Why Do We Build the "Machine"?

A brief review of Paul Kingsnorth's much-discussed "Against the Machine"

While I was in the middle of reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, my two-year-old son Patrick wandered into the basement and climbed up on my lap. We shared a quiet moment of dad snuggles together. This is wonderful, I thought. This is what life is really about. No screens, no distractions, just us.

Kingsnorth, I suspect, would agree. An Irish cultural critic and Orthodox Christian—formerly an environmental activist and Wicca practitioner—Kingsnorth has carved out a distinctive intellectual niche for his trenchant critiques of modernity’s hurly-burly. Recently, he delivered a provocative First Things lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” reckoning with the whole business of Christian state-building and traditional political engagement. Against the Machinerepresents a synthesis of Kingsnorth’s views as developed across multiple forums—a sort of right-leaning degrowth manifesto.^[1]

This is a book of cultural criticism, about the miseries of the commercialized, commodified, mechanized, hypercontrolled world we’ve built. Voices on the left and right have leveled such charges for generations. But what distinguishes Kingsnorth’s line of attack is just how radical—in the original etymological sense of getting to the root—it actually is. Where plenty of right-leaning writers old and new have blamed specific intellectual figures for modernity’s pathologies—Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, and the list goes on—Kingsnorth goes far deeper. He indicts the whole “intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits.”^[2] This complex, which Kingsnorth dubs “the Machine,” is not an agglomeration of specific technologies. It is, instead, “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance” to exercise a certain form of technical mastery over the stuff of creation.^[3] Its core values today are what Kingsnorth calls the “four Ss”—science, the self, sex, and the screen.^[4]

To be clear, this is not just a criticism of Silicon Valley, or even—pace Ted Kaczynski—“industrial society” as such. Indeed, Kingsnorth comes extraordinarily close to stating outright that organized civilization itself is the problem—or at least, civilization that advances beyond a certain very low level of sociopolitical cohesion.^[5] The legendary anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who famously argued for the sociological virtues of hunter-gatherer societies over settled agrarianism, is never cited directly—at least not that I noticed—but his specter looms very large over Kingsnorth’s book. Kingsnorth’s specific complaints against the modern world are, for the most part, standard fare among the postliberal set: mass alienation, depression, sexual confusion, environmental degradation, digital disembodiment, and so on. And yet for Kingsnorth, these are all attributable, at some level, to the original sin of trying to master the given order and subordinate it to human ends—to the original sin, that is, of civilization-building.

As Kingsnorth has it, our technological advancement has left us cut off from what matters most—from our past, from our people, from our place, and even from our prayers.^[6] We no longer know our neighbors, no longer belong to “thick” nationalities, and no longer worship as we once did. The rhythms of life that structured the years of our ancestors no longer exist. In their place, we have smartphones and targeted advertising.

There is something demonic about this—perhaps, Kingsnorth dares to suggest, quite literally. In the book’s closing chapters—which are both jarring and compelling—Kingsnorth explores the haunting language used by frontier AI pioneers, which carries considerable metaphysical freight. What exactly is this supposedly inhuman superintelligence “struggling to be born”? What is being “ushered in” by the gods of the corporate machines? There is something here, Kingsnorth contends, of Antichrist itself.^[7]

This is a gloomy prophecy indeed. So what, then, does resistance to the Machine look like? Well, for Kingsnorth—who draws inspiration from a mix of Southeast Asian tribes who refused to assimilate into nations and “remained ungovernable”—it can take the form of internal resistance, an unwillingness to let oneself be remade in the Machine’s image (a sort of “Benedict Option of the soul”).^[8] Alternatively, resistance may involve an Amish-style retreat from mass culture altogether.^[9]

This book, in short, has a sharp edge. And it’s that sharp edge that sets Kingsnorth’s book apart from so many other conservative-coded volumes in the same genre. Most books treat the problems of modern civilization as matters for amelioration; Kingsnorth dares to ask whether they are, in fact, fundamental—and hence unsolvable within the limit conditions imposed by modern priors and political systems. That is a cold and bracing word.

But is it the full story?

When my wife entered labor with Patrick, he was breech, with his feet downward. So, in the early hours of May 19, 2023, doctors performed an emergency cesarean section and bring Patrick into the world. Mom and son are happy, healthy, and thriving today. And yet, if the same situation had occurred three thousand years ago, one or both of them would almost certainly be dead. My wife and son are alive today because of the Machine that Kingsnorth deplores (well, at least its science and its screens).

This is the one great, brutal, bittersweet fact that Kingsnorth’s book—for all its erudition, moral seriousness, and rhetorical force—simply cannot bring itself to confront, People chose the Machine—choose civilization and modernity and technology and change—because they wanted to live.

This side of industrialization, the distinctive horrors of a premodern age are virtually unthinkable to us. We no longer live in a time when every childbirth means risking death, where childhood illnesses can be life-threatening, or where one bad harvest leads to starvation. There is something essentially decadent about a degrowther critique that doesn’t look this searing truth in the eye. Of course it would be better to live with greater rootedness, to put down the digital devices and encounter nature, and to be free from totalitarian systems. Anyone can agree with this in the abstract. But the price of an actual return to those “thick” traditional lifeways would be vastly higher than almost anyone today would dare to accept.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari once coined a memorable phrase that’s picked up some degree of notoriety: under modernity, “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”^[10] That is to say: when our technology hits a certain point, we surrender our sense of closeness and attachment to the given order, our sense of its sacredness in some sense, in order to make the world do what we want. Viewed from Kingsnorth’s perspective, Harari is right. But there’s an alternative interpretation, too: under modernity, man trades one locus of meaning for another: the world for people.

And this, at bottom, is an inheritance of our religious past. Jewish and Christian monotheistic thought rejected the sacralization of the natural world on its own terms. No longer was the wind the presence of Hermes, or the wheat the manifestation of Demeter.^[11] These were gifts of a Creator beyond them—good gifts, of course, to be honored and cherished, but not divine in themselves.^[12] And so, against that backdrop, the individual human soul, in its capacity for salvation beyond time’s horizon, took on infinite value.

All throughout Against the Machine, Kingsnorth hesitates to confront this religious question—perhaps sensing that it necessarily complicates the traditional/modern binary upon which his book depends. And yet the distinction between the animisms and pantheisms of “traditional societies,” and the Jewish/Christian understanding of divine transcendence, is metaphysically stark.^[13] And it is of utmost consequence for understanding why the Machine came to be. Notwithstanding today’s mad transhumanist ambitions of apotheosis, vast numbers of the West’s scientists and inventors have been Christians seeking to better the lives of their fellows—because in the lives of their friends and neighbors, they saw something of God.

There are limits, of course, to how far this pursuit of life can go. As Giorgio Agamben has helpfully argued, there is a real distinction between “bare life,” or subsistence (zoe) and life-as-flourishing (bios), and a regime concerned only with the furtherance of “bare life” becomes a medical-totalitarian nightmare.^[14] But, at least phenomenologically, it does not ring true to me that—even in our modern-ness—I and my loved ones are somehow cut off forever from bios, that there is no way for us to flourish in the world we’ve made.

Maybe I am deluding myself, though. Perhaps everything Kingsnorth argues in this book is correct. Perhaps, as the Machine has worked me over, I have—against my will or knowledge—nonetheless become a damaged, not-quite-human, decidedly imperfect cyborg-person.

But I will be a damaged cyborg holding my living wife and child. And I accept that price.

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^[1] Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (New York: Thesis, 2025).

^[2] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 38.

^[3] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 37.

^[4] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 133.

^[5] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 81–88.

^[6] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 131.

^[7] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 258–61.

^[8] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 304.

^[9] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 305–07.

^[10] See Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus; A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017), 199.

^[11] For more detailed discussion of this point, see Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians In the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).

^[12] Cf. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), ebook ed. (arguing that in the medieval period, “the belief in a controllable, mechanistic universe in which human beings may exploit the laws of nature for economic purposes, was growing; by the end of the Middle Ages, it had triumphed. Thomas Aquinas recognized that man, created in God’s image, held power over the natural world.”).

^[13] Kingsnorth’s engagement with metaphysical questions is confusing, to say the least. Within the space of three pages, Kingsnorth cites two writers—Philip Sherrard and Brad Gregory—who offer precisely opposite diagnoses of our current theological predicament. The former frames the Western assertion of divine transcendence as modernity’s metaphysical sin, while the latter argues that the loss of divine transcendence was the key error. Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 70–72. Kingsnorth seems to see no tension between these narratives, running them together as part of the same genealogical account of the Machine.

^[14] See generally Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).