, it's too convenient for everything a person hates about the modern age to be a manifestation of one, singular, entity which is "the machine." And if he wanted a cogent and successful argument, he should have paid more attention to the underlying logic of "the machine" and everything he hates about the modern age to show how they are intrinsically linked. He raises many issues but sometimes fails to offer much rigorous argumentation. A skeptical reader likely wouldn't be convinced without more careful treatment. If you didn't already agree with Kingsnorth, good chance you would find portions off-putting.
Hopefully my criticisms aren't too harsh because I would actually like to reread this with others, and I did benefit from it.
January 22, 2026
Really 3.5 stars. While I am *deeply* sympathetic to the points made in this book and the "direction" the author would like readers to go in, I still found a few frustrations with the book. Regardless, Kingsnorth's "Four P's" and "Four S's" alone makes the book worth reading. I'd say the same thing about the "raw" vs "cooked" distinction of protesting the machine.
January 29, 2026
A 3.5 stars for me, but I can’t bear to give it less than 4. This review from Commonweal captures my thoughts and feelings about the book and more: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ki... —beguiles, baffles, then bores. He loses credibility and skill as the book goes on.
I truly think Kingsnorth is a prophet for our day, but also, this book leaves quite a bit to be desired. I actually appreciate how he brings in the spiritual elements of our post-modern moment even though it can seem rather fantastic. I take him very seriously while also understanding that he is A perspective, not THE perspective.
If you’re a serious student of the times and seasons, you should read this book.
I truly think Kingsnorth is a prophet for our day, but also, this book leaves quite a bit to be desired. I actually appreciate how he brings in the spiritual elements of our post-modern moment even though it can seem rather fantastic. I take him very seriously while also understanding that he is A perspective, not THE perspective.
If you’re a serious student of the times and seasons, you should read this book.
October 13, 2025
This is a beautifully written and presented book, but it often comes across as an old man howling at the moon.
Kingsnorth makes some on-point critiques of Western life but the solutions feel ill-considered and half-baked if you are not in the position of having a successful writing career behind you to enable you to sell up and move to the wilderness. Even here he demonstrates the problems of off-grid life that relies on those still on the grid. There are some exceptional paragraphs but too often it drifts into 'we've lost a sense of being English' and, although he seeks to avoid the right-wing mantras of the cultural Christianity grouping, it often strays close.
As with so many writers he relies on (Wendell Berry and Ellul to name two), the critique is good but the solution is unworkable.
Kingsnorth makes some on-point critiques of Western life but the solutions feel ill-considered and half-baked if you are not in the position of having a successful writing career behind you to enable you to sell up and move to the wilderness. Even here he demonstrates the problems of off-grid life that relies on those still on the grid. There are some exceptional paragraphs but too often it drifts into 'we've lost a sense of being English' and, although he seeks to avoid the right-wing mantras of the cultural Christianity grouping, it often strays close.
As with so many writers he relies on (Wendell Berry and Ellul to name two), the critique is good but the solution is unworkable.
January 4, 2026
Cannot process a proper review at this time. All I know is that immediately upon finishing this book I:
- Hugged my baby and shuddered at the world she's inheriting
- Finally for real got rid of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
- Watched the Matrix
- Turned back to page 1 to read it all over again
- Hugged my baby and shuddered at the world she's inheriting
- Finally for real got rid of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
- Watched the Matrix
- Turned back to page 1 to read it all over again
April 8, 2026
In a world where social media feeds people more of the same, reinforcing our existing views, it’s refreshing to read a book that sets out a viewpoint apparently diametrically opposed to my own (as a science writer), especially as the reality is that I find strong feelings in common with Paul Kingsnorth.
I certainly should feel opposition. Kingsnorth sees our culture as doomed, in part thanks to science and technology, or, as he puts it, the Machine (in the general, rather than physical, sense). And while I feel more optimistic about our ability to see beyond the self-centred aspect that technology has forced on us, I can certainly see the danger that Kingsnorth is highlighting as a real thing.
In chapter after well argued chapter, Kingsnorth shows how the move away from our roots, religion and culture, driven in part by the enlightenment, has had damaging results. These amount to fragmentation, a focus on the self rather than community, and a globalist approach that fascinatingly is just as appealing (if not more so) to the liberal left than to the capitalist right. He rightly eviscerates the way our intellectual elite has done away with everything that once mattered in its hatred of anything non-material. We have moved away, he says, from the essential four P's: people, place, prayer and the past.
Given the book's title, it’s hard not to add the word ‘rage’ to the front. In one sense I don’t feel any need to rage against Kingsnorth's Machine, because I appreciate what the it has done for humanity, whether it’s health care, or transport, or IT. But neither would I rage against Against the Machine - it’s a heartfelt book and where I stand alongside the author is raging against the dying of the light, if we can separate that term from Dylan Thomas, it appears to be the unwanted consequence of the Machine's ascendence. I don’t have a problem with technology, it has made our lives better. But I do have a problem with putting it in front of acknowledging our humanity and its roots. We need spirituality and nature and myth too. Hopefully books like this can encourage us to find ways to have both.
If I was to be a little petty I would point out that Kingsnorth himself, who stresses his attachment to being British and our culture and religious tradition has in fact moved to Ireland and become an Orthodox Christian - anything but his personal roots, especially given his doubts about supranational groupings like the EU. But I genuinely don't want to be petty, because something he does so well here is make the reader think about what makes life good... and what doesn't.
This review started with social media bubbles - I wish more of us could break out of literary bubbles. We read books that support our viewpoints. If more people who read science books could read books like this and more people who read books like this (or ‘literary fiction’) could read science books, the world would be a better place.
I certainly should feel opposition. Kingsnorth sees our culture as doomed, in part thanks to science and technology, or, as he puts it, the Machine (in the general, rather than physical, sense). And while I feel more optimistic about our ability to see beyond the self-centred aspect that technology has forced on us, I can certainly see the danger that Kingsnorth is highlighting as a real thing.
In chapter after well argued chapter, Kingsnorth shows how the move away from our roots, religion and culture, driven in part by the enlightenment, has had damaging results. These amount to fragmentation, a focus on the self rather than community, and a globalist approach that fascinatingly is just as appealing (if not more so) to the liberal left than to the capitalist right. He rightly eviscerates the way our intellectual elite has done away with everything that once mattered in its hatred of anything non-material. We have moved away, he says, from the essential four P's: people, place, prayer and the past.
Given the book's title, it’s hard not to add the word ‘rage’ to the front. In one sense I don’t feel any need to rage against Kingsnorth's Machine, because I appreciate what the it has done for humanity, whether it’s health care, or transport, or IT. But neither would I rage against Against the Machine - it’s a heartfelt book and where I stand alongside the author is raging against the dying of the light, if we can separate that term from Dylan Thomas, it appears to be the unwanted consequence of the Machine's ascendence. I don’t have a problem with technology, it has made our lives better. But I do have a problem with putting it in front of acknowledging our humanity and its roots. We need spirituality and nature and myth too. Hopefully books like this can encourage us to find ways to have both.
If I was to be a little petty I would point out that Kingsnorth himself, who stresses his attachment to being British and our culture and religious tradition has in fact moved to Ireland and become an Orthodox Christian - anything but his personal roots, especially given his doubts about supranational groupings like the EU. But I genuinely don't want to be petty, because something he does so well here is make the reader think about what makes life good... and what doesn't.
This review started with social media bubbles - I wish more of us could break out of literary bubbles. We read books that support our viewpoints. If more people who read science books could read books like this and more people who read books like this (or ‘literary fiction’) could read science books, the world would be a better place.
December 19, 2025
In the fashion of a truly "cooked barbarian," I listened to this as an audiobook.
All of my yurt-dwelling, composting-toilet sitting, Henry-and-the-Great-Society reading instincts are enflamed by this book.
Unlike many in the anti-tech thought world, Kingsnorth is not ruled by, nor does he wish to peddle, fear. His solutions are small, local, creative, and ultimately human. You can read this book at any level of entanglement with the machine and be inspired to plant an herb drink tea in quietude or finally give yourself the space to master that hobby which has always fascinated you. We got the machine in tiny bite-sized pieces over the course of centuries, and we can only free ourselves from it in the same way. I have read very few books as dour and yet jubilant as this one, and somehow it is that, more than the meticulous research or humor or insightful prophesy, that I like most about this book.
This book is the kind of prescient clarion call that every present needs to stand up and cry out unswervingly, but joyfully that something is very wrong with the world. And yet, is not blind to the fact that the same world still brims with everything that will make it right once again.
Make principles for yourself and live by them, taking the consequences as proof of life.
Grow roots.
Fear the Lord.
Let the West die, but don't you dare forget its story.
Homeschool your children.
Write poetry.
All these and other important lessons can be drawn from engaging with this book.
All of my yurt-dwelling, composting-toilet sitting, Henry-and-the-Great-Society reading instincts are enflamed by this book.
Unlike many in the anti-tech thought world, Kingsnorth is not ruled by, nor does he wish to peddle, fear. His solutions are small, local, creative, and ultimately human. You can read this book at any level of entanglement with the machine and be inspired to plant an herb drink tea in quietude or finally give yourself the space to master that hobby which has always fascinated you. We got the machine in tiny bite-sized pieces over the course of centuries, and we can only free ourselves from it in the same way. I have read very few books as dour and yet jubilant as this one, and somehow it is that, more than the meticulous research or humor or insightful prophesy, that I like most about this book.
This book is the kind of prescient clarion call that every present needs to stand up and cry out unswervingly, but joyfully that something is very wrong with the world. And yet, is not blind to the fact that the same world still brims with everything that will make it right once again.
Make principles for yourself and live by them, taking the consequences as proof of life.
Grow roots.
Fear the Lord.
Let the West die, but don't you dare forget its story.
Homeschool your children.
Write poetry.
All these and other important lessons can be drawn from engaging with this book.
February 5, 2026
I agree with most of Paul Kingsnorth's opinions: The Machine is coming (has come) for us all. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is looming. The West has colonized and destroyed the world and swept individual cultures away like dross. We'd be better off burning peat to warm our Irish cottages and homeschooling our Orthodox children and smashing our smartphones. All of this is true. But, sheesh, the way he says it! Just the absolute gloomiest. No hope whatsoever. He terrifies me.
My central beef with Kingsnorth in this book is that he decries all of these modern tendencies and technologies but never adequately explains why the things he cherishes are superior. If he spent more time praising and explicating the beauties of a life lived against the Machine, we might be more likely to take him at his word and change ourselves.
I'm at least further galvanized to turn away from my phone and refuse to use ChatGPT and seek an offline, handmade, rooted life as much as I can. For that, I am grateful for his depressive goading.
My central beef with Kingsnorth in this book is that he decries all of these modern tendencies and technologies but never adequately explains why the things he cherishes are superior. If he spent more time praising and explicating the beauties of a life lived against the Machine, we might be more likely to take him at his word and change ourselves.
I'm at least further galvanized to turn away from my phone and refuse to use ChatGPT and seek an offline, handmade, rooted life as much as I can. For that, I am grateful for his depressive goading.
March 20, 2026
3.4
Kingsnorth more or less accurately describes the evil of today's world that views creation and humanity as machine, which both the left and right are subsumed by. His vision of a way forward however is compromised by a spiritual blindness that fails to take into account the fundamentals of his own religion.
Pros: + Saving the west is a fool's errand.
+ In the end colonialism came home to roost.
+ The horror of how the green movement was subsumed by industrialism.
+ The artificialness of marxism vs the organicness of Ludditism and Zapatismo
+ AI as demonic. Science=faustian magic.
+ Since the Machine is wide reaching and industrial scale the true way to fight it is on the personal small scale (Isengard vs hobbits).
Cons: --- Biggest issue is his diminishment of Christianity to a vague "Western spirituality". Tellingly at a couple points he disparages protestant missions to Polynesia as globalism and that it would have been better had they maintained some ancient polynesian spirituality. He seems to think that all ancient spirituality is united in a common cause against the machine and so all spirituality is equally good, as long as it is local. He is also blind to the parts of Christianity that run against his local tribal utopia. Western globalism at some level is the product of biblical Christian theology. The ideal Jerusalem in Revelation is a huge multi-ethnic capital city (every single one of those things is something that Kingsnorth hates). The antichrist seems to be far more central to Kingsnorth's philosophy than Christ.
--- He sends a lot of conflicting signals. While he says that he is against utopias he ends up painting a utopia. he says he is against ideology but the whole book is ideology. He says that he isn't trying to save the west but that's all he focuses on.
--- At the end of the day liberalism is better than tribalism.
--- Urban spread disturbs me more than most, yet even I am uncomfortable with his assertion that city dwellers are less human.
Kingsnorth more or less accurately describes the evil of today's world that views creation and humanity as machine, which both the left and right are subsumed by. His vision of a way forward however is compromised by a spiritual blindness that fails to take into account the fundamentals of his own religion.
Pros: + Saving the west is a fool's errand.
+ In the end colonialism came home to roost.
+ The horror of how the green movement was subsumed by industrialism.
+ The artificialness of marxism vs the organicness of Ludditism and Zapatismo
+ AI as demonic. Science=faustian magic.
+ Since the Machine is wide reaching and industrial scale the true way to fight it is on the personal small scale (Isengard vs hobbits).
Cons: --- Biggest issue is his diminishment of Christianity to a vague "Western spirituality". Tellingly at a couple points he disparages protestant missions to Polynesia as globalism and that it would have been better had they maintained some ancient polynesian spirituality. He seems to think that all ancient spirituality is united in a common cause against the machine and so all spirituality is equally good, as long as it is local. He is also blind to the parts of Christianity that run against his local tribal utopia. Western globalism at some level is the product of biblical Christian theology. The ideal Jerusalem in Revelation is a huge multi-ethnic capital city (every single one of those things is something that Kingsnorth hates). The antichrist seems to be far more central to Kingsnorth's philosophy than Christ.
--- He sends a lot of conflicting signals. While he says that he is against utopias he ends up painting a utopia. he says he is against ideology but the whole book is ideology. He says that he isn't trying to save the west but that's all he focuses on.
--- At the end of the day liberalism is better than tribalism.
--- Urban spread disturbs me more than most, yet even I am uncomfortable with his assertion that city dwellers are less human.
April 20, 2026
A food-for-thought smorgasbord. I do feel more optimistic about our path than Kingsnorth, but he also has some very legitimate concerns about how societies and cultures have evolved or transitioned over the last several decades. I agree wit him that the uprooting of our histories and the transition away from a home-based culture is concerning, but I also think that Kingsnorth doesn't give enough due credit to the benefits that have come with 'The Machine'. Change in itself is not inherently bad, and the removal of some traditional 'human' qualities could be a long term benefit.
Big picture though, yes, our screen time is disgusting (as I sit here staring at a screen typing this up), the loss of the family-centered culture is a problem, and yes, everyone just needs to slow down. We are not designed to receive information at this speed, and it has decimated human decency. I encourage everyone to read this, regardless of your political and social positions. Solid four stars.
Big picture though, yes, our screen time is disgusting (as I sit here staring at a screen typing this up), the loss of the family-centered culture is a problem, and yes, everyone just needs to slow down. We are not designed to receive information at this speed, and it has decimated human decency. I encourage everyone to read this, regardless of your political and social positions. Solid four stars.
December 1, 2025
Edit: 4 days have gone by and I think this book broke me.
5/5 for thought-provoking and enjoyable writing.
Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastatising machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is *us* and *them,* here is *humanity* and *nature,* here is *people* and *God.* A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into dis-integration and we fall out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates; even if we find our way back ot the garden again, we cannot re-enter. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.
We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.
You are living among these ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful—intact cathedrals, Bach concertos—but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called ‘Christendom,’ a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story steeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing ans transforming everything in its image. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of indiviudals; with ‘God-given’ rights and duties; the attiude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe—its structure and meaning, and our human place within it.
[The West] is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.
The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be.
We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront, and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.
Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could. The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.
…people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost.
We turned away from a spiritual, rooted understanding of the world in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands.
We build and rebuild our cultures every day, in the stories we tell our children and ourselves.
This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true. But first, we are going to have to be crucified.
The rise and triumph of the internet—the neurological network of the Machine—has meant that there are now few places on Earth to which we can escape from the incessant noise of this state-corporated ‘growth’ and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing.
Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit.
…it’s the whole mindset of humantiy changing, from one which dwells in a place in which we are not the centre of attention, to one which exists in a new kind of landscape, built entirely by and for us.
You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to bank, finance houses and global corporations.
Why were the merchants the lowest order of society? Because their work created nothing of value.
Soon enough, human contact will be a luxury good, and like all luxury goods it will sell at a premium.
Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: *the web; the net.* I think: *These are things designed to trap prey.*
Humans have always used technologies, or at least tools; but for most of history they have been designed to augment human work rather than to entirely replace it.
“It is east for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be betwene people who wish to live as creatsures and people who wish to live as machines” (Wendell Berry).
1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being ‘a people.’
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods. 131
—
1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of ’sexuality’, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine.
The deepest human emotions are engaged to flog us cornflakes, shampoo and dog food. We are drowning in strategically commercialised passion.
In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories.
In a Machine anticulture, the home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise? Phones long ago replaced hearth fires. Handily, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under the pillow in case something urgent happens elsewhere while we sleep. We wouldn’t want to miss anything.
the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had more agency and power—in that sphere at least—than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests… Today’s ‘liberated’ woman is liberated from her home and children, who will be looked after by a paid stranger while she is out adding numbers to the gross national product like the men were before. ‘Freedom’, the highest prize, is always to be sought and won away from home, family and place.
When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally enables globoculture, when you can log on to Instragram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon, what does your ‘nationality’ even mean?
…the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A sense of being rooted. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll ‘datafy’ all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained ‘exabytes’ worth of information rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.
In just a few years we became smartphone junkies with anxious, addicted children, dedicated to scrolling for hours each day, in the process rewiring our minds and turning us away from nature and towards the Machine.
It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom. It is building a life in which you can see the stars and taste the air. It is to live on the margins, in your home or in your heart; to scatter the pattern. It is to speak truth and try to live it, to set your boundaries and refuse to step over them. It is to be a conscientious objector to the Machine.
Choosing the path of the cooked ascetic means you be must be prepared, at some stage, for life to get seriously inconvenient, or worse. But such a refusal can enrich as well as impoverish you. In exchange for your refusal, you get to keep your soul.
If we don’t have an end-game—‘saving the world’, say—then everything gets easier. The Earth still turns. These are churches. Prayer works. Nature gives and takes. The sunset is astonishing. There is poverty and death and injustice. There are miracles and there is some strange, saving love. It’s all still there.
Once, in a dark age a very long time ago, the Irish built monasteries. As the pagan armies flooded through the West, burning books and people, slaughtering priests and kidnapping villagers, the monks kept the manuscripts safe, and the teachings. Then, later, they emptied themselves and went out to the margins, to offer up those teachings to the barbarian kings. It was a ridiculous idea. As ridiculous as sending two halflings to throw a ring into a volcano under the nose of the dark lord. It was madness. But it worked.
5/5 for thought-provoking and enjoyable writing.
Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastatising machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked, and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions; the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly now here is *us* and *them,* here is *humanity* and *nature,* here is *people* and *God.* A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into dis-integration and we fall out of the garden forever. Armed angels are set at the gates; even if we find our way back ot the garden again, we cannot re-enter. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.
We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.
You are living among these ruins, and you have been all your life. Many of them are still beautiful—intact cathedrals, Bach concertos—but they are ruins nonetheless. They are the remains of something called ‘Christendom,’ a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story steeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing ans transforming everything in its image. No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of indiviudals; with ‘God-given’ rights and duties; the attiude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe—its structure and meaning, and our human place within it.
[The West] is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.
The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. What does that make us, its descendants, living amongst its beautiful ruins? It makes ours a culture with no sacred order. And this is a dangerous place to be.
We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront, and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.
Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could. The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.
…people don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost.
We turned away from a spiritual, rooted understanding of the world in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands.
We build and rebuild our cultures every day, in the stories we tell our children and ourselves.
This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true. But first, we are going to have to be crucified.
The rise and triumph of the internet—the neurological network of the Machine—has meant that there are now few places on Earth to which we can escape from the incessant noise of this state-corporated ‘growth’ and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing.
Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit.
…it’s the whole mindset of humantiy changing, from one which dwells in a place in which we are not the centre of attention, to one which exists in a new kind of landscape, built entirely by and for us.
You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to bank, finance houses and global corporations.
Why were the merchants the lowest order of society? Because their work created nothing of value.
Soon enough, human contact will be a luxury good, and like all luxury goods it will sell at a premium.
Many people have simply forgotten what it feels like not to be pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: *the web; the net.* I think: *These are things designed to trap prey.*
Humans have always used technologies, or at least tools; but for most of history they have been designed to augment human work rather than to entirely replace it.
“It is east for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be betwene people who wish to live as creatsures and people who wish to live as machines” (Wendell Berry).
1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being ‘a people.’
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods. 131
—
1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of ’sexuality’, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine.
The deepest human emotions are engaged to flog us cornflakes, shampoo and dog food. We are drowning in strategically commercialised passion.
In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories.
In a Machine anticulture, the home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise? Phones long ago replaced hearth fires. Handily, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under the pillow in case something urgent happens elsewhere while we sleep. We wouldn’t want to miss anything.
the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had more agency and power—in that sphere at least—than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests… Today’s ‘liberated’ woman is liberated from her home and children, who will be looked after by a paid stranger while she is out adding numbers to the gross national product like the men were before. ‘Freedom’, the highest prize, is always to be sought and won away from home, family and place.
When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally enables globoculture, when you can log on to Instragram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon, what does your ‘nationality’ even mean?
…the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A sense of being rooted. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll ‘datafy’ all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained ‘exabytes’ worth of information rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.
In just a few years we became smartphone junkies with anxious, addicted children, dedicated to scrolling for hours each day, in the process rewiring our minds and turning us away from nature and towards the Machine.
It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom. It is building a life in which you can see the stars and taste the air. It is to live on the margins, in your home or in your heart; to scatter the pattern. It is to speak truth and try to live it, to set your boundaries and refuse to step over them. It is to be a conscientious objector to the Machine.
Choosing the path of the cooked ascetic means you be must be prepared, at some stage, for life to get seriously inconvenient, or worse. But such a refusal can enrich as well as impoverish you. In exchange for your refusal, you get to keep your soul.
If we don’t have an end-game—‘saving the world’, say—then everything gets easier. The Earth still turns. These are churches. Prayer works. Nature gives and takes. The sunset is astonishing. There is poverty and death and injustice. There are miracles and there is some strange, saving love. It’s all still there.
Once, in a dark age a very long time ago, the Irish built monasteries. As the pagan armies flooded through the West, burning books and people, slaughtering priests and kidnapping villagers, the monks kept the manuscripts safe, and the teachings. Then, later, they emptied themselves and went out to the margins, to offer up those teachings to the barbarian kings. It was a ridiculous idea. As ridiculous as sending two halflings to throw a ring into a volcano under the nose of the dark lord. It was madness. But it worked.
April 5, 2026
I think it’s hard to overestimate how much Kingsnorth’s disillusionment with his youthful activism shaped the book. He saw the green movement taken over by CEOs and government projects, transforming environmentalism into something he no longer recognized. The Machine ate environmentalism just like it ate everything else. When Kingsnorth speaks of his former days of naivety and hubris…it’s those times when he believed change was possible. Now, he knows all is coming to an end; the machine will win. All that’s left is to get your own house in order, and settle in for the long defeat.
There is something very, very right about this. Kingsnorth has the voice of English prophet (I imagine he has tea with his locusts and honey), because he is willing to tell the truth. You forget how much everyone lies and ignores and pretends until your ears ring with an apocalyptic message that the world is ending and it’s all your fault. This is Kingsnorth’s greatest virtue: honesty. It’s the kind of truth-telling of a man on his death bed. No time for pleasantries. It’s sweat-of-the-brow proverbs or uncomfortable gallows humor. The central message of the book is somewhere in between: it’s okay to spend your whole life losing. We will not win. But we can lose the whole world and gain our souls.
If anyone would accuse Kingsnorth of providing no constructive solutions to techno-capitalism or cultural desecration, I would simply respond: “Shhhhhh! The prophets are talking, honey.” Such pragmatists would be both correct and incorrect. Correct, in that there is no blueprint or battleplan; no 10 steps to taking back the West (“The West Must Die”); no quantifiable or measurable strategy. Yet, incorrect, in that this is precisely the point. That‘s what the Machine wants. Paul Kingnorth wants to live on an Irish farm, kissing the Earth, raising his children, and dancing on the astroturf. Get with the anti-program.
This isn’t a hopeless book. It does offer something to attend to: it is the four P’s of people, place, prayer, and the past, along with a “reactionary radicalism,” which is an active attempt at creating, defending, or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps. And the models of a “cooked ascetic” and a “raw ascetic” are a good sketch of two faithful ways of life.
But the shiniest glimmer of hope comes at the end: “the age of the Machine…is the time we were born for. We can't leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.”
He recalls the Irish monks who stored the ancient manuscripts, while the pagan invaders desecrated the West, and when the time was right…they made known what they had preserved all those years. This is what we must do. We must learn to live well and perform our duty to God, our ancestors, our families, and the land beneath us—even while it all crumbles.
My criticism of the book is mainly that it reads like a collection of essays (which it is) instead of a coherent whole. That’s annoying. Plus I don’t think it will convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with the fundamental worldview (fortunately, I do), but I won’t be recommending it to everyone I know. And It’s also repetitive and simplistic and I prefer the idea of the book to the book itself. That’s the truth.
But, as I’ve made known, I consider Kingsnorth to be a publicly lamenting prophet, and who expects them to be coherent and clear? That would ruin the aesthetic anyways. He has said much, and this book will start a lot of important conversations, but we will need A LOT more to rage against “the Machine.”
Still, I’m grateful for Kingsnorth labeling the demonic giant, so we at least know where to sling our stones.
There is something very, very right about this. Kingsnorth has the voice of English prophet (I imagine he has tea with his locusts and honey), because he is willing to tell the truth. You forget how much everyone lies and ignores and pretends until your ears ring with an apocalyptic message that the world is ending and it’s all your fault. This is Kingsnorth’s greatest virtue: honesty. It’s the kind of truth-telling of a man on his death bed. No time for pleasantries. It’s sweat-of-the-brow proverbs or uncomfortable gallows humor. The central message of the book is somewhere in between: it’s okay to spend your whole life losing. We will not win. But we can lose the whole world and gain our souls.
If anyone would accuse Kingsnorth of providing no constructive solutions to techno-capitalism or cultural desecration, I would simply respond: “Shhhhhh! The prophets are talking, honey.” Such pragmatists would be both correct and incorrect. Correct, in that there is no blueprint or battleplan; no 10 steps to taking back the West (“The West Must Die”); no quantifiable or measurable strategy. Yet, incorrect, in that this is precisely the point. That‘s what the Machine wants. Paul Kingnorth wants to live on an Irish farm, kissing the Earth, raising his children, and dancing on the astroturf. Get with the anti-program.
This isn’t a hopeless book. It does offer something to attend to: it is the four P’s of people, place, prayer, and the past, along with a “reactionary radicalism,” which is an active attempt at creating, defending, or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps. And the models of a “cooked ascetic” and a “raw ascetic” are a good sketch of two faithful ways of life.
But the shiniest glimmer of hope comes at the end: “the age of the Machine…is the time we were born for. We can't leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.”
He recalls the Irish monks who stored the ancient manuscripts, while the pagan invaders desecrated the West, and when the time was right…they made known what they had preserved all those years. This is what we must do. We must learn to live well and perform our duty to God, our ancestors, our families, and the land beneath us—even while it all crumbles.
My criticism of the book is mainly that it reads like a collection of essays (which it is) instead of a coherent whole. That’s annoying. Plus I don’t think it will convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with the fundamental worldview (fortunately, I do), but I won’t be recommending it to everyone I know. And It’s also repetitive and simplistic and I prefer the idea of the book to the book itself. That’s the truth.
But, as I’ve made known, I consider Kingsnorth to be a publicly lamenting prophet, and who expects them to be coherent and clear? That would ruin the aesthetic anyways. He has said much, and this book will start a lot of important conversations, but we will need A LOT more to rage against “the Machine.”
Still, I’m grateful for Kingsnorth labeling the demonic giant, so we at least know where to sling our stones.
March 28, 2026
Reactionary garbage. The cliche story of a White GenX male who finds the world has changed in ways he doesn’t like and decides to rant and rave about it in the most unhinged possible way for 300+ pages. Not worth the paper it’s written on.
December 31, 2025
An extremely thought-provoking book that begs to be discussed on a wider scale.
There was plenty I disagreed with here, such as the author's identification of capitalism=consumerism=corporate/individual greed. As others have mentioned, I felt that in trying to summarize the problems of an entire age, the author stretched himself too thin and perhaps took some of the sting out of his punch. I also felt that Kingsnorth was better at diagnosing the problem than he was at prescribing a solution. Despite the keen observations of the book, there seemed to be a glaring omission: the power of Christ to overcome sin, the world, and Satan. To be fair, Kingsnorth kept alluding to traditional spirituality, but I felt that he kept his allusions a bit vague.
Despite these shortcomings, I would still highly recommend this book, if for no other reason than the fact that these cultural issues need to be discussed. Kingsnorth captures some of the problems of our current moment with bracing clarity. Too often, I find that Christians (myself included!) fall into extremes: we either adopt a glum pessimism about the world, or we act terrified and spend all our mental and spiritual energy preparing our bomb shelters, or we try to spiritually hand wave the evil of the world away via Christian platitudes like "God is in control." This book personally challenged me to want to engage the evils of this world through the power of God's word and in the context of community. It is through God's Word and Spirit that the church can live as a vibrant counterculture to the world, acting as salt and light. But this kind of counterculture often requires taking every thought captive. It requires honest dialogue and self-examination: how have I lived more like the pagans around me than like a member of the household of God? And it requires sacrifice--a willingness to be different for the sake of God's kingdom.
Much to chew on here.
Edit:
I was asked as part of a white elephant gift exchange to write a haiku that summarizes this book. So...here it is:
Modernity's ills
The cure? Not to transcend man
But walk ancient paths
There was plenty I disagreed with here, such as the author's identification of capitalism=consumerism=corporate/individual greed. As others have mentioned, I felt that in trying to summarize the problems of an entire age, the author stretched himself too thin and perhaps took some of the sting out of his punch. I also felt that Kingsnorth was better at diagnosing the problem than he was at prescribing a solution. Despite the keen observations of the book, there seemed to be a glaring omission: the power of Christ to overcome sin, the world, and Satan. To be fair, Kingsnorth kept alluding to traditional spirituality, but I felt that he kept his allusions a bit vague.
Despite these shortcomings, I would still highly recommend this book, if for no other reason than the fact that these cultural issues need to be discussed. Kingsnorth captures some of the problems of our current moment with bracing clarity. Too often, I find that Christians (myself included!) fall into extremes: we either adopt a glum pessimism about the world, or we act terrified and spend all our mental and spiritual energy preparing our bomb shelters, or we try to spiritually hand wave the evil of the world away via Christian platitudes like "God is in control." This book personally challenged me to want to engage the evils of this world through the power of God's word and in the context of community. It is through God's Word and Spirit that the church can live as a vibrant counterculture to the world, acting as salt and light. But this kind of counterculture often requires taking every thought captive. It requires honest dialogue and self-examination: how have I lived more like the pagans around me than like a member of the household of God? And it requires sacrifice--a willingness to be different for the sake of God's kingdom.
Much to chew on here.
Edit:
I was asked as part of a white elephant gift exchange to write a haiku that summarizes this book. So...here it is:
Modernity's ills
The cure? Not to transcend man
But walk ancient paths
October 29, 2025
Above all things in Against the Machine, I enjoyed Kingsnorth's image-building and extended metaphors. He plays ball with some of the great apocalyptic and prophetic thinkers of the last 200 years. It is, in many ways, the Benedict Option for the Year of Our Lord 2025.
I'm personally in agreement with many of his claims and nervous about the same topics that all resound of cultural despair and collapse, but I'm not at all convinced that his thesis surrounding techne overwhelmingly overcoming and distorting nature is fully true. More effort needed to be given towards the inherent goodness of reality and the "very" goodness of humanity and how that relates to the depravity/corruption/privation of that two-fold created goodness. He contends that the Genesis narratives are fundamental. His interpretation of stealing the fruit sheds light on some but not all of the implications for a post-fall world, and I'm mostly puzzled by his quick ending.
If the world's techne is at the apotheosis of its idolatry, why not end with a meditation on exorcising demons in the name of Christ. Maybe even a how-to of discerning modern spirits! That would require a vision of wordly interaction where each of us carries the apostolic seed of faith and sews that Good News into the rocky ground of a world dazzled by technological splendor. This assumes a much higher sense of God's control, which often felt absent in Kingsnorth's imagination.
I'm personally in agreement with many of his claims and nervous about the same topics that all resound of cultural despair and collapse, but I'm not at all convinced that his thesis surrounding techne overwhelmingly overcoming and distorting nature is fully true. More effort needed to be given towards the inherent goodness of reality and the "very" goodness of humanity and how that relates to the depravity/corruption/privation of that two-fold created goodness. He contends that the Genesis narratives are fundamental. His interpretation of stealing the fruit sheds light on some but not all of the implications for a post-fall world, and I'm mostly puzzled by his quick ending.
If the world's techne is at the apotheosis of its idolatry, why not end with a meditation on exorcising demons in the name of Christ. Maybe even a how-to of discerning modern spirits! That would require a vision of wordly interaction where each of us carries the apostolic seed of faith and sews that Good News into the rocky ground of a world dazzled by technological splendor. This assumes a much higher sense of God's control, which often felt absent in Kingsnorth's imagination.
February 1, 2026
What it says against the Machine is about as important as anything there is to say these days. If it's right, I want to be right like this. If it's wrong, it's no bad way to be wrong; it's better to be wrong than right.
No other book has articulated so precisely my own anguish at my own rootlessness, at the atrophying of the strength and identity that I had as recently as twenty years ago in my family and church. My anguish and my anger. When Kingsnorth starts his blessed "I hate screens" riff on p. 302, well, I don't hate screens as he does, but I do "hate the digital anticulture that has made them so ubiquitous."
This new world we're entering is what anguish and anger are made for. It makes no good promises.
But anguish and anger aren't constructive on their own. And the book does get to how to build, or how to resist, how to turn the Machine against itself and live in the margins. Centre on people, place, prayer, the past, not sex, science, screens, and the self. There's peace out there, as well as anger and fear. After all, this is the world in which we must all say yes to life.
No other book has articulated so precisely my own anguish at my own rootlessness, at the atrophying of the strength and identity that I had as recently as twenty years ago in my family and church. My anguish and my anger. When Kingsnorth starts his blessed "I hate screens" riff on p. 302, well, I don't hate screens as he does, but I do "hate the digital anticulture that has made them so ubiquitous."
This new world we're entering is what anguish and anger are made for. It makes no good promises.
But anguish and anger aren't constructive on their own. And the book does get to how to build, or how to resist, how to turn the Machine against itself and live in the margins. Centre on people, place, prayer, the past, not sex, science, screens, and the self. There's peace out there, as well as anger and fear. After all, this is the world in which we must all say yes to life.
February 15, 2026
A manifesto about many evils of Progress, compressed under the canopy of the “Machine.”
Not very satisfactory—I can’t quite enter into the conspiratorial vibes against civilization. I am sympathetic to parts of Kingsnorth’s vision for a life more rooted, less frenetic and distracted, but I think it can probably be found elsewhere, and if it is Kingsnorth you want, you can find him on Substack.
Seeking arguments for embodied living that are not so tech-despairing!!!
Not very satisfactory—I can’t quite enter into the conspiratorial vibes against civilization. I am sympathetic to parts of Kingsnorth’s vision for a life more rooted, less frenetic and distracted, but I think it can probably be found elsewhere, and if it is Kingsnorth you want, you can find him on Substack.
Seeking arguments for embodied living that are not so tech-despairing!!!
October 8, 2025
"An ideology built on remaking nature for human needs will inevitably include human nature in that project."
"The thread that links [science and magic] is control. Both the scientific enterprise and the magical quest—which is was part—spring from the same desire: To know the world and bend it to our will."
"Mother is such a problematic word—like home, like body, like God."
"And now that I looked, I saw that the whole place was emblazoned with the same kind of over-egged, exaggerated, breathless language. There was 'love' and 'passion' and 'excitement' and 'commitment' everywhere. I've noticed for a few years that the grimier the consuming experience gets, the more flurid becomes the language in which it is wrapped... We are drowning in strategically commercialized passion."
"The end result of this self-divination will be, irony of ironies, our own neutering."
(me, author of a piece against vasectomies, a bit too amused at that one.)
"Crucially, the technologization of sex and sexuality--which involves everything from online hookups to birth control pills to IVF to mastectomies for teenagers born in the wrong body is a huge shift in our relationship with human nature, and nature in general."
"What would a refusal to worship look like, and what would be the price?"
"Without an ascetic backbone, there is no spiritual body."
"You make real things with your hands. You pursue nature and truth and beauty. You have all the best jokes, because you have had to fight to tell them and you know what the real world tastes like."
"The thread that links [science and magic] is control. Both the scientific enterprise and the magical quest—which is was part—spring from the same desire: To know the world and bend it to our will."
"Mother is such a problematic word—like home, like body, like God."
"And now that I looked, I saw that the whole place was emblazoned with the same kind of over-egged, exaggerated, breathless language. There was 'love' and 'passion' and 'excitement' and 'commitment' everywhere. I've noticed for a few years that the grimier the consuming experience gets, the more flurid becomes the language in which it is wrapped... We are drowning in strategically commercialized passion."
"The end result of this self-divination will be, irony of ironies, our own neutering."
(me, author of a piece against vasectomies, a bit too amused at that one.)
"Crucially, the technologization of sex and sexuality--which involves everything from online hookups to birth control pills to IVF to mastectomies for teenagers born in the wrong body is a huge shift in our relationship with human nature, and nature in general."
"What would a refusal to worship look like, and what would be the price?"
"Without an ascetic backbone, there is no spiritual body."
"You make real things with your hands. You pursue nature and truth and beauty. You have all the best jokes, because you have had to fight to tell them and you know what the real world tastes like."
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