It’s Complicated
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Thesis, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
As AI encroaches on every job and every piece of technology, a sense of discontent is rising. As we see what screens are doing to people of all ages and what surveillance is making possible for governments, that discontent is joined by despair and anger. Liberal modernity seems increasingly hollow. Everything seems decided by metrics. All growth is deemed good. Paul Kingsnorth calls it all “The Machine,” which “is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up…The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition” (37).
Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, has struck a chord with many readers. It is a critical look at what progress and technology have wrought, a spiritual interpretation of our present moment and AI, and a call for allies in something he is calling reactionary radicalism. As Kingsnorth works his way through his own life, current events, and thinkers like Jacques Ellul, the image he creates via text has much in common with Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film, Metropolis, in which men are made to fit machines and toil underground, regulated by technology rather than liberated by it. Kingsnorth’s message is also consistent with the film’s final inter-title: “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.”
We can see Kingsnorth’s Machine everywhere. The Machine centers the Four Ss: science, the self, sex, and the screen (133). It offers us smart refrigerators, artificial wombs, and monthly subscriptions for heated seats in the car. It consumes the intelligence of our young and the attention of our old. An alternative to The Machine is human culture. Kingsnorth sums that up in the Four Ps: past, people, place, and prayer (131). Kingsnorth’s more recent embrace of religion means that this book takes a decidedly spiritual look at our modern malaise and even floats the idea that AI might be linked to the antichrist. That seems a little wild, but, then again, even big tech insiders like Peter Thiel are saying that.
Against the Machine is one part compelling and one part frustrating. Deeply personal, it revolves too much around Kingsnorth’s own positioning at times. Ireland and the UK had much stricter COVID-19 regulations, which clearly radicalized Kingsnorth. He falls into cliche at times when he defends populism, dislikes “elites,” and suggests that the saying “dead white men” is a form of hate speech. His drift to the right is a threat to the promise of the book, not because he is drifting right, but because his drift seems to reflect discomfort with his own place in society. He does not like the current green movement, not just because of the changed relationship with technology, but because it’s not what it used to be when he was part of it (149). He is distressed by the current left, while acknowledging that he rebelled against society, family, and traditional values in his youth: “I suppose I always assumed there would be something to come back to” (189). That kind of sentence makes his arguments seem more like time-tested generational complaints than insights.
Unfortunately, Kingsnorth often circles back to a way of seeing the world which seems grounded in resentment about being an aging man in a culture which does not like aging and has some doubts about gender. For example, when explaining the anti-culture we are experiencing, and trying to be sympathetic to the left, he writes: “I understood why the new Star Wars films had to first humiliate and then kill off their white male hero, Luke Skywalker, and replace him with a young woman” (140). This is silly. Luke Skywalker is too old to be the hero in any franchise outside of Indiana Jones. Luke Skywalker is played by a notoriously “woke” actor, who no doubt causes more trouble for the franchise than any other actor on the roster. It is less woke to lose him than to keep him. And how many of the Star Wars films have, and continue to have, male heroes? The majority. If anything, the persistence of the Star Wars franchise is all about aging people—big studio films cater to nostalgia all the time. If watching Star Wars move on from Luke Skywalker makes someone feel attacked, that may be on the viewer. It’s not as though Star Wars has changed plots at all in the last forty years. But passages like that are frustrating because Kingsnorth is right about many things in other passages.
Kingsnorth’s Machine is something of an updated version of the Underground Man’s Crystal Palace. Both Notes from the Underground and Against the Machine are wary of the language of society as perfectible and the elevation of human reason. Kingsnorth considers the elevation of reason to be the great crime of the French Revolution, which he blames for much of modernity’s woes. But, here again, his argument is weakened by his choice of evidence. Reason may have been the rallying cry at the beginning of the Revolution, but the Terror was far from rational. Robert Darnton’s The Writer’s Lot shows how many Enlightenment types were quickly considered enemies of the Revolution. Kingsnorth connects reason with many crimes: “We want to believe, like good Western liberals, that horror like Nazism or the mass murders of the Communist regimes were driven by irrational fanaticism: that they were in some ways reversions to a ‘barbaric’ past, the opposite of our ‘reasonable’ and human present. The truth, though, is the opposite” (61). Yet the Holocaust was irrational, because it was grounded in baseless hate and the Germans irrationally devoted resources to murder that they could have devoted to their war machine. Kingsnorth’s argument that reason cannot be counted on to remake society into a utopia is a good one, it does not require recoding historical excesses and crimes as rational.
Despite some flaws in historical interpretation and argument, Kingsnorth is not wrong about the appearance of the Machine in the present. He is not wrong that rhetoric around equality somehow got co-opted into meaning equal access to the free market. We should not let Elon Musk put microchips in our brains. We should not let AI do our thinking for us. He is correct that the old greens were not consumed by the same techno-optimism that fuels their alleged opponents. If you can plane the rough bits, Against the Machine has a compelling vision of the present and its woes. And despite all his despair about modern times, Kingsnorth does not fall back on a trite defense of “the way things were” or even the West. The book indulges a few cliches, but it transcends cliche.
Rather than return to anything, Against the Machine argues that we should rebuild. One foundation for that would be the embrace of askesis, asceticism. After that, we have two options. One can become “a conscientious objector to the Machine” (297). It is not easy, but “we can always find our liminal spaces” and
“there are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. Nothing is easy; everything is compromised. But building anew, building in parallel, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and building your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: What else is there?” (297).
One can also join a Monkey Wrench gang and go after the data centers. People who try to go as off grid as possible will also bring “your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine, and as delicious,” and see “the Amish as your lodestones” (306). For the radical ascetics, life might more closely resemble that of the rebels in The Matrix, including risk of capture.
Whether we take a more assimilated form of resistance or a more radical one, Kingsnorth suggests that meaningful resistance involves two things. One is clearly the embrace of limits, of many kinds. The other is to “pass any technologies you do use through a sieve of critical judgement. What—or who—do they ultimately serve? Humanity or the Machine? Nature or the technium? God or his adversary?” (307). Readers of Wendell Berry and fans of Yvon Chouinard will find that familiar.
Against the Machine is an imperfect book—as are all books—but it is an intentionally bold and provocative call to take the threat around us seriously (even spiritually). Modern markets and technology are like a Moloch that we feed our children to, the children must consume, must be productive, must be the kind of citizen who is easy to track, and who increases share value. If the phones rot their brains and the AI steals jobs they might actually enjoy, so what? The Machine must be fed. And we are so dependent on the Machine that some of its own creators worry it is more likely to become independent of us than we are to maintain power over it. That should alarm us and move us to action. Against the Machine is, at minimum, a conversation-starter on the topic.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
