{"id":11781,"date":"2025-10-08T16:45:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T16:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11781"},"modified":"2025-10-30T19:43:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T19:43:23","slug":"against-the-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/08\/against-the-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Against the Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Luddites Were Right<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Paul Kingsnorth predicts the techno-capitalist mission to eradicate human limits will eradicate humanity itself.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Evan Tao<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Our world feels more unstable than ever, and even the meaning of humanity seems in danger of eroding under the shadow of artificial intelligence. In this maelstrom, Paul Kingsnorth presents in his latest book Against the Machine<\/em>, a comprehensive account of the historical forces that brought us from the Enlightenment to ChatGPT. The Machine, according to Kingsnorth, is not simply technology, but the myth on which our civilization balances: namely, that humans should overcome all limits. There is some nobility in this urge, he admits, but \u201cthe problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of.\u201d \u201cUprooting\u201d is the word Kingsnorth uses repeatedly to describe the Machine. It uproots limits, cultures, religions, borders, places, and nature, in the name of \u201cprogress\u201d or \u201cdevelopment.\u201d<\/p>

The Machine manifests today as technological capitalism: \u201can intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies.\u201d It operates by treating its citizens not as living things but as cogs in a machine made of human parts. This isn\u2019t a particularly new phenomenon\u2014human civilizations dating as far back as ancient Egypt have been mechanistic\u2014but what is new is the rejection of human limitations. At least the Egyptians knew their place in the cosmos.<\/p>

The Machine is not a conspiracy devised by lizard people or elites in a smoke-filled room, so much as it is a positive feedback loop that reproduces and accelerates itself like a black hole or malignant tumor. It is in the air, and it has choked out any alternative mode of thinking until everyone takes it for granted. Kingsnorth\u2019s theory of the Machine is not Q-Anon; it is Foucault\u2019s Panopticon, where individuals obey its power because its rules have become self-imposed.<\/p>

Modernity, Kingsnorth says, is a recent and violent break from most of the human past. Its history begins with the collapse of Western Christendom at the Enlightenment. Kingsnorth asserts that all societies need a founding story, and the people of Western Europe lost theirs, leaving a cultural and spiritual vacuum. The Enlightenment cleared the way for a new myth to manifest: one worshipping reason, money, human progress, and cosmopolitanism. \u201cReason is appealing, because it implies that humans can use their faculties to order the universe,\u201d he writes. During the French Revolution, its proponents propped up Reason as a deity and sneered at religion and parochialism as backwards or oppressive.<\/p>

Through the Industrial Revolution, the British capitalists first \u201ccolonized\u201d the rural working classes of their own country into the Machine, before moving on to all corners of the world. Kingsnorth tells the story of Admiral Perry\u2019s arrival in Japan that forced the country to open its tradeports to the world, and post-apartheid South Africa, where the African National Congress was forced by the global markets to scrap its plans for a socialist economic policy in favor of \u201cfree trade\u201d and \u201ccompetition.\u201d The Machine needs to expand and grow to keep its momentum. Today, the flag of the Machine is not carried solely by Western states and corporations, but also by governments around the Global South in their march towards \u201cdevelopment\u201d and \u201cnation-building\u201d at the expense of indigenous and rural people.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The future of the Machine is no less than the eradication of humanity as we know it.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Anyone seeking to fit Kingsnorth into a familiar political category will be disappointed\u2014his politics are from an older age. The Machine, at first glance, appears to be simply capitalism, and Kingsnorth a degrowther from the radical environmentalist left. But listening more carefully also reveals values that sound right-wing, such as his insistence that human societies need to be rooted in \u201cpeople, past, place, and prayer,\u201d and resist any revolution that threatens these values. He doesn\u2019t preach liberation and social justice, but limits and borders. Ultimately, politics will not be the solution to this problem. Both the left and right are children of the Machine, Kingsnorth believes: \u201cNone of them has resisted the Machine. They have just taken different paths towards it.\u201d<\/p>

The future of the Machine is no less than the eradication of humanity as we know it. After we remove all limits from humanity, we will eventually find that they were there for a reason. Kingsnorth predicts that the transhumanists of today will be the mainstream of tomorrow; but by seeking to \u201cenhance\u201d humanity they will dissolve it. Whether by climate catastrophe or AI singularity, the Machine is overheating itself.<\/p>

Where Against the Machine <\/em>falters is in the vague foundations of its moral theory. Most of it sits on an appeal to tradition: long-held practices must be good, new ones must be bad. Kingsnorth clearly has a conception of the good life, presenting the \u201cpast, people, place and prayer\u201d as values on which most premodern societies are based, and which cultures need in order to survive. But there\u2019s no justification for why <\/em>they are necessarily good, besides being old. It\u2019s not obvious that every culture that has held these values has flourished. Arguably, life was worse for the median person in premodern societies by many metrics, including life expectancy, poverty, child mortality, disease, oppression, and others. Skeptical of the Enlightenment as he is, Kingsnorth echoes Rousseau in his romanticization of the state of nature.<\/p>

Similarly, the only justification for why the Machine\u2019s values are bad is because they replace the traditional. Transhumanism sounds scary, but what exactly makes it unethical? Frustratingly, there\u2019s very little attempt to persuade the reader; Kingsnorth simply assumes you already agree.<\/p>

Even accepting that long-held practices are inherently good, the book suffers from a lack of rigor in identifying exactly which cultural practices are long-held and which are Machine inventions. For instance, although Kingsnorth concedes that gender dysphoria and people who do not conform to societal expectations of gender have always existed, he asserts that societal acceptance and active encouragement of gender transitioning (\u201ctransgenderism\u201d) is a new outgrowth of the Machine. It is \u201cthe latest manifestation of a long struggle for technological liberation from nature itself,\u201d he writes, \u201csymbolised by the limits of human biology.\u201d However, evidence suggests<\/a> that transgender and third-gender people have been common and socially accepted in numerous premodern and non-Western cultures. If anything, the rigid gender binary, enforced through colonialism as a means of social control, was a product of the Machine. Others may disagree, but that\u2019s the problem with appealing to tradition: what counts as \u201ctraditional\u201d is up for debate.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Reason need not be the only moral justification, but neither can intuition alone tell us how to live.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Admittedly, Kingsnorth never claims to be making a rational argument. In fact, he indicates that Enlightenment rationalism is part of the problem: \u201cWe can\u2019t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don\u2019t convince anybody that matters.\u201d But intuition is never sufficient moral justification, because it can vary so much across individuals. Reason need not be the only moral justification, but neither can intuition alone tell us how to live.<\/p>

What is missing? The moral force of Kingsnorth\u2019s book is clearly underpinned by his Orthodox Christian faith. The theory of the Machine is a spiritual argument, rooted in dualisms of sacred and profane, holy and earthly. Kingsnorth references snippets of Scripture, if not full passages. \u201cDo what thou wilt <\/em>is the motto of the world: the motto of the Machine,\u201d he writes. \u201cThy will be done<\/em> is its older brother and its challenger.\u201d These appeals to Christian principles are compelling, yet rare and brief. Kingsnorth claims the fall of Christendom has left a God-shaped hole in the Western spirit, but he stops short of calling for us to rediscover Christ.<\/p>

This leaves the reader confused about the book\u2019s audience. It\u2019s too steeped in Christian assumptions for a non-Christian audience, but it\u2019s insufficiently rooted in Christian sources for a Christian audience. If it\u2019s meant for the latter, the moral arguments would have benefitted from the support of Biblical exegesis, not least because Kingsnorth concedes that, even among Orthodox Christians, his \u201cbelief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared.\u201d Other Christian critics<\/a> of Kingsnorth have argued that his perspective falsely takes for granted that the God of the Bible condemns modern civilization. After all, the Bible begins in a garden, but ends in the New Jerusalem, a city redeemed.<\/p>

If you\u2019re looking for Five Action Steps you can take to stop the Machine today, you will be disappointed. Kingsnorth\u2019s answer isn\u2019t to charge into the Apple store with a hammer or vote for antitrust policies\u2014rather, he calls us to live on the margins and rebuild our roots. Be countercultural, place aggressive limits on the role of technology in your life, and find like-minded friends. Avoid the Machine, and live life on your own terms: \u201cLike small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of tyrannosaurs, we build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very unsustainability of Machine modernity,\u201d quoth Kingsnorth. Remarkably, this feels even more revolutionary than violence.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Evan Tao<\/strong> is a pastor’s kid, political activist, and writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is currently pursuing a BA in Public Policy and Anthropology at Brown University in the class of 2027. His work has been published in the Brown Political Review<\/em> and the Brown Daily Herald<\/em>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity<\/strong> was published by Penguin Random House on September 23, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Kingsnorth predicts the techno-capitalist mission to eradicate human limits will eradicate humanity itself. 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