Against The Machine: A Review

Paul Kingsnorth's Solution to Modernity

We’ll die by the billions if Paul Kingsnorth gets his way.

That’s what I’ve told myself for years when reading his often cogent arguments against modernity — against the creeping machine eroding and constricting what it means to be human.

And now we have this book — Against The Machine – expanding on his old arguments and explaining what’s to be done. So did he change my mind?

I’m temperamentally open to Kingsnorth’s view that something is amiss in the master-slave relationship between technology and humanity. Our creations are capturing us and we lack the will to pry ourselves loose. Woe be to us, for technology can be a stern slavedriver. It turns us into cogs if we’re not careful. Many of us are already willing and happy cogs, and there are days when I’m one too.

Yet scanning the horizon for a Dune-style Butlerian jihad, I see only glazed eyes locked on glowing screens. There is misery in enslavement, but also peace — or at least acceptance — for cogs need not grapple with free will. They need only drink deep from the algorithm, soaking in the vibes and adopting the right opinions.

Kingsnorth insists we were once rooted culturally, socially, geographically, and religiously, but are now adrift with only our four idols as companions: screen, science, self, and sex. They’re great grist for the machine, which can use them to uproot us. So now we hate our history. We demean the old paragons. We put ourselves on pedestals and throw away community. We’ve forgotten spirituality and awe.

And for what? The Machine.

But here we reach the first problem of the book — Kingsnorth’s refusal to define what is and is not part of the machine. Is it all of modernity, or only the parts he viscerally dislikes?

His varied works suggest possibilities: AI, screens, space exploration and colonization, things destroying cottage industries (most factories, labor-saving devices, and corporations), fossil fuels, the tech industry, free trade beyond the local level, and global governing institutions like the United Nations.

Types of anarchism and local self-government are clearly approved. But states? Federations? European-Union style systems? Maybe he’s undecided. One gets the impression that Kingsnorth, if asked to be specific, might use the same reply Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used when asked to define pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Kingsnorth has a head for analogies and turns of phrase. He’s a great writer who identifies what’s not working in our world, and has done it since his days as a world-trotting environmental reporter. But when breaking down root causes and solutions, his go-to move is to reach for a vibe.

I’d accept some ambiguity from him if he would tell us when — even vaguely — progress/modern ideas progressed too far. Certainly, the embryonic machine has been with us for at least 10,000 years, and merely metastasized into a menace at some point. But when should we retreat to?

I imagine this conversation:

Before 2015? No, algorithms, social media, and smartphones.
Before 1995? No, the internet.
Before 1960? No, unchecked consumerism, corporations, and mass world trade
Before 1940? No, federal and global institutions’ usurping local control.
Before 1920? No Fossil Fuels
Before 1720? No, the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

Perhaps he’d be fine with the High Middle Ages. But then what? We’re back to my opening assertion: humans will die by the billions.

Maybe we’ll be spiritually dead if we stay in the machine, but without food, medicine, trade, and adequate wood to see us through winter, we’ll be physically dead much sooner. Yet Kingsnorth has nothing to say about this. Does he accept it as a necessary evil?

I suspect that if he started down the path of “our world would be better after removing/regulating these technologies or systems,” he would confront the problem of achieving things without the institutions and technologies humans developed to get things done. He does not want to grapple with reality as it exists because he dislikes it. So he just doesn’t grapple at all.

Toward the end of the book he admits he’s trapped in the machine and utilizes the global markets it’s opened for his writing, allowing him to make a living talking about the machine on the machine. Perhaps this is no more hypocritical than me writing about the joys of internet voids on the internet, but I’m not suggesting that the internet/AI is part of a malevolent entity evolving into the anti-Christ, which Kingsnorth does.

He has vague ideas about people living on the margins of our machine civilization, but doesn’t suggest any policies that might facilitate that (and I think there are many to consider).

Although writing decades before modern tech, at least Daniel Quinn envisioned a world he’d like to see come about in a series of books. That seems more honest, if no more likely to appeal to average people.

Kingsnorth merely suggests we embrace past, people, place, and prayer. And…that’s about all we get.

Some other issues:

• Kingsnorth dislikes the analogy that Earth is like a machine. He wants us to go back to earlier conceptions. But he never grapples with the implications of his hinted at Gaia Hypothesis-like approach — a living planet or dynamic system — and what that would mean.

• He’s careful to criticize right and left, but his ideas for a better world will alienate almost every modern nonconservative, and probably many conservatives, too.

• He really goes in for romanticizing aboriginals and nonwestern cultures. Yes, Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, Aboriginals’ impressive memory techniques, and their groundedness. But also the brutal slavery, killing babies and the elderly when they’re inconvenient, endemic warfare and raids, human sacrifice, and much else anyone with morals will balk at. Aboriginals and non-Western civilizations are fine, but they’re not great sages or moral paragons, and I think his romantic inclinations hurt his whole project.

As much as I agree with Kingsnorth about modernity’s problems, this book is less “Against the Machine.” and more “Diatribe About the Machine.”

My take on our situation is that there is no going back. At each historical moment we’ve had problems, but innovated systems, philosophies, and technologies to solve them. In doing so, we often created new problems later generations had to grapple with in turn. I’m not sure that’s the tragedy Kingsnorth thinks it is, even if it hurts, even if it got us here.

Perhaps totalitarian systems or disasters might force a regression on humanity, but that new state will have problems. Those problems will be a clarion call for ingenious humans, and in solving them they’ll disrupt the equilibrium of Kingsnorth’s past, people, place, and prayer in a way he’ll hate. Humanity will not remain static.

That doesn’t mean the past is worthless. We can use it as a rootstock to grow something new and better, and we should be clear about what that might require.

Kingsnorth understands that it’s not just tech that’s the problem, but monolithic forces deciding things on high and forcing one-size-fits-all solutions on millions of people. Situations and preferences are legion, and there’s no one right solution. We need a thousand solutions. That means returning to the original US conception of municipalities and states charting their destinies without interference.

How exactly do we get there? I don’t think Kingsnorth will point the way. We’re going to have to incrementally stumble there, preferably with a little less romanticism and a little more hope.

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