Against the Machine
On the Unmaking of Humanity
Paul Kingsnorth
Having read it
★★★★★
Realistic, human and brilliant.
It has a set of thoroughly decent essays that, combined in book form, present a very valid, observant and cohesive story of what we in the West have done and are doing to ourselves and the world and, it isn’t a good thing.
And so we find ourselves in the age of AI and apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before. In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input.
Everyone – especially in the West – should read this book as it says so much about the world we are building, apparently in the name of Progress, and offers great spirit, hope and a raw, or cooked, ascetic* approach we can inhabit to help defeat the Machine.
A good passage
Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the Grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming.
I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.
I think: These are things designed to trap prey.
A second good passage
When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.
A third good passage
The Machine cannot be fought head-on, but it can, in certain circumstances, be circumvented. You can find your escape hatch. There are many such hatches, but each has to take into account one reality: that the key driver of Machine modernity, and the chief enemy of human freedom, has always been the state. It follows from this that escaping the reach of the state, and attempting to rebuild a moral economy, is the work – or the beginning of the work – of the reactionary radical.