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Books

Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

Charles Repp questions a slightly vague revolutionary vision.

If you’ve never read Paul Kingsnorth before, as I hadn’t, you might guess from the title that his new book Against the Machine is about AI. In fact, although that subject does inescapably come up, Kingsnorth devotes just as much of the book to discussing automobiles, smartphones, and lawnmowers. While I think it’s fair to say that he’s against all these, it turns out that none of them is the titular ‘Machine’. The target of the book is something much bigger, older, and more pervasive – a set of cultural forces of which these literal machines are merely local manifestations. The sum total of these forces, otherwise known as ‘modernity’, is what Kingsnorth calls ‘the Machine’.

On Kingsnorth’s telling, this machine culture was born from the collapse of Christendom. It grew with the emergence of science, the spread of liberal values, and the rise of capitalism – brought on by the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions respectively. The values of this machine culture, he writes, “are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as wind and rain. [They include] Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism… pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values” (p.42).

Morské oko national nature reserve Slovakia Maya K. Photography 2022 CC 4.0

As the ‘Machine’ metaphor suggests, Kingsnorth believes that modern culture is the antithesis of ‘natural’. Natural cultures arise from the ‘need for roots’ he argues, drawing on Simone Weil’s book of that title. They traditionally answer to that need, he says, by anchoring us in the four Ps: Past, People, Place, and Prayer; that is, a shared history, a collective identity, a local geography, and a sacred order. Modern culture, however, is inimical to roots. Its characteristic attitudes and processes are aimed at erasing history, dissolving group identities, replacing diverse ecosystems with homogenous built environments, and eradicating ‘superstition’. The result is that “wherever we come from, wherever we are, we are almost all uprooted now.”

Kingsnorth blames the Machine not only for our present spiritual predicament, but also our political one. The populist surges behind Brexit and Trump can be understood, in his analysis, as a reaction against Machine culture, as reflected in the ‘politics of openness’ embraced by both the woke left and the ruling Western elite. The alliance of these two groups is no accident, he thinks. Since the French Revolution (from which the very notions of political left and right originate), the left has championed a certain ideal of emancipation that aims at destroying all traditional cultural boundaries. This same ideal has consistently, and conveniently, served the interests of global capitalism for a reason aptly expressed, Kingsnorth thinks, by GK Chesterton: “Capitalism is a monster that grows in deserts. Industrial servitude has almost everywhere arisen in those empty spaces where the older civilisation was thin or absent” (Outline of Sanity).

While Kingsnorth is decidedly not woke, he’s just as emphatically not a Nazi, fascist, nationalist, socialist, or communist. All these ideologies, he claims, are false substitutes for religion, promising salvation through a material world remade for the better. He also rejects conservatism, which in his eyes is more concerned with conserving power than tradition. The view he finally espouses he calls ‘reactionary radicalism’ – a term used by the historian Craig Calhoun to describe the political orientation of the Luddites. As Kingsnorth understands it, reactionary radicalism is a non-ideological commitment to protecting ‘the moral economy’ – by which he means “a system built around community bonds, local economics, and human-scale systems.” In addition to the Luddites, Kingsnorth also attributes this radicalism to the Fen Tigers, Mexico’s Zapatistas, Brazil’s landless worker movement, and various other groups who have fought, sometimes by violent means, to protect their traditional ways of life against the forces of the Machine.

Kingsnorth suggests that for those of us who have no traditional ways of life to protect, reactionary radicalism demands a different form of activism. Rather than confront the Machine, those stuck inside it must escape by first disengaging from the technologies by which it seeks to control us. In practice, this means strictly limiting the technologies one allows oneself to use, or the amount of time one allows oneself to use them – Kingsnorth calls this form of self-discipline ‘technological asceticism’. He imagines such ascetics one day banding together to form small communities, where they can begin the work of rebuilding the moral economy of the Machine’s inevitable self-destruction.

Kingsnorth writes with remarkable saneness – all the more remarkable given that he defends many of the same ideas once proclaimed by mail-bombing Montana hermit Ted Kaczynski. Mixing homely autobiographical anecdotes – a trip to buy farm equipment, a family vacation, a lesson in maintaining a child’s fish tank – with insights distilled from heavy tomes of history and philosophy, he cultivates a persona that is at once folksy and deeply intellectual. If the anecdotes are sometimes a bit clunky, the effect is generally convincing. In his searching style, one senses a genuinely serious and self-honest mind.

Unfortunately, Kingsnorth’s credibility is repeatedly undercut by incongruities in his argument: a diatribe against automobiles sits side by side with a panegyric for his VW bus; a critique of ‘adversary intellectuals’ marches in a parade of sympathetically cited French critical theory; a story of the Machine’s distinctly modern origins is followed up with evidence for its existence in ancient Egypt; one moment he’s shaking his fist at the worship of individualism and waxing nostalgic about a once powerful British monarchy, the next he is excoriating our dependence on the Machine and warning us of the totalitarianism to which it will inevitably lead. What makes these tensions damaging is not that they can’t in theory be resolved, but that Kingsnorth doesn’t even seem to notice them.

A more serious flaw of the book is its failure to offer any clear alternative to the Machine. Kingsnorth gestures towards what he calls the ‘moral economy’ and urges us to trade in our smart phones in the hope of rebuilding it. But if this economy once existed, Kingsnorth doesn’t tell us when or where. Nor, apart from a few hazy adjectives, such as ‘local’ and ‘human-scale’, does he give us any clues as to what it might look like. However convincing his account of the dysfunctions of the Machine may be, therefore, it is hard to take seriously his case for abandoning it.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is an engrossing read, and if it doesn’t say much about AI specifically, it nonetheless speaks clearly to the anxieties of our age. Moreover, by placing these anxieties in a broader context, it offers us a way of understanding them as more than just of the moment. To go along with Kingsnorth’s framing is to see our fears about AI as properly directed at something much bigger than a single Frankensteinian overstep, a catastrophic technological ‘Oops’. On Kingsnorth’s view, our apocalyptic forebodings are a perception of a deep destructive flaw in our cultural character, which has been eating away at our humanity for centuries and which no amount of industry regulation is going to correct. What looms is a tragic finale to an epic world historical drama. Accepting this picture, while certainly not diminishing our fears, at least dignifies them.

Charles Repp is a professor of philosophy at Longwood University, Virginia.

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth, 2025, Particular Books, £11.35 pb, 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0241788400