Paul Kingsnorth has had an interesting career. He started as a radical environmental activist who once chained himself to a bridge to protest the construction of a highway across protected land. Then he was an eco-doomer and post-environmentalist. Then some sort of ancient-England traditionalist: he wrote a well-received trilogy of novels, the first of which is set in Lincolnshire at the time of the Norman conquest. Then, by his own account, he was a Buddhist, a Wiccan, and finally a very public convert to Orthodox Christianity. The path from radical to reactionary is now well-trodden, but he’s walked it with more self-respect than most. He’s smart for a trad guy and charismatic for an environmentalist, and his new book, an anti-tech magnum opus called Against the Machine, has been getting a lot of attention and been reviewed widely.
Against the Machine is a history of modernity by someone who hates modernity. As such it’s the story of how humanity lost its way, straying from some kind of authentic existence into the world of the Machine. In Kingsnorth’s conception, this Machine is not an institution, a technology, or an organization, but a way of thinking. It is rationality, “left-brain” thought, science, efficiency, technology, capitalism. “We could simply call this process modernity,” Kingsnorth writes. “But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine… is what it feels like.” Kingsnorth describes the development of the Machine, from the Enlightenment (“Descartes was happy to slice open living dogs and insert his fingers into the ventricles of their hearts while they still pumped in order to understand ‘how the machine works’”) to the Enclosures in England, which dispossessed independent peasants (“Plans hatched in London and carried out by an engineer and labourers from across the seas would end their way of life”), to the Industrial Revolution and eventually to the present day. He tells the story of how, over five centuries or so, capitalism was consolidated and expanded, the lives of human beings increasingly surveilled and regimented, and society made more and more dependent on technology. Until we arrive here:species extinction,climate change, and AI.
This story is not original, but Kingsnorth does a good job of synthesizing and summarizing the ideas of some of the best writers of the anti-modern tradition. He’s read his Simone Weil, Oswald Spengler, Lewis Mumford, and Edward Abbey, among others. And his version of the story is lively. You can tell he’s also a novelist: he has a novelist’s talent for amplification, for picking a vivid metaphor and loading it with associations. His chapter about the global spread of capitalism, for example, takes as its central image the “Black Ships” that arrived in Edo Bay in 1853 to present America’s demand that Japan open up to Western trade. As Kingsnorth sees it, the IMF and World Bank, with their demands for economic reforms, are the Black Ships of today, and Western nations’ austerity policies and wealth inequalities are the Black Ships coming home. “In this world,” Kingsnorth writes, “we are all crewing the Black Ships, or we are the working poor of Japan waiting for the consequences of their coming, or we are samurai, facing our own obsolescence.”
For Kingsnorth there’s also another element to all this—the religious one. In his telling, the Western world, formerly Christendom, was based on a religion that understood man’s sinful nature and had at its heart a story about being tempted by the devil into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Then Christendom broke apart, Christianity lost its power, and we decided we should eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge after all. The story of modernity, in his version, is the story of our spiritual downfall. With Christendom gone, Kingsnorth asks, “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.”
All this is lively too, and it gives the account a certain passion that a more sober one by, say, Bill McKibben would lack. One may not share Kingsnorth’s Christian faith, and his combined economic, cultural, and spiritual history of the last 500 years might seem a tad simplistic, but nevertheless it could make engaging reading, a modern-day fable, part erudite campfire story, part fiery sermon. The problem is that Against the Machine, for all its high ambitions and spiritual exhortations, ends up devoting half its energy to culture-war axe-grinding. Here’s Kingsnorth on climate change:
“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.” (We should be so lucky!)
On the pandemic:
“I had not prepared myself for enforced medication on pain of job loss, blatant media narrative control… 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.”
And so on, chapter after chapter. The contrast between the epic tale Kingsnorth is telling and the petty topicality of the complaints to which he returns again and again is striking. Along with vaccine passports and wind farms, he’s angry about chain stores, corporate media, and gender transitions. Kingsnorth’s grudge against progressivism extends to the pettiness of repeatedly referring to the transhumanist and inventor Martine Rothblatt, who is transgender and has lived as a woman for decades, as “he.” (I would like to see the emails with the copy editor over that one: how many times did Kingsnorth have to stet that before they gave in?)
Maybe I am guilty of pettiness of my own in finding these complaints irritating, being myself a member of the class Kingsnorth spends much time maligning, one of the arrogant, godless “elites.” But Kingsnorth’s utter lack of self-awareness is galling. Never does he consider the possibility that some of the revulsion he feels at the modern world might be his problem, not the world’s. Sometimes this tunnel vision is a little funny. For example, here’s his description of an epiphany he had a few years ago while on holiday in some tourist village:
“It was a nice little place, and all of a sudden I saw it for what it was. I saw what was happening here, and by extension everywhere, and within me and all of us. I saw that everything around me was dedicated solely to the immediate gratification of the senses. There it was, all of a sudden, right in my face. Eating. Drinking. Buying colourful things. Boats, vans, bikes, beer, steak, new clothes, secondhand clothes, burgers, chocolate bars, old castles, stately homes, cappuccinos, pirate adventure parks, golf courses, spas, tea rooms, pubs… I saw that this was what we were, what we had become without really thinking about or planning it. Stimulating the senses, then reacting to the stimulus, profiting from it all: this was what our society was all about.”
I had to smile when I read this. I feel his pain. Like countless sensitive people, countless intellectuals before him, Kingsnorth was subjected on his holiday to that most excruciating torture: being forced to endure the entertainment, culture, and recreations that most people like. Even for non-snobs, such pleasure trips are notoriously, paradoxically, difficult to enjoy. Who hasn’t mentally cursed the inane amusements and junk food and enforced idleness and whole damn holiday-industrial complex? Plenty of people feel this way, but they somehow manage to get through their vacation without issuing condemnations of their entire society. You hear the phrase “the culture of narcissism” as a charge leveled at liberals—at therapy culture, identity politics, etc.—but to me there’s something immensely narcissistic about convincing yourself that the things that happen to offend you, the various insults to your tastes and prejudices that everyone has to endure, are actually the work of Satan. This is the right-wing culture of narcissism: the conviction that my sense of distaste (at having a trans barista), my annoyance (at having restrictions imposed because of a pandemic), my hurt pride (when I’m reminded that some people look down on my tastes), are intolerable injuries that reveal the wickedness of my adversaries and prove that something is deeply wrong with the world.
Kingsnorth wallows in this totally unjustified feeling of injury just like so many other conservatives, and it spoils what could have been an interesting book. It also reminds the reader that Kingsnorth’s analysis of modernity isn’t just distorted by pique but grossly oversimplified as well. Writing about the Enclosures and quoting an eighteenth-century observer, he asserts, “Taking away peoples’ ‘comfortable…partial independence’ and substituting it with ‘the precarious condition of mere hirelings’ has been the working basis of Machine capitalism worldwide since the 1700s.” I do think people’s “comfortable independence” in the 1700s included quite a lot of malnutrition, death in childbirth, and illiteracy. The book is full of these dubious generalizations. Kingsnorth urges his readers to reject the Machine, which means, among other things, rejecting states, which in his view are instruments of oppression. But he has no solution to the problem of how you preserve at least some of the benefits of modern civilization, like medical science and civic order, without a state. Indeed, he doesn’t even acknowledge that this is a problem. He professes to hate culture war (“I don’t believe in this conflict, and I won’t send my children to fight in it”), but he’s a culture warrior like so many others, and for the same reason they are: it’s much easier to shout about culture than to try to solve actual problems. The ones we’re facing are, as always, pretty difficult. Climate change, for example. Where to begin? Better not to, and to just focus on spiritual matters. As he told Ross Douthat, “I think my concern for the destruction of the natural world…it’s subsided a little since I became a Christian…Because if you’re a Christian, you don’t believe everything ultimately is in the hands of humanity. There’s an end point to history.”
Most reviewers of Against the Machine have politely ignored its religiosity. But the book doesn’t really make sense without it. Viewed in purely secular terms, “the Machine” is just too broad an idea to mean anything. It comprises, among other things, internet shopping, transgender identity, the enclosure of the commons, and the scientific method. What idea, what force or program or tendency, could inspire all these things? By about halfway through the book, I think most readers will have guessed. I mention Satan above. That’s not my exaggerated version of Kingsnorth’s argument: he spells it out himself. “‘AI’,” he writes, “on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying ‘Antichrist.’” And later, “What Moloch wants—Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks—is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments.” In the interview with Ross Douthat, he asked, “Are we creating these things or are we summoning them?”
Now this is more interesting. Kingsnorth is a flawed pundit, but he is a talented mythmaker, and when he departs from social commentary and gives his imagination some rein, his book starts to come into its own. His picture of the devil is well executed, the story of his emergence into the modern world subtle and creepy. Against the Machine is a fantasy history in which our world contains the seed of the Antichrist, which, over the course of five hundred years, manifests itself as modern civilization and is currently achieving its final and most perfect incarnation in the form of AI. It could have been a good novel. The devil is a great character—probably the greatest in all of literature—and certainly about a million times more interesting than the dead-eyed geeks in charge of the tech companies whose products invade our lives. It would be nice to think that if we’re headed to some sort of tech-driven catastrophe, it’s the Adversary, the Deceiver, Old Nick, who’s responsible for it and not just Sam Altman.
Against the Machine has gotten a pretty friendly reception from the liberal media Kingsnorth despises. It was reviewed respectfully in The New Yorker and the TLS, and the New York Times did not one but two features on him. I think the reason for all the interest in this flawed book is that (wind farms and trans people aside) the problems it addresses really are bad. The natural world is being churned up and turned into garbage and at the same time replaced by digital life. “Burning the rainforest to produce AI slop” is not, I think, actually an accurate description of how LLMs work, but still it’s a good shorthand. We all understand that there’s a Machine, and we’re against it. We’d like to renounce our phones like Kingsnorth, who lives on a farm in the west of Ireland and mows grass with a scythe. But the Antichrist twist to the book just reveals how big the gap is between Kingsnorth and us poor rationalists who’d like to spend less time on our phones. How difficult this seemingly ordinary task is! Willpower doesn’t work: to even think about giving up technology, you have to believe apps are actually created by the devil.
For all the talk about the harms of digital addiction, my impression is not that people are spending any less time on their phones. My impression is that people are gazing into their phones more eagerly than ever, as if it were the last time, as if their devices were just about to be taken away. Like a smoker who absentmindedly lights a cigarette even while he already has one burning in the ashtray, I sometimes start to reach for my phone only to realize that I’m already holding it. Getting on the subway in the morning, I notice that every single person getting off is already – or still – looking at their phones as they walk. On the train, every passenger, sitting or standing, is staring into their phone. I see it and feel ashamed for us. At these moments it would be nice to have Kingsnorth’s faith. He would say that the sense of revulsion I feel at this scene is really my perception of the presence of evil in the world. That all these people on the F train are bent in prayer over an unholy book, not just scrolling but enacting a dark rite. I like this. I like the unironic belief in demons and spirits. You have to have a little magic in the world. But his book doesn’t get me there. On the contrary, all its references to the spiritual only end up reinforcing my own depressive rationalism. A machine may be what modernity feels like, but that doesn’t mean it’s what it is. A machine has a design. With our digital addiction, as with most things in the human world, there’s no plan. Everything is becoming digitized and automated and disembodied for reasons of convenience and greed and sheer simian shortsightedness. The introduction of AI into our economy and society, which may have awesome consequences, is being accomplished for the most banal reasons and directed by mediocrities. We’re filling the world with bots in the same way we pumped the atmosphere full of carbon. Another inconvenient truth. The horror, to me, isn’t that Satan is behind this transformation, it’s that no one really is. One of the devil’s oldest tricks is not showing up when his worshippers go to great lengths to invoke him. Me and the other jerks scrolling on the train—we’re not summoning anything.
Aaron Labaree
Aaron Labaree's work has appeared in Literary Review, L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.