The usurper in your pocket
Working through Paul Kingsnorth's anti-tech screed, 'Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity'
There’s a cute Austrian restaurant in South Brooklyn called Werkstatt. I have only been there once. They had a photo of Bob Dylan up on the wall. It wasn’t an album cover or a concert photo. It was just a snapshot of a young Bob Dylan, leaning against some cool 70s car. It happened to be sitting opposite me the time I went, and, when I saw it, a thought arose unbidden from somewhere far back in my mind.
I thought: “That guy doesn’t have a cell phone and he doesn’t have email. He couldn’t check Twitter if he had all the money in the world.
“He doesn’t even know those things are on the way.
“He’s so lucky.”
There are a lot of things one should think about what made Bob Dylan lucky in the 70s, and I have thought about many of those things at other times. But that night, in that place, my mind went to his pockets and the fact that his held no tiny computer, buzzing away.
The 70s were a better time, not only because everyone then was hotter than anyone now.
Paul Kingsnorth’s bestselling book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, is about what we’ve lost as little masters colonized everyone’s pockets. His book unsettles people, and I think I know why. It’s because it’s not just a polemic against technology, but because it is a diagnosis of what technology replaced.
He opens the book by saying that our society doesn’t have a purpose any longer.
He makes a strong case that we went from being a Christian society to a godless one. But actually it’s not so much that we’re godless. In theory, that might be okay. The trouble is that we used to have a shared theory of purpose — a teleology — but in unshackling ourselves from the church we did not sign on to anything else.
Nothing but ourselves. So collectively we became rudderless. We thought of secularism as philosophical progress. But how do you progress if you’ve no idea where you’re going? We’re lost.
He writes:1
Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. ... There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.
The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions ... The dethroning of the sovereign-Christ who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.
That’s really the core idea. Most of the book is about resisting the thing that’s colonizing us now that Christ no longer reigns, but it couldn’t have done if the throne weren’t empty.
It’s not so much that a usurper is on the way, but that there’s no one seated on the throne to stop it. What matters is not merely that Christ no longer reigns, but that Nothing reigns.
Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them.” (Screwtape to Wormwood, Letter XII), The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.
We were once a Christian people. No longer. Now we go shopping. Even the few of us who go to church go shopping for churches. They go shopping for the church that makes them feel the way they want to feel.
This is a book about a culture that lost the plot, and what fills that void.
In the following I want to give a fair summary of the book. And then I want to reflect on it.
But here’s the quick version. I’ve established the big point. So, from there, Against the Machine argues that technology isn’t even a little bit neutral and that, at this point, we can confidently say that engineers aren’t so much building something as summoning it. If you accept that premise, then you should resist.
This puts me in a bind.
I don’t think he’s wrong about the present moment, but it’s hard for me to see what the point of resisting is. The tide of history has seldom been pushed back effectively. Japan delayed it, but that didn’t last. Kingsnorth even opens one of his chapters with just that moment. That’s chapter X, “Come the Black Ships.”
What sort of resistance is one to do? I could move onto a mountain I suppose, but I’m not quite that antisocial. I could apply for one of those disconnected communities, but I’m not much of a joiner.
For all our modern mobility, we can’t seem to close the most important gap of all: We can’t meet eye-to-eye.
Plus, I really like the coming of self-driving cars. I understand they expand the panopticon, but it would be nice to know that I could shoot between Wichita and Tulsa in the dead of night without worrying about falling asleep on the road.
The Machine isn’t all bad.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t much want to fight. But I’m also not very crazy about being eaten.
It’s a dilemma.
The easiest way to get a picture of what Kingsnorth wants to do here is to look at two sets of four concepts that he returns to throughout.
Modernity, he contends, is defined by four atomizing elements: sex, science, the self and the screen.
A more human world, on the other hand, places the emphasis on people, place, prayer and the past.
I’d be interested in hearing what you think about those two pairs of four concepts.
If you want to stop reading now and go ahead and jump into comments and say before you see what I think, that would be great.
I’ll babble just a little bit more here to keep my reaction further from your eyes while you consider it.
Just a little bit more.
How you been anyway?
OK.
Here we go.
If you ask me, the big difference between those lists comes down to choice. The first list, the top one, that’s all about giving you lots of choices, lots of discretion.
But it’s easier to see with the second list. The second list constrains choices. If your life is about people and place, then you’re stuck with a lot of obligations, a lot of expectations. If you emphasize place in your life, if you decide that your roots matter, then you’re stuck with an accident of birth. You’re stuck with traditions and ideas that maybe you find grating.
And prayer? Well any tradition of prayer is going to come with corresponding interdictions. And the past tells you that it’s about sticking with what’s known to have worked rather than attempting to chase new ideas willy-nilly.
The second list is about being part of something, and being part of something yields constraints.
It’s hard because I got to the end of every chapter of this book and didn’t particularly disagree with any of them. Not in a big way, anyway. But I also listened to the extended interview between PJ Vogt and Sebastian Thrun (formerly of Waymo) and came away as excited as he is about engineers’ ability to move people further, faster.
But, then again, as a GenX guy who remembers the old ways before cell phones and podcasts, it’s obvious to me a larger vexation. For all our modern mobility, we can’t seem to close the most important gap of all: We can’t meet eye-to-eye.
“Today we are led by want, we are drenched in it, and we are increasingly sick from its infection.”
The first part of the book sets up the concept of the machine. The machine is basically technology, but it’s more than that. It’s a unification of rationalism as opposed to the messy, earthiness of natural life.
Years ago, I was riding from Philadelphia to central Pennsylvania for an organizing conference with this hardcore environmentalist who worked for one of the big local unions. We were comparing our views of the world.
At some point, I made a comment about how efficient nature is. He corrected me, saying that nature is not efficient. Nature is resilient, he told me.
He meant that there’s a lot of redundancy in the wild. The system has backups upon backups. We like to talk about nature as a delicate web, but it’s not really that delicate at the macro level. A species might die if the wrong thing happens, but the whole ecosystem will carry on. Nature has enough processes going that it can adapt.
We could have a multipolar nuclear war and nature would persevere. The planet would bounce back. We probably couldn’t kill everything on this planet if we put our minds to it. We probably couldn’t kill off humanity if we put our mind to it, though God knows we are constantly told that we live forever on the brink of extinction.
I thought of this idea of resilience as the pandemic kicked in and everyone was freaking out about toilet paper. The economy was very efficiently allocating toilet paper largely to commercial spaces and to a lesser extent to consumer outposts. It had a way of getting that sanitary tissue to the places it typically needed to be just as it was needed.
But then the location of demand shifted in a major way and the supply chain wasn’t set up to pivot as needed. That’s an efficient supply chain. No excess. No waste. But also not a lot of flexibility. The price of efficiency is breakdowns in an emergency. The benefit, though: Lotta strong quarters.
Resilience doesn’t deliver rising equity prices and breakout quarters, but it does deliver survival.
Pick your poison.
This section takes the origins of the Machine way, way back. It even goes back to the Protestant Reformation. Kingsnorth basically contends that what Martin Luther thought was a liberation of the masses from a hidebound patrician theology was ultimately the first seed of an anything goes ethic that would eventually deliver us to our blue-and-green-haired, facially-pierced present.
But his larger point here was to show that technology, the Machine, is not a bunch of little things. It’s one big thing, and it’s hoovering us all into it. There’s a point at which it becomes nearly impossible to say no to the Machine, as Japan learned when it tried simply to shut the rest of the world out.
There came a point at which the world insisted on incorporating Japan’s economy too firmly for it to refuse.
Which brings me back to the point I began with: What’s the point of resisting?
In the Machine age, ideology effectively functions as a replacement for and simulacrum of religion. Liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, nationalism: all of these post-Enlightenment forms could be said to be the result of what historian John Bossy called ‘the migration of the holy’ from the Church to state.
He calls The Matrix the most symbolically prophetic movie of the 20th Century.
You probably know this, but: It’s a film about a fake world, a computer program designed to distract humans from the hideous reality of their actual lives — that they are comatose batteries living from birth to death inside a tube.
(Have you ever seen a parent take a tablet out of the hands of a toddler?)
The point he’s making in this section is that it just doesn’t mean anything to live in the West any longer. Which might be why we peer into a simulated world so much, rather than living actual lives.
He has chapters about the home, the nation, the body, the land, the church. If you’re an American, like me, you’ve probably lived your whole life believing that kings are gross anachronisms, that Britain should throw its royals into the sea.
I’m not saying that Kingsnorth will bring you around, but if anyone can shake your faith, he can.
We define ourselves by what we are not, and what we are not is everything we used to be.
If you know any Millennials or Gen Whatevers and you ask them about the West, they will probably respond with some sort of disgust. Which, like, fine, but ask them what we should replace it with. They don’t really have an answer. Or, actually, they will all have an answer.
Every single one of them. An individual answer. Plus something about Trump.
Kingsnorth ends the section by meditating on the coming of AI, and reminding us that traditions going back as far as human memory reaches have warnings about calling up unhuman intelligences from elsewhere.
For a book that reveres the past, it takes a surprising turn as it proceeds toward the end.
This is what we do, here in ‘the West’: we break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests. We split atoms and we bust through the upper atmosphere. ... ‘The West’ has become an idol; some kind of static image of the past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: The Machine.
The West has died.
Kingsnorth lives in Ireland now, but he’s from England. His oldest ancestors are from Kent. He can find their tombstones in graveyards there.
He tells a story of meeting an Irish man who asks him where he’s from. He tells him England, but the Irishman finds that to be a ridiculous answer. It’s as obvious to the Irishman that Kingsnorth is English as it would be to a Frenchman that I’m American.
That’s not where he’s from, the Irish man explains. He presses him until he comes up with Kent.
Most people in the U.S. can’t answer this question in a word or two: Where are you from?
We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands.
Books that diagnose a problem frequently get criticized for failing to offer solutions (as if anyone cares what people who write books think).
But I wouldn’t say this book closes on a prescription for dealing with the problem of the Machine.
Kingsnorth doesn’t precisely advocate a full-on resistance to the Machine. The book is peppered with little stories of traditional peoples who — one way or another — ran for the hills as civilizers came to town. He admires them.
But Kingsnorth hasn’t headed for the hills, though he does tell us that he has a nice camper van. Instead, it ends more on practices one can undertake to remain human as more and more of what’s good about being a human being gets stripmined away.
Let’s come back to the point of the book. The point of the book is that godlessness leads to cultures that have no rudders. And cultures that have no rudders spin out.
Do you think the U.S. is spinning out?
We might be on the precipice of building the greatest engine of growth in all of human history, but what’s that growth going to do? Is it going to grow inside of us, like one of those aliens in the Sigourney Weaver movies?
I suspect the main takeaway that most people who read this book will come away with is: He thinks technological progress is bad. And he does. But that’s not really the point.
The point is that an intelligence from outside can colonize us as a people if there’s nothing inside us — all of us — standing in its way. We live in a world where the typical person looks at a little silver screen for 10 hours a day. He’s on to something.
You can have your washing machines and your electric cars and your fast fashion and even your nuclear reactors. You can keep them. All Kingsnorth asks in exchange is that you join some collective reason to live. That’s what’s missing.
And, I promise you, that’s not the Democratic Party.
So, I’m going to close this on notes from three different contemporary philosophers who I encountered while reading this book, and then I’m going to go. The first is crazy. The second is divisive. The third is me.
David Chapman
David Chapman is the crazy one. I’ve been casually paying attention to Chapman since I found This Part of Twitter (TPOT) in 2019. He makes it difficult for me to take him seriously at too long of a stretch.
Chapman has not written about Against the Machine, as far as I can tell, but he did publish a post recently on re-enchanting the world. All it takes, he contends, is to just decide to see the sacredness there. The sacredness, he contends, never went anywhere. You just have to look for it.
In a world without Christ, this almost feels like a start. But it’s not. Not really. This perspective is completely complementary with the Machine. Said another way, this is spirituality under capitalism.
If you’re not familiar, Capitalist Realism is a pamphlet by the late Mark Fisher. Its point is simple, that it’s hard to even imagine an alternative to capitalism.
Just going around and seeing sacredness however it comes to you is the same self-directed spirituality that leaves our people directionless. If everyone is going their own way, we aren’t going anywhere.
Joe Rogan
Comedians are in fact our contemporary philosophers, and Rogan isn’t bad as philosophers go. Rogan and I both take the idea of alien life actively engaging with our planet seriously. I doubt this is something Kingsnorth takes seriously, but I do.
If there are intelligent beings on other planets who managed to remain living, embodied, organic beings despite achieving technologies far beyond our present ken, then that offers some kind of hope that our progress-oriented world might not be suicidal.
Maybe this other intelligence we’re in the midst of summoning won’t be so bad?
Not so long ago I was going down a Rogan rabbit hole as I started looking into peptides, because he was way out ahead of most platformed people on the peptide curve. In one of the many episodes I listened to, he went off about how it could be that the only way alien civilizations are able to reach the stars is by eliminating all the crazy differences that makes it fun to be alive.
If they manage to make themselves a lot more the same, they might be able to coordinate well enough to overcome gravity and the vastness of interstellar space. That would make him sad, he said, to think of humanity’s wildness going out like that.
So that’s another way of looking ahead. Maybe the machine doesn’t kill us? Maybe it will make us all the same? Which would be too bad, but it would also mean we’d stop killing each other. Which would be nice. And maybe we’d see Saturn’s rings up close. That would be cool.
Though I’m not sure it would be worth the trip.
I really wish Kingsnorth would go on Rogan to discuss this book. I think Rogan would actually read it if he did. I’d like to hear the two of them compare notes. Kingsnorth pushing to return to the wild. Rogan opining about the inevitable homogenization.
You can’t fight City Hall.
Me
The question of whether or not we’re meant to see Saturn’s rings with our own naked eyes comes back to the question of what you think the point of being alive is.
Is it to do new things in the world or is it to just be?
These are two perfectly reasonable schools of thought. Panda bears exist. Humans build.
The trouble with building is that building requires resources, and seeking resources leads to disputes and sometimes disputes get out of hand. And there are unforeseen consequences. And winners and losers. And The Real Housewives of Cleveland.
Pandas have disputes over resources but they don’t get all that far out of hand.
Do you want to be man or panda?
Here’s what I know: I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to protest. I don’t want to run for the hills. I might be persuaded to run to an alternative community, but I’d need to know it had a track record of working out before I wanted to go.
The new ones have a way of falling to pieces. And the Machine seems to be reaching the longest standing communities now, anyway.
I don’t think technology can be stopped. If a breakthrough isn’t made in one place, it will be made in another. If one engineer quits, another will take his place. And obviously there’s just never any going back. Believe me, if I could have lived in the 70s, rather than today, I would have. But it’s not an option.
No one ever again gets to be Bob Dylan leaning against a cool looking car, with a guitar in the back seat but no phone in his pocket.
But I think maybe I can believe that the former denizens of the West can again unify around a reason to keep living. That seems feasible. In fact the process might have already begun somewhere. At one point in time, Jesus was just some nut in Galilee.
There could be a nut in Schenectady right now making some very good points that won’t really catch on for the next 100 years. But there’s time.
Nature is resilient, and it made us.
I doubt anyone made it this far, so, it’s a good place to admit that I had a hard time writing this essay. Like the West itself, I didn’t know where I was headed as I started it, wasn’t sure where I was going, don’t know if I got anywhere, so, eventually, I just had to admit that I was at...
The End.
All the block quotes are from the book, except the one from C.S. Lewis, as noted.
After I read Against the Machine, I went looking for articles about it, sure that it would spark interesting conversation, and I was surprised by how many reviewers had at best skimmed it or, more likely, not read it at all.
Thanks for this. I still haven't made up my mind about the book's core argument, but I think it's worth wrestling with and I'm glad to read an essay from someone who has.