“Against” the Machine

A review of Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine.

A woman playing the theremin, a musical instrument played by waving your hands through invisible electromagnetism in the air.

Unlike Paul Kingsnorth, I don’t hate “the Machine,” although in many ways my life has been defined by what it destroys.

My little home town, like many others across the middle, had its spirit partly consumed by titans of the Machine working under backlit plastic banners in the night: Wal-Mart and Dollar General.

Worse, maybe in my case, was the backlit glass in our living room, pumping the Machine’s dreams into my head. All corners of local embodied living, down to the dialect, were made irrelevant in the world’s most effective propaganda campaign. Young people left the farm and the community to go off to college and the city for a “better” life. The result was mutual destruction, with only old people left in towns like mine, and young people suffering mostly alone in sterile studio apartments, with only a phone screen and porn to keep them company.

You’d think, then, that Paul Kingsnorth’s new book “Against the Machine,” which articulates the devil inside the Machine with great clarity, would be right up my alley. I actually first discovered Paul because something like 25% of my readers also read his Substack, my biggest overlap. Why, then, is this not resonating?

Most of the criticisms that I’ve read of his book amount to, “We can’t abandon these large swathes of mainstream culture, as corrupt as they may be. We have to improve them from within.” Which, if you go by Kingsnorth’s own frame, makes them “cooked barbarians.” They are living right outside of the city of the Machine - Mammon - but maintain a certain freedom through resistance and wilderness. In Paul’s frame, this is a compromise to the freedom of the more ideal “raw barbarians,” who are truly wild and in no way shaped by the Machine. His detractors, I suppose, make the argument that being a cooked barbarian is not just a one-way relationship - they make the city more sane, and therefore more ideal than total purity, which is not possible, anyway.

This is not exactly my criticism. First of all, I reject the barbarian frame. Second, this is boring, and that’s not just to be glib (although it also is) but to give my gut reaction, which I think I can also put more words to.

It’s the undefeatable enemy of it all that I just don’t buy. It would be like claiming you could fly if it weren’t for gravity, writing a book called “Against the Gravity” and then spending all of your time clenching your butt-cheeks to fly like Superman and convincing others to do the same to fight the good fight. And then other people write a bunch of articles about how we should keep a little bit of gravity, so we can still drink from a cup without a straw.

This is, of course, an exaggeration: not to mock, but to magnify the issue so we can more easily see it.

“The Machine” is, fundamentally, a mode of apprehending the world. True, a bad master but, very importantly, an excellent servant. Since I know that Paul and I have both read “The Matter with Things” and I think both agree with the conclusions, we know that the left brain is responsible for the world-view that gives rise to his Machine. The left hemisphere’s take on reality may not be as fundamental as gravity (although, maybe it is), but an entire half of the nervous system is pretty dang fundamental, and declaring war on it (or, at least, to idealize totally withdrawing from it) feels almost exactly as futile.

And that’s also the thing: I agree with Paul’s excellent poetry about the faults of the Machine. It abstracts and therefore destroys Edenic flow. It tends us toward soulless automatons. AI will exaggerate these fundamental mistakes to the extreme, which may very well indeed turn out to be fatal. These observations, while true, are also easy to get applause for being a Doomer about.

What is less popular to notice, but is also true, is the unbelievable good the Machine affords us. I’m thinking sewage pipes and dollar bills, for one. I could go on. These very words, for another. These things, at their best, free us from machine-like labor so we can get busy being human. The failure to do so seems to me personal and moral, not an inherent fault with technology.

What Paul is raging against, more specifically, is our culture’s growing left-brain-as-master outlook of the last couple of hundred years which says, “It would be best if everything was treated like a machine.” That’s what both he and I hate because we’ve both watched it eat what we love.

But to say that the exact opposite is true is to make the same mistake in reverse. You can’t declare war on or abandon the Machine as a category. You’re using the Machine at this very moment: symbolic language. If you think that’s too broad a category for “the Machine,” you’re probably reading this on a screen, anyway. If you think that’s a nitpick or a very recent necessary evil, remember that Socrates disliked the advent of the written word because “nobody would be able to remember anything anymore,” which is exactly the complaint made about the phone, now. Fundamentally, technology always has a price and philosophers have always complained that the price is too high.

What is maybe a more accurate position to take in relation to the Machine (and, understandably, probably won’t sell many books) is a slightly different connotation of the word “against.” Instead of meaning the devil who should be destroyed, but is unstoppable, it should mean “against” in the sense of opponent processing. Meaning, they are indeed mutually incompatible worldviews - Aliveness and the Machine - but still must both be held at the same moment. By their mutual exclusivity being held against each other, we create the tension that fires the arrow.

I don’t want to sound naive. When I look out at my world and see the heart-shattering ugliness of ruthless and inhuman abstraction, I understand anew, over and over, Paul’s rage against the Machine. But the solution isn’t in total war with the Machine, which is impossible anyway, but in finding small ways to make the Machine principle the slave of the Aliveness principle once again. These are necessarily deeply unique to each person and not manifested as machine-like ideologies (as Paul likes to say, “I don’t know what you should do because I don’t know you”). Going a level deeper, declaring unwinnable wars against half our half our phenomenology would be, if I was feeling conspiratorial, a great way for the “Machine” to further distract and divide us. It would also be a great way to sell books, too. The more “human” approach is therefore full of balance and paradox.

Instead of not having a smartphone, for example, setting reasonable limits on their use. I have one and I use it less than an hour a day, mostly for texting and reading in the grocery store check-out. Instead of living in the woods, obsessively off the “grid,” maybe just move out of centralized urban hell to a slightly smaller town where people generally know each other and there’s a town hall.

“The West has fallen” is boring theatrical fussiness. At worst, it is unhelpful Doomerism that encourages impossible fantasies of living ten miles away from the nearest microchip instead of the more reasonable aim of getting off Instagram and calling your mom.

As an Orthodox Christian, I would think Paul would believe that being a saint in the City of Mammon (aka Nineveh) is far more valuable than being a “free” barbarian of any sort, merely for the perceived purity of your and your family’s spiritual life. In fact, that seems somewhat like a selfish ambition, in Christian terms. One that Paul isn’t actually pursuing, I think, given that I read his book on my iPhone, which struck me as funny more than a few times.

His cut-and-dry category of “the Machine” hits me, ironically, as pretty machine-like in its simple binary and certainty. The enemy is never so easy to categorize in my experience, and when he seems very clear, it’s probably something wrong in me rather than a dramatically external demon.

For Paul, this great external demon is tightly aligned with the concept of capitalism, which he argues is something recent, machine-like, and categorically new in human nature - something that did not organically develop from human tendencies. This strikes me as both implausible and convenient if you need to create a wholly distinct enemy you can be morally justified in devoting your life to its destruction.

Implausible because, from a purely logical standpoint, you’d have a hard time explaining how something emergent like capitalism arrived ex-nihilo. Nevermind that historically you’re also going to have a hard time explaining merchants, currency, and the fact that ancient chiefs were buried with all the tribe’s gold. As a Christian, Paul would also need to account for the “Matthew Principle,” which is an observation made in the Gospel of Matthew that seems to communicate the fundamental reality of wealth inequality caused by something like capitalism.

That’s all to say, there is no historical justification that capitalism arrived out of nowhere in the last few hundred years. You would only hope that was the case if you were trying to prove that your enemy is recent and extraneous, not deep and fundamental. One requires an all-out spiritual war, the other requires a site-blocker and some self-control.

What personally strikes me as the strangest is the implication that we are inevitably victimized by our technology - if you touch your phone, it will ruin you. It reminds me of documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” which take on this apocalyptic tone as they tell me about all the billions that urgently go into keeping me addicted. As someone who has an iPhone and is mostly not addicted to it, the fatalism strikes me as a little funny. I know the buttons are colorful like a ripe strawberry - you can still just put it down.

Sure, I’ve blocked and deleted pretty much everything my phone could do to suck me in. I know it’s incredibly powerful and so I am careful with it. I don’t have social media and I only check email on my computer once a day, etc. It has taken work, yes. But it’s far from impossible, and the implication that it can’t be done seems to me like convenient moralizing from people who actually don’t want to stop scrolling Instagram and would rather live in a fantasy world that suggests the only way for them to personally stop doomscrolling is to burn down the West.

Which, I think, may be at the heart of the popularity of this book. It is also why I tend to distrust these black and white apocalyptic narratives. They are a great way to hide from the fact that building a good, normal life in an evil, fallen world is tedious and difficult. It’s easier to pretend you have an unbeatable enemy and live in some off-the-grid fantasy than it is to have a balanced relationship with your iPhone and nature and your kid’s friends.

So, yes, I am against “Against” the “Machine” - in the sense that I hold the Machine and its demands for quantification and measurement against the paradoxical demands for love, God, and humanity and often also deeply fail at that. While not being radical in its outlook, it is allowed me to be normal, which is radical in its own way.

The Machine’s ugly utility longs for our creative attention to reimagine it, little by little, into something as paradoxically beautiful as the screech of a Theremin.