Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
By: Paul Kingsnorth
Published: 2025
368 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Before Kingsnorth can tell you how to be against the Machine, he first sets out to define it. The Machine is multi-faceted, but Kingsnorth distills it down into four S's: Science, The Self, Sex, and the Screen. To take a position "against the Machine" he urges a return to the four P's: People, Place, Prayer, and the Past. But before you grasp this simple heuristic too firmly, it turns out that not all P's are good, and not all S's are bad. He is opposed to progress, particularly as it reduces everything to the parameterized, portable, plannable, and ultimately purchasable. On the other side, he is attempting to carve out a path to salvation, through a return to Christian values, a settledness that comes from having a place and community, and a sacredness that comes from connecting with the natural world.
What authorial biases should I be aware of?
Kingsnorth has huge biases. He's an ex-environmental activist who converted to Orthodox Christianity. He's spent decades opposing globalization, technocratic progress, and materialism. It's not true to say that he opposes all progress, but he certainly thinks that progress has gone from something we do, to something that is done to us—the Machine of the title, which turns everything (nature, people, culture, pleasure) into raw material that needs to serve ever more productive ends.
As such he makes no pretense at being balanced. And that's part of the book's value. This is a steelman of the anti-progress argument and a powerful rhetorical broadside against the technological miasma we're currently wading through.
Who should read this book?
I think those who would benefit most from this book probably won't read it. And those who will read it, might end up being too radicalized. I personally think that Kingsnorth is pointing in the correct direction, but as a practical matter we can't all duplicate Kingsnorth's life in rural Ireland, growing our own food and fuel, while making a living as a writer. To be fair that's not how he sees things playing out, but he still has a tendency to lump all of progress into one negative whole, without much effort to identify things that might have been useful.
What does the book have to say about the future?
He doesn't think we're going to overthrow the Machine, or even deflect it very much. He's urging people to outlast it in the same way that Irish monasteries kept the light of knowledge alive during the Dark Ages.
Specific thoughts: What exactly is the "Machine"?
