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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
1057 people are currently reading
6240 people want to read
About the author
Paul Kingsnorth
40 books603 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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 273 reviews
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!
October 22, 2025
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. 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. Our political contexts are wildly different, but 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. 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. Our political contexts are wildly different, but 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.
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 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.
November 9, 2025
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, 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, 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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."
November 17, 2025
This book is an absolute polemic against our modern capitalist tech-laden society and it is a wonderful one at that. Kingsnorth is right about nearly everything by my estimation. We badly needed someone to come along and just rip the mask off the whole thing. The "West" has largely fallen. We are fighting over the scraps. Modern "progress" is pure illusion. The onward march of technology is extremely dangerous. The smartphone was a mistake. We are unmaking our own humanity. And here is the part that 99 of every 100 commentators and talking heads will miss: This is all, at its most fundamental level, spiritual. We are souls, and all this mischief we've brought upon ourselves results from a disordered relationship with, or denial of, God. The emergence and rapid evolution of technology, especially towards general purpose AI that we don't even fully understand, can and will be actively used by darkness (Satan/demons) as a tool of its hatred for humanity. Absolutely true, a hundred times yes.
So why not five stars? Kingsnorth absolutely hates capitalism and gives us very little as to what he would replace it with. Capitalism, just as Churchill said of democracy, is the worst system, except for all the others. It does indeed play to many of our worst motives and passions and orients society toward the accumulation of wealth which corrodes the soul. But at root, capitalism only requires two things: 1) Private property + 2) Rule of law. While I partially concede Paul's point that often the early development of capitalist societies comes along with all sorts of unfortunate tagalongs to those two, I don't know what he thinks is preferable. The closest he gets is holding up the pre-industrial local economy as an example. But that still requires private property and the law to enforce it. While such an economy may be forced to large-scale industrial capitalism through state power and colonialism, it need not be. And it's simply not true that everywhere and at all times modern capitalism evolved from domineering state force that intentionally destroyed pre-industrial economies. Or, at least, I don't think it is. So there seems there is a natural incentive, given private property, towards economies of scale, towards technologization and industrialization and standardization, and it can happen all on its own. How would he stop it?
Which brings me to my final point. If you prefer an intentional earlier pre-industrial or pre-technological version of private property, you've got to acknowledge *some* trade-offs. Kingsnorth acknowledges zero. His position is, as far as I can tell, without any asterisks, that capitalism always makes the average man and the poor materially poorer. This is obviously false. Indeed, one of the main reasons that technology and screens are destroying so much of culture and human connection is because nearly everyone can afford a half dozen of them, along with a car, occasional plane tickets, home appliances, and consistent electricity. Material poverty is the natural condition of man, the starting point. Kingsnorth genuinely believes that when free trade comes to a pre-industrial society, everyone is made materially worse off. By contrast, capitalism has been the largest driving force within human history for lifting people out of material poverty. It absolutely comes with massive trade-offs! It enriches us materially while kicking about and corrupting our souls. It erodes local community and bombards us all with constant advertising and turns well-rounded people into highly specialized laborers totally dependent on others for 99% of their "needs". You can totally say the trade-offs aren't worth it, but you can't say that the world is materially poorer because of private property. It reminds me of the old boycott years ago of the "slave labor" American clothing companies used abroad. Companies actually left, closed up. The researchers followed up with those who were thrown out of work, Kingsnorth's "slaves" who were made so worse off by having to work awful factory jobs. Most of them were beggars and prostitutes. That's just the reality of it and Paul flatly denying it all doesn't change it.
Overall, a great read with one major blind spot. I still haven't heard a great way to solve these very real trade-offs of capitalism, so it can hardly be held against Paul that he didn't fix all the world's problems at once! He gets us going in absolutely the right direction and with a lot of the right values, ideas, and aspirations. Modernity is totally out of touch with actual spiritual reality and Paul knows it and he lays it out compellingly. And that makes this book a winner.
So why not five stars? Kingsnorth absolutely hates capitalism and gives us very little as to what he would replace it with. Capitalism, just as Churchill said of democracy, is the worst system, except for all the others. It does indeed play to many of our worst motives and passions and orients society toward the accumulation of wealth which corrodes the soul. But at root, capitalism only requires two things: 1) Private property + 2) Rule of law. While I partially concede Paul's point that often the early development of capitalist societies comes along with all sorts of unfortunate tagalongs to those two, I don't know what he thinks is preferable. The closest he gets is holding up the pre-industrial local economy as an example. But that still requires private property and the law to enforce it. While such an economy may be forced to large-scale industrial capitalism through state power and colonialism, it need not be. And it's simply not true that everywhere and at all times modern capitalism evolved from domineering state force that intentionally destroyed pre-industrial economies. Or, at least, I don't think it is. So there seems there is a natural incentive, given private property, towards economies of scale, towards technologization and industrialization and standardization, and it can happen all on its own. How would he stop it?
Which brings me to my final point. If you prefer an intentional earlier pre-industrial or pre-technological version of private property, you've got to acknowledge *some* trade-offs. Kingsnorth acknowledges zero. His position is, as far as I can tell, without any asterisks, that capitalism always makes the average man and the poor materially poorer. This is obviously false. Indeed, one of the main reasons that technology and screens are destroying so much of culture and human connection is because nearly everyone can afford a half dozen of them, along with a car, occasional plane tickets, home appliances, and consistent electricity. Material poverty is the natural condition of man, the starting point. Kingsnorth genuinely believes that when free trade comes to a pre-industrial society, everyone is made materially worse off. By contrast, capitalism has been the largest driving force within human history for lifting people out of material poverty. It absolutely comes with massive trade-offs! It enriches us materially while kicking about and corrupting our souls. It erodes local community and bombards us all with constant advertising and turns well-rounded people into highly specialized laborers totally dependent on others for 99% of their "needs". You can totally say the trade-offs aren't worth it, but you can't say that the world is materially poorer because of private property. It reminds me of the old boycott years ago of the "slave labor" American clothing companies used abroad. Companies actually left, closed up. The researchers followed up with those who were thrown out of work, Kingsnorth's "slaves" who were made so worse off by having to work awful factory jobs. Most of them were beggars and prostitutes. That's just the reality of it and Paul flatly denying it all doesn't change it.
Overall, a great read with one major blind spot. I still haven't heard a great way to solve these very real trade-offs of capitalism, so it can hardly be held against Paul that he didn't fix all the world's problems at once! He gets us going in absolutely the right direction and with a lot of the right values, ideas, and aspirations. Modernity is totally out of touch with actual spiritual reality and Paul knows it and he lays it out compellingly. And that makes this book a winner.
October 31, 2025
Unfortunately, Against the Machine is not the Christian critique I had hoped it would be: namely, the sort of thing Wendell Berry might write were he to join one of the ancient churches. Still, despite the letdown, I’d like, if I can, to do some small justice to Kingsnorth’s latest book.
To begin with, I should note that I, too, am against the Machine, and I’ve been an appreciative follower of Kingsnorth’s writing on this topic for almost two decades. (Some of his essays—like “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” and “Learning What to Make of It,” for example—are remarkably insightful and helpful.) I was also received into the Catholic church a mere year after Kingsnorth joined the Romanian Orthodox, and I have been eagerly anticipating what I had hoped would be Kingsnorth’s first thoroughly Christian book, especially given the impressively Christian Erasmus Lecture he delivered to a dining room full of “based” (i.e., sub-Christian) First Things insiders last fall.
But, alas (and puzzlingly), Against the Machine is not a particularly Christian book; indeed, it is even filled with errors of the sort that Kingsnorth has so powerfully excoriated the self-appointed defenders of “Christian civilization” for making. To pick just one example: Kingsnorth is obsessed with the power of myth, which he seems to believe floats free of logic. (Put another way: he seems to think that myth can “perform its cultural function,” as it were, even if no one belonging to the culture in question understands what the myth in question means; and he goes on to suggest that Christianity may (once?) have been this kind of myth—a strange thing for a self-professed Christian to propose!) And more generally, Kingsnorth almost seems embarrassed to think in a thoroughly Christian way—taking, as he does, nearly every opportunity to remind the reader that his conversion (from a syncretistic blend of desiccated Anglicanism, quasi-Buddhism, and Wicca) surprises even him. You can only say that sort of thing so many times before revealing a deep discomfort with your newfound religious commitments.
But of course, such an attitude is not without precedent. Terry Eagleton once wrote (with reference to Roger Scruton) that the “conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect,” in part because such converts have “a good deal to say about pews, choir stalls, polished brass and embroidered kneelers, but very little about the New Testament.” The curious case of Paul Kingsnorth suggests that much the same may be true of the conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Eastern Orthodox churches (or, at least, to that of Romania). I suppose that Kingsnorth himself might reject—even resent—the thought that he is a High Tory, but it’s patently true: in Against the Machine, he makes the tell-tale Burkean move of setting reason in opposition to tradition, only to take unreasonable tradition’s side. Like Scruton, then, Kingsnorth is more of a “romantic reactionary” (to use Eagleton’s illuminating term) than a thoroughly Christian thinker. Worst of all for Kingsnorth, this places him much closer to the boosters of the Machine than he wishes to be, since he and they agree in thinking that reason and tradition are opposed. In this, he and they make a disastrous misstep, after which further disagreements matter very little.
It may be that Kingsnorth simply finds himself without a Christian’s hope in such trying times as these; if so, I certainly sympathize with him. But the irony is that in spite of his avowed neo-Luddism, Kingsnorth is Extremely Online, and there is no quicker route to despair. I don’t say this for the sake of a “gotcha” potshot—I too am much more online than I’d like to be—but rather to suggest a potential source of the distortions in Kingsnorth’s vision of the present age. After reading Against the Machine, I am more convinced than ever that we need to get rid of our smartphones and drastically reduce both our screentime and the screens themselves. Kingsnorth can certainly help us think about how to do this, even if his account of the Machine is irremediably flawed.
To begin with, I should note that I, too, am against the Machine, and I’ve been an appreciative follower of Kingsnorth’s writing on this topic for almost two decades. (Some of his essays—like “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” and “Learning What to Make of It,” for example—are remarkably insightful and helpful.) I was also received into the Catholic church a mere year after Kingsnorth joined the Romanian Orthodox, and I have been eagerly anticipating what I had hoped would be Kingsnorth’s first thoroughly Christian book, especially given the impressively Christian Erasmus Lecture he delivered to a dining room full of “based” (i.e., sub-Christian) First Things insiders last fall.
But, alas (and puzzlingly), Against the Machine is not a particularly Christian book; indeed, it is even filled with errors of the sort that Kingsnorth has so powerfully excoriated the self-appointed defenders of “Christian civilization” for making. To pick just one example: Kingsnorth is obsessed with the power of myth, which he seems to believe floats free of logic. (Put another way: he seems to think that myth can “perform its cultural function,” as it were, even if no one belonging to the culture in question understands what the myth in question means; and he goes on to suggest that Christianity may (once?) have been this kind of myth—a strange thing for a self-professed Christian to propose!) And more generally, Kingsnorth almost seems embarrassed to think in a thoroughly Christian way—taking, as he does, nearly every opportunity to remind the reader that his conversion (from a syncretistic blend of desiccated Anglicanism, quasi-Buddhism, and Wicca) surprises even him. You can only say that sort of thing so many times before revealing a deep discomfort with your newfound religious commitments.
But of course, such an attitude is not without precedent. Terry Eagleton once wrote (with reference to Roger Scruton) that the “conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect,” in part because such converts have “a good deal to say about pews, choir stalls, polished brass and embroidered kneelers, but very little about the New Testament.” The curious case of Paul Kingsnorth suggests that much the same may be true of the conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Eastern Orthodox churches (or, at least, to that of Romania). I suppose that Kingsnorth himself might reject—even resent—the thought that he is a High Tory, but it’s patently true: in Against the Machine, he makes the tell-tale Burkean move of setting reason in opposition to tradition, only to take unreasonable tradition’s side. Like Scruton, then, Kingsnorth is more of a “romantic reactionary” (to use Eagleton’s illuminating term) than a thoroughly Christian thinker. Worst of all for Kingsnorth, this places him much closer to the boosters of the Machine than he wishes to be, since he and they agree in thinking that reason and tradition are opposed. In this, he and they make a disastrous misstep, after which further disagreements matter very little.
It may be that Kingsnorth simply finds himself without a Christian’s hope in such trying times as these; if so, I certainly sympathize with him. But the irony is that in spite of his avowed neo-Luddism, Kingsnorth is Extremely Online, and there is no quicker route to despair. I don’t say this for the sake of a “gotcha” potshot—I too am much more online than I’d like to be—but rather to suggest a potential source of the distortions in Kingsnorth’s vision of the present age. After reading Against the Machine, I am more convinced than ever that we need to get rid of our smartphones and drastically reduce both our screentime and the screens themselves. Kingsnorth can certainly help us think about how to do this, even if his account of the Machine is irremediably flawed.
December 1, 2025
Man oh man.
October 24, 2025
A very important book. I have felt this way for fifteen years and it's nice to know that there are others who feel and think similarly.
-brent
-brent
November 16, 2025
This is the first book Kingsnorth has written since undergoing his road to Damascus moment and joining the Romanian Orthodox Church. I had previously read many of these Substack essays, although they have undergone edits to better fit this format. Perhaps some will cringe when he suggests that smartphones and AI are literal portals to demonic realms, but even hardcore atheists should be able to find some value in his critique of modern civilisation. Largely, the religious element has been dialled down, as has his ecological emphasis; this book is mainly concerned with spiritual health and man's search for meaning.
The machine is a metaphor for the hollowing out of local culture, values and traditions to subsume regions into a globalist blob of digital markets. Yes, alien influences and migration play a large part in this process, but we must also accept that we have done it to ourselves.
"Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all."
The machine is a metaphor for the hollowing out of local culture, values and traditions to subsume regions into a globalist blob of digital markets. Yes, alien influences and migration play a large part in this process, but we must also accept that we have done it to ourselves.
"Since at least the 1960s our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all."
October 7, 2025
Fantastic read. Well written, insightful, and engaging. Something for everyone: AI, culture, the West, human futures, religion and spirituality, place and home. Well worth reading.
November 14, 2025
Reading this book is an unnerving experience. As my first introduction to Paul Kingsnorth, I found his personal journey from environmentalist to Orthodox Christian both fascinating and relevant to the book’s themes.
Kingsnorth’s depiction of our society’s drift into technological dependency—especially regarding AI—resonates deeply. He describes how we have become unmoored from traditional spiritual roots, moving toward a world where we attempt to remake ourselves as gods and believe technology will liberate us from biological constraints, promising a utopia of our own making.
His analogies to biblical texts are striking, even raising the possibility that the rise of AI could usher in something resembling the Anti-Christ.
It’s a challenging and worthwhile read!
Kingsnorth’s depiction of our society’s drift into technological dependency—especially regarding AI—resonates deeply. He describes how we have become unmoored from traditional spiritual roots, moving toward a world where we attempt to remake ourselves as gods and believe technology will liberate us from biological constraints, promising a utopia of our own making.
His analogies to biblical texts are striking, even raising the possibility that the rise of AI could usher in something resembling the Anti-Christ.
It’s a challenging and worthwhile read!
December 18, 2025
I think sometimes that my book reviews are no longer attempting to describe a book’s content, but are instead describing how I am internalizing it and integrating its message into my personal worldview. It will be especially so, I think, with this review.
Initially, I hesitate to affirm Kingsnorth’s externalization of the human problem. My reflex is that our problem, so far as there is only one, is internal; the line runs through the human heart, as Solzhenitsyn says. But if the threefold classification of the Christian’s enemy—the world, the flesh, and the devil—holds, the Machine that Kingsnorth observes may represent the enemy of the World.
This Machine “wants” to reorganize the world in a completely left-brain way, in which all space is accounted for, productive, and efficient. It reduces the world to number, to units, to sameness, to binaries (computers, at the most elemental level, think in binaries). The Machine is ever increasing, ever progressing, ever more fake. Its chief values are science, screens, sex, and the self.
Kingsnorth offers as antitheses (or theses, perhaps) the values of people, place, prayer, and the past. He believes technology is not neutral, which I am gradually believing more every day. His rhetoric is alarming and maybe alarmist.
Kingsnorth puts me in an unfamiliar position. I want to affirm his critiques of the West and the Machine, while also affirming that “this age—right now—has everything to love.” I don’t think I experience the world Kingsnorth articulates.
Kingsnorth writes well. Very well.
4.5 stars.
Initially, I hesitate to affirm Kingsnorth’s externalization of the human problem. My reflex is that our problem, so far as there is only one, is internal; the line runs through the human heart, as Solzhenitsyn says. But if the threefold classification of the Christian’s enemy—the world, the flesh, and the devil—holds, the Machine that Kingsnorth observes may represent the enemy of the World.
This Machine “wants” to reorganize the world in a completely left-brain way, in which all space is accounted for, productive, and efficient. It reduces the world to number, to units, to sameness, to binaries (computers, at the most elemental level, think in binaries). The Machine is ever increasing, ever progressing, ever more fake. Its chief values are science, screens, sex, and the self.
Kingsnorth offers as antitheses (or theses, perhaps) the values of people, place, prayer, and the past. He believes technology is not neutral, which I am gradually believing more every day. His rhetoric is alarming and maybe alarmist.
Kingsnorth puts me in an unfamiliar position. I want to affirm his critiques of the West and the Machine, while also affirming that “this age—right now—has everything to love.” I don’t think I experience the world Kingsnorth articulates.
Kingsnorth writes well. Very well.
4.5 stars.
December 14, 2025
Kingsnorth collects many of the criticisms of modernity and packages them in a fashion that should resonate with the contemporary reader. He is critical without falling into despair and his spiritedness is an appropriate reaction to a burning world.
As a sympathetic reader, I found the first half of the book easier to nod along with than the latter half, where he begins to question the true end of the path we are on. He may be correct that there is something demonic undergirding the principalities and powers of this world, but I am too engrafted into it to not want to offer an apology on its account.
In the end, some sort of radical resistance against The Machine is necessary, but are our incremental steps to save our souls and those of our neighbors and children going to be sufficient?
As a sympathetic reader, I found the first half of the book easier to nod along with than the latter half, where he begins to question the true end of the path we are on. He may be correct that there is something demonic undergirding the principalities and powers of this world, but I am too engrafted into it to not want to offer an apology on its account.
In the end, some sort of radical resistance against The Machine is necessary, but are our incremental steps to save our souls and those of our neighbors and children going to be sufficient?
November 26, 2025
Very good
January 2, 2026
I’m rounding this up to 5 stars not because Kingsnorth’s arguments are unassailably persuasive, but because he expresses something that at its core seems to me to be undeniably true. And I think I’m going to be wrestling with these ideas for a long time. I’m not going to take a strong position here for or against his overall thesis. Instead I’m going spend some time letting this book soak in. I need to think/read/pray about this more.
Kingsnorth doesn’t really present a formal systematic argument. Instead, each chapter is separate essay examining the topic from another angle, a different facet.
I think it’s important to note that while he is coming at this issue from primarily a secular perspective, he highlights how we need to consider the underlying spiritual dimension behind this movement toward the Machine.
I should probably reread this with a more critical eye, but during my first pass I found his theses both fascinating and troubling. I suspect Tolkien would agree with him.
Here are some reviews that I really appreciated:
Alex’s review
Jake’s review
Bob’s review
I’m going to post several passages here that I found save-worthy:
“The sheer scale of the modern urban conglomeration is mind-boggling, and entirely irreversible. These ‘barrack cities’, as Spengler referred to them, which now contain the majority of mankind, are tied up with our ultimate fate. Once a structure of this size and complexity has been created, it must be maintained. In the case of a modern city, this means that the surrounding lands, and then the lands further afield, must be colonised to supply it and its inhabitants, their whims and desires and needs. Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it; and a modern world-city sucks in the world. The impacts of this are measurable.”
[p 83]
“I have argued that two things are happening as this Machine reaches its maturity. Firstly, an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network's needs. And sec-ondly, in this bending we are losing the essence of what it means to be human.
“Later, I will be saying a third thing: rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.
“But why a machine? Why choose this particular image to try and pin down this thing that is enveloping us? Because a machine is an emotion-less, inorganic system; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfil. Above all, a machine is something unnatural: something constructed.
[p 114]
“When we look at it this way, we can see one of biggest ructions of our time—the global response to the COVID pandemic—for what it was: a triumph of technique. Whatever your views on virus or vaccine, you should be able to see that the response of authorities worldwide was pure technique, all the way down. Authoritarian control on an unprecedented scale; a narrow focus on an equally narrow set of carefully calculated numbers; official projections guiding societal behaviour; the anointing of a clerisy of official spokespeople intoning ‘Follow the Science' like a hushed prayer; collusion between state and media to promote an ever-changing approved narrative and suppress questioning voices, including those of dissenting scientists; the manufacturing of fear to achieve desired ends; and the ultimate focus on a profitable techno-fix above all else.”
[p 120]
“As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older-societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalisation, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:
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 manifes-tation.
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. It’s religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.”
[p 131]
“The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the
Four Ss:
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. measur-able) 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.”
[p 133]
“I understood decolonising the curriculum and cisheteronormativity and stale pale males and diversity training, and I understood all of it not as a desire for actual meaningful change, let alone as any kind of thought-through pathway to a better world. Instead, I saw a great weave of symbolic meaning. I saw all of it as a rolling statement by those who controlled the levers of power in the post-Western West, a statement that said: We are the opposite of what we once were. We reject our ancestors and our history. We condemn our past and its legacy. We have redrawn our cosmic map. We are now something entirely new—even if, as of this moment, we have no idea what.
“The deflating West is becoming a place of almost pure negation. Atter decades of cultural inversion, we have forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct, there is nothing left to overturn, and we have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Black is Not-White. Female is Not-Male. Gay is Not-Straight, and Trans is Not-Gay. Muslim is Not-Christian. Weak is Not-Strong. Welcome to the Not-West.”
[p 140]
“Though wrong about plenty of things, the left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of capitalism, while the right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valourising greed and rapine and then wondering where the ‘traditional values' they love so much have gone to. It's only in recent years that conservative thinkers in any numbers have begun to explore the territory where Wendell Berry planted his flag half a century ago and Chesterton half a century before that.
[…]
“Meanwhile, a loose and ill-defined 'national populist' movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism and a desire for economic protection.
“On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the ‘left' than the workers? If the left was what it claims to be—a bottom-up movement for popular justice—this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be—a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit maximisation—then this would not be the case either.
“But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive' left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?
[p 151]
“To be 'progressive' is to emancipate. What is it that is to be emancipated? The answer is: the individual self. What is this self to be emancipated from? All societal structures. And what is the best instrument for achieving this emancipation? Uncomfortably for both Rousseauian primitivists and old-school leftists, who have seen large-scale experiments in socialist economics go up in flames time and time again, the answer appears to be: global capitalism.”
[p 153]
“If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society—mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution, fill in the blanks—then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of a Machine culture. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can't read or understand the peer-reviewed science', then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people—drawn, as all green 'thought leaders' are, from the upper strata of society—will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”
[p 215]
“Consider this chilling fact: when polled for their opinions, over half of those involved in developing Al systems said they believe there is at least a 10 percent chance that they will lead to human extinction.
“Yes, you read that right: over half of the people actually developing these things think that there is a significant chance that they could destroy the human race.”
[p 251]
“It was the pandemic—or rather, the response to it—that finally ripped up that contract for me. I had not prepared myself for enforced medication on pain of job loss, blatant media narrative control, scientists being censored for asking the wrong kind of scientific question, or ordinary members of the public being locked out of society while politicians and journalists called them conspiracy theorists and far-right agitators. I wasn't prepared to see in my country a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. When I did see it, it shook me hard, and it changed me.
“The bottom line is that I don't think I really understood the nature of power until that happened.”
[p 286]
Kingsnorth doesn’t really present a formal systematic argument. Instead, each chapter is separate essay examining the topic from another angle, a different facet.
I think it’s important to note that while he is coming at this issue from primarily a secular perspective, he highlights how we need to consider the underlying spiritual dimension behind this movement toward the Machine.
I should probably reread this with a more critical eye, but during my first pass I found his theses both fascinating and troubling. I suspect Tolkien would agree with him.
Here are some reviews that I really appreciated:
Alex’s review
Jake’s review
Bob’s review
I’m going to post several passages here that I found save-worthy:
“The sheer scale of the modern urban conglomeration is mind-boggling, and entirely irreversible. These ‘barrack cities’, as Spengler referred to them, which now contain the majority of mankind, are tied up with our ultimate fate. Once a structure of this size and complexity has been created, it must be maintained. In the case of a modern city, this means that the surrounding lands, and then the lands further afield, must be colonised to supply it and its inhabitants, their whims and desires and needs. Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it; and a modern world-city sucks in the world. The impacts of this are measurable.”
[p 83]
“I have argued that two things are happening as this Machine reaches its maturity. Firstly, an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network's needs. And sec-ondly, in this bending we are losing the essence of what it means to be human.
“Later, I will be saying a third thing: rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.
“But why a machine? Why choose this particular image to try and pin down this thing that is enveloping us? Because a machine is an emotion-less, inorganic system; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfil. Above all, a machine is something unnatural: something constructed.
[p 114]
“When we look at it this way, we can see one of biggest ructions of our time—the global response to the COVID pandemic—for what it was: a triumph of technique. Whatever your views on virus or vaccine, you should be able to see that the response of authorities worldwide was pure technique, all the way down. Authoritarian control on an unprecedented scale; a narrow focus on an equally narrow set of carefully calculated numbers; official projections guiding societal behaviour; the anointing of a clerisy of official spokespeople intoning ‘Follow the Science' like a hushed prayer; collusion between state and media to promote an ever-changing approved narrative and suppress questioning voices, including those of dissenting scientists; the manufacturing of fear to achieve desired ends; and the ultimate focus on a profitable techno-fix above all else.”
[p 120]
“As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older-societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalisation, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:
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 manifes-tation.
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. It’s religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.”
[p 131]
“The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the
Four Ss:
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. measur-able) 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.”
[p 133]
“I understood decolonising the curriculum and cisheteronormativity and stale pale males and diversity training, and I understood all of it not as a desire for actual meaningful change, let alone as any kind of thought-through pathway to a better world. Instead, I saw a great weave of symbolic meaning. I saw all of it as a rolling statement by those who controlled the levers of power in the post-Western West, a statement that said: We are the opposite of what we once were. We reject our ancestors and our history. We condemn our past and its legacy. We have redrawn our cosmic map. We are now something entirely new—even if, as of this moment, we have no idea what.
“The deflating West is becoming a place of almost pure negation. Atter decades of cultural inversion, we have forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct, there is nothing left to overturn, and we have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Black is Not-White. Female is Not-Male. Gay is Not-Straight, and Trans is Not-Gay. Muslim is Not-Christian. Weak is Not-Strong. Welcome to the Not-West.”
[p 140]
“Though wrong about plenty of things, the left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of capitalism, while the right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valourising greed and rapine and then wondering where the ‘traditional values' they love so much have gone to. It's only in recent years that conservative thinkers in any numbers have begun to explore the territory where Wendell Berry planted his flag half a century ago and Chesterton half a century before that.
[…]
“Meanwhile, a loose and ill-defined 'national populist' movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism and a desire for economic protection.
“On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the ‘left' than the workers? If the left was what it claims to be—a bottom-up movement for popular justice—this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be—a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit maximisation—then this would not be the case either.
“But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive' left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?
[p 151]
“To be 'progressive' is to emancipate. What is it that is to be emancipated? The answer is: the individual self. What is this self to be emancipated from? All societal structures. And what is the best instrument for achieving this emancipation? Uncomfortably for both Rousseauian primitivists and old-school leftists, who have seen large-scale experiments in socialist economics go up in flames time and time again, the answer appears to be: global capitalism.”
[p 153]
“If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society—mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution, fill in the blanks—then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers which go with the grain of a Machine culture. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can't read or understand the peer-reviewed science', then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people—drawn, as all green 'thought leaders' are, from the upper strata of society—will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”
[p 215]
“Consider this chilling fact: when polled for their opinions, over half of those involved in developing Al systems said they believe there is at least a 10 percent chance that they will lead to human extinction.
“Yes, you read that right: over half of the people actually developing these things think that there is a significant chance that they could destroy the human race.”
[p 251]
“It was the pandemic—or rather, the response to it—that finally ripped up that contract for me. I had not prepared myself for enforced medication on pain of job loss, blatant media narrative control, scientists being censored for asking the wrong kind of scientific question, or ordinary members of the public being locked out of society while politicians and journalists called them conspiracy theorists and far-right agitators. I wasn't prepared to see in my country a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. When I did see it, it shook me hard, and it changed me.
“The bottom line is that I don't think I really understood the nature of power until that happened.”
[p 286]
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September 24, 2025[The Theology Pugcast] Against the Machine! (Some Reflections on Paul Kingsnorth's New Book) #theTheologyPugcast
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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.
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