An Apostate Against the Machine-God
Reflections on Christian anarchist Paul Kingsnorth's powerful, must-read anti-technology manifesto
With his new book, Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth offers a powerful jeremiad, meditation, and manifesto for this moment. I love his book even when I disagree with him. In fact, I appreciate our areas of disagreement as I find the tension between our views generative and productive. Many of the thinkers Kingsnorth references are known to me from decades of exploring the evolution of Techne from different angles. But this book will be a fantastic primer for anyone who hasn’t studied historical criticism of the technosphere, such as Rene Guenon, Jacques Ellul, or Lewis Mumford—or even, from way back, the Luddites and Diggers.
Kingsnorth argues that the converging catastrophes of our age—ecological collapse, social atomization, and the rise of artificial intelligence—are symptoms of a deeper metaphysical sickness and long-term civilizational project he calls “the Machine.” He posits that what we call “the West” is less a geography or a culture than a specific way of seeing: a left-brained, rationalist, utilitarian ethos. This force, driven by the ideology of progress and the limited worldview of scientific materialism, has uprooted humanity from connection to place and tradition, alienating us from the transcendent and sacred. We are all rootless beings now: “Cut loose in a post-modern present,” he writes, “with no center, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.”
Kingsnorth traces his journey from a young environmental activist protesting against corporate globalization to a writer who realized that political resistance was insufficient against a force that was not just physical, but metaphysical and spiritual, finally moving his family to the Irish countrside. He realized that something alien, parasitic, had found its way into the human soul. He suggests that the “Great Unsettling” we experience today—the vertiginous sense that our world is spinning out of control—is the result of a long process of left-brain dominant thinking:
We could simply call this process modernity, which is not a time period so much as a story we tell ourselves. But I prefer to call it the Machine, because a machine…is what it feels like. This process, which has been going on for centuries, of uprooting us from nature, culture and God, leads us into a mass society, controlled by and for technology, in which we have been on course to become, since at the least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.
Just as the English peasantry got fenced out of the commons with the Enclosure Act from the 17th Century, our techno-feudal elites increasingly build digital fences to keep modern humanity away from nature and reality itself. We’re getting corralled into a sterile “technosphere” where human nature and identity is unfixed, biology is a constraint to be overcome, and the final goal is a detached, amoral, disembodied immortality for the few and slavery for the many.
Kingsnorth argues that modern Machine civilization has become a “totalitarian” system of pure ratio—the calculating, logical, and binary intellect that dissects the world into measurable parts—while effectively blinding itself to the nous, or “heart-mind,” which perceives the sacred, the whole, and the unquantifiable. In this “Age of Iron,” the intuitive wisdom that once guided human life has been exiled because it cannot be processed by the Machine’s binary logic, leading to a “pall of rationality” where only what can be counted is counted as real. He contrasts this with the pre-modern worldview, noting that “the medieval mind saw the ratio as a servant of the nous” —a proper hierarchy that kept technological power in check before the “spiritual restraints” were removed, allowing the unleashed ratio to embark on its monomaniacal conquest of the human soul and the planet.
Kingsnorth defines the Machine not merely as technology but as an autonomous program that ruthlessly exploits the natural world for utilitarian aims, deploying nature as a mechanism and human beings as interchangeable parts. The crisis, he argues, is fundamentally spiritual. By severing our connection to the divine and to other aspects of tradition and community, modernity created a vacuum that has been filled by a vacuous conception of freedom and worship of the self or the “sovereign individual.”
Simone Weil explored “rootedness,” declaring that humans have a vital need to be anchored in time, place, and community. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul,” she wrote. The Machine’s primary function is to sever all of our roots to create utterly dependent consumer who need the Machine to survive. Lacking a “sacred order” to bind culture together, society devolves into a “culture of inversion” where all traditional values are overturned. Kingsnorth sees the counterculture of the 1960s as contributing to this project of demolishing and “deconstructing” all traditional bonds and structures.
He offers a grim diagnosis of our current trajectory. He identifies the values of the Machine as the "Four Ss": Science, the Self, Sex, and the Screen. These have replaced the traditional "Four Ps" of People, Place, Prayer, and the Past. He takes the modern transgender moment as an example of how the system valorizes individual identity over all else, and how the countercultural rebellion against constraints on personal freedom ends up feeding Capitalist production, even the production of new genders and identities. For Kingsnorth, the decoupling of gender from sex expresses the Machine’s hostility toward the "given"—the aspects of our existence we do not choose. He argues that the movement toward infinite progress or transhumanist Singularity treats biology as a prison and a repressive limitation. Our organic nature is something to overcome, rather than something fundamental to our being.
Reading Against the Machine, I found myself contrasting Kingsnorth with the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, his polar opposite. Land’s books were given away at Hereticon, a Miami conference I attended last year funded by Peter Thiel, which had a distinctly transhumanist bent. Land and Kingsnorth agree that an autonomous, self-organizing entity—an occult being or archetype sometimes called Ahriman or Moloch—seeks to use us to create a “body” for itself, then escape human control and perhaps discard us. However, where Kingsnorth views the Machine as a destructive monster, Land celebrates this suicidal drive. ”The human animal is a meat puppet of the machinic unconscious,” Land notes.
Land wants to accelerate technocapitalism to force the end of humanity in a robot civilization, positing that “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” Kingsnorth, by contrast, is a classical humanist and self-described “reactionary radical” who wants to restore human-scale cultures and rooted identities by rebuilding “moral economies.” While Land nihilstically encourages humanity to surrender as we decompose into the raw material to be re-used by mechanized super-intelligence, Kingsnorth calls for “technological askesis”—a disciplined refusal of dehumanizing technologies, and a return to home, hearth, family farming, and artisanal craftsmanship.
But Kingsnorth seems to have fallen behind our fast-moving times. He ignores the profound shifts that have occurred in the last few years. He remains bitter over the Covid lockdowns and the Left’s capture of the academy, with its focus on identity politics and victimization. Covid was a breaking point for him: “The COVID pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kinds of technologies— smartphone-enabled passports, under-the-skin microchips, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control, psychological ‘nudging’—which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of ‘saving the planet’.”
Kingsnorth assumes that the Machine is intrinsically linked to a progressive, liberal rationalism—the technocratic Left —that seeks to dissolve all boundaries linking people to tradition:
The post-modern left which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of Machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s: norms which act as a brake on the spread of Machine values. The left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.
But he misses the rise of the new “Reactionary Modernism”—represented by figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and J.D. Vance—that applies the unleashed power of the Machine to support a much darker and more destructive ethos: A regressive, racist, misogynist project, based on an atavistic form of imperial Christianity, in a quest for totalitarian control. This “New Right” seeks to marry futuristic technology with a new kind of corporate monarchy, using AI and surveillance to enforce a rigid, neo-feudal order. We are caught in the teeth of this now.
Kingsnorth’s often-restated bitterness toward the Left (his former team) leads him into reactionary overreach.
