Rewilding the Machine
A Middle Way Through Kingsnorth’s Black Pill
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
An Introduction to the Machine
We are all cogs unwittingly assembled into the Machine, a pseudo-religious techno-cult that is progressively dismantling our humanity.
This is the disquieting central thesis of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, and as I read the book, I couldn’t help but nod along in agreement with most of its primary contentions regarding the current state of modernity.
However, I have no talent for book reviewing. So instead of critiquing Against the Machine, I’ve set out here to examine Kingsnorth’s main points in the context of my own uneasy relationship with technology, while sharing some thoughts on how to resist disappearing into the Machine.
But first, let’s outline the gist of Against the Machine.
Kingsnorth, who has a previous background in environmental activism, describes in several dozen essays how the West adopted a worldview that treats the earth as a machine, and why the Western socio-political approach to modernity appears fixed on replacing the cultures and religions of all people with a globalized cult of technical progress.
(NB: I think the most apt definition for “the West” in this context was recently explained by John Robb of Global Guerrillas as: “our globally networked commercial culture.”)
Kingsnorth lucidly describes how this happened. Centuries’ worth of pro-technology propaganda (going back at least to the Enlightenment) has “stripped away our sense of human-scale culture, our sense of humanity, our relationship with nature, our traditions, and our God.” Kingsnorth posits that the animating spirit behind this Western techno-religion, which he refers to as the Machine, is a desire to completely subjugate nature, including human nature.
The stakes are high in this war with the Machine. Will we allow this confluence of power, wealth, and technology to converge into a totalizing system of control? Or, will we defend nature and the commons from technologies that will eventually “unmake” humanity? Kingsnorth is clear that he thinks it unlikely humanity will ultimately win, though it is not a foregone conclusion that we must lose.
How the Machine Works: The Four P’s vs. the Four S’s
So, how does this Machine actually work? What is the mechanism being used to unmake us? Kingsnorth refers to a systematic process by which we are shepherded into a post-human future as “the Great Unsettling.” This Great Unsettling is achieved through a replacement of the Four P’s with the Four S’s:
Essentially, human culture arises from the Four P’s:
Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people.”
Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.
Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.
In order to replace human culture, these Four P’s must be supplanted by their inverted counterparts. Kingsnorth calls these the Four S’s and identifies them as the primary factors driving us toward a post-human anticulture:
Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality,” an affirmation of individual identity.
The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine.
Kingsnorth argues that together, these latter four forces form the secular creed that defines modern “progress.” By displacing the Four P’s, the Four S’s erode limits, traditions, and shared human experiences rooted in nature, community, and mortality.
The Human Need for Roots
Kingsnorth describes how much of this process to replace the Four P’s with the Four S’s has unfolded gradually in the West through deliberate policies of deracination: the literal uprooting of People from their Place.
The importance of “rootedness” as a requirement for maintaining our humanity is a running theme throughout Against the Machine, with Kingsnorth drawing heavily on French philosopher Simone Weil’s World War II-era book The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Writing in exile from London while her native France was under Nazi occupation in 1943, Weil argued that rootedness is a fundamental need of the human soul and that its destruction is the defining spiritual catastrophe of modernity.
Kingsnorth agrees:
“I believe the heart of the crisis that is enveloping so much of the world today - cultural, ecological and spiritual- is this ongoing process of mass uprooting…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 least the Industrial Revolution, mere cogs in a giant mechanism that we have no control over.”
Loss of Identity
Nowhere is this uprooting more visible than in how we have come to talk about ourselves.
Kingsnorth notes that: ”People don’t tend to talk much about their ‘identity’ unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, the more you have lost. Once an entire country is talking about nothing else, that’s a pretty good sign that the Machine has sprayed the roots of its people with Roundup and ploughed the remains into the field.”
Technology as Culture
As I mentioned above, Kingsnorth’s thesis left me with much to ponder in the context of my own relationship with technological progress. I am quite sympathetic to many of his arguments, especially that technology is flattening and even erasing human cultures.
But what if you’d grown up in a milieu where technology already was your culture? For those of us born American in the late 20th century, this is exactly what happened. We arrived naked and screaming into a culture saturated in techno-optimism. I positively marinated in it for most of my childhood and youth. We’d been to the moon, after all. AND we had the bomb, so take that commies! We were assured as children that armed with our shiny new computers, our modern education system was the best in the world. Nothing could stop America from progressing toward the brightest of futures.
What Remains When Technology Fails?
While reading Against the Machine, I often thought of the brand-new middle school I attended in the mid-90s. With the Millennium approaching, science, space exploration, and all things tech were major themes. Students were even administratively organized into teams named after each space shuttle.
I try not to read too many retconned omens into this, but a few years later, in 2003, my team’s shuttle, the Columbia, broke up on atmospheric re-entry, killing all seven astronauts onboard. The shuttle program was retired shortly thereafter. In hindsight, that event seemed a symbolic end to the promise sold to my generation of American youth.
Instead of the bright techno-future we had been promised, we got forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, an opioid addiction epidemic, and COVID. It often seems to me that we’ve lost the stars in exchange for limbic system-hijacking devices that steal our creative energies and ruin our attention spans. In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth repeatedly suggests that this promised future will never arrive, making it absolutely essential to resist the Machine’s efforts to destroy the foundations that have given our human cultures their shape and meaning, lest we find ourselves completely uprooted.
Confessions of a Recovering Effective Accelerationist
Despite technology failing my generation at every turn, I persisted. Here I confess to being a recovering effective accelerationist. Blame it on the American techno-propaganda I was raised with, but I was initially seduced by Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto and its effective accelerationist ethos (aka, ”e/acc”). Coming off the post-COVID blahs, it seemed just the antidote we needed in the West to heal our cultural and spiritual malaise when I first read it in 2023.
While I still think many of Andreessen’s arguments have merit, I’m concerned e/acc takes far too much of a materialist view of the world, and does not adequately address several current human pathologies including (but not limited to!) state violence, class warfare, environmental degradation, and corporate rapaciousness, which are not fixable through increased wealth and prosperity alone. I worry that going full e/acc risks leading us away from something like a Star Trek vision of the future toward a world closer to The Expanse. Technology itself is not a panacea for solving human coordination failures, nor can it fill the spiritual void that seems to accompany modernity. I conclude that on our current trajectory, the majority of future humans are more likely bound for a Belter-type existence than for Starfleet Academy.
The d/acc Construct
I’m no longer an effective accelerationist, and two things in particular crystallized this shift. First, there must be a middle ground between full-throttle techno-accelerationism and de-growth doomerism, and I think I found the sweet spot with d/acc.
Formulated by Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, the defensive, decentralized, democratic, differential acceleration (d/acc) construct was introduced in his 2023 essay My Techno-Optimism. The d/acc concept rebuts Andreessen’s cheerful assurances that the world’s problems will be fixed by rocketing up the Kardashev scale. Instead, Buterin argues that we should accelerate technologies that strengthen human defense, distribute power, and preserve individual agency, while holding back those that concentrate power or degrade human dignity. I will always believe technology has an inevitable (and positive!) part to play in future human flourishing, but it needs wisdom and restraint applied, which I think the d/acc concept recognizes.
The second thing causing my pivot from e/acc was a deep dive into several 19th and 20th-century thinkers (many of whom I later discovered Kingsnorth also cites in Against the Machine) who wrote eloquently about the modern tendency to idolize science and technology.
The most important of these for me was probably C.S. Lewis, whose The Abolition of Man imagines a future in which a class of technocrats he calls “the Conditioners” might use a combination of technology, psychology, and propaganda to reshape the desires and values of all humans. Lewis later fictionalized the concept in his 1945 sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, where a group of academics and scientists attempt to establish a global authoritarian technocracy.
Both works reflect Lewis’s rejection of scientism, the belief that science is the only valid source of knowledge, and his concern that humanity could be reshaped by a technocratic elite who no longer recognize any moral law above their own will.
Between Buterin’s framework and the warnings of Lewis (and many others - see bibliography below), I landed on d/acc as a way for us to cautiously embrace technology without entirely losing our humanity.
Finding A Middle Way
In some ways, Against the Machine is the blackest of black pills. Kingsnorth doesn’t have much hope that the Machine can be defeated, and he’s pessimistic overall about our ability to thwart our total subjugation by “Techno-Sauron.” It’s perhaps unsurprising that his solutions for fighting or escaping the Machine are relatively thin compared to the book's critical portions. And that’s fine; I actually find it refreshingly humble when an author gives a detailed diagnosis of a problem without ending with an explicit answer about what he/she thinks is the perfect solution.
However, I do think Kingsnorth’s pessimism might be alleviated somewhat if he had explored some compromises, call them middle ways, between what he sees as the Machine’s inexorable march to eradicate humanity, and some current efforts to harness technology in a more wise and human-scale fashion.
One area that is clearly near and dear to my heart is the contemporary parallel society movement. As we’ve written about extensively on this blog, the parallel society or parallel polis movement goes by many names (network states, parallel societies, startup societies, etc.) and represents a broad array of ideas, but their unifying factor is aptly summed up by Kingsnorth himself in Against the Machine (paraphrasing Jacques Ellul): “the only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization is to give them the slip. To learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society…”
Obviously, these experimental communities have their challenges. Buterin himself has been candid about this regarding the Zu pop-up city archipelago he founded and continues to inspire, e.g., conceding that governance remains to be solved (who decides the rules?), membership defined (who gets in, and why?), etc. These are questions every durable community in history has had to answer. Additionally, Simone Weil’s warning that “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others” is of particular concern for emergent parallel societies. Many of those most drawn to building parallel communities are themselves thoroughly deracinated. A parallel society built by uprooters seriously risks uprooting host communities (my piece Expat, Immigrant, Missionary, Guest details some of the most significant of these issues).
Ultimately, though, I think Kingsnorth might find the sphere of parallel societies interesting to study, especially the often thoughtful, constructive, and intentional ways in which its advocates and practitioners are using tech. They represent the kind of constructive engagement with modernity that would benefit from Kingsnorth’s analysis. I’d be very curious to hear his thoughts on these efforts (even if highly critical) because he arrives at something close to the same instinct in the final pages of Against the Machine:
“To me, the dissolution of the modern nation-state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralized units would be welcome. Perhaps then we could rediscover the roots of our old nations, and begin to rebuild them again. Perhaps too, new nations will form, built around a spiritual core, and a love of place, which will give to their people the kind of meaning which the nation-states of the Machine era have so successfully imitated whilst at the same time destroying. Perhaps we will live in real nations again. Perhaps we will build them. Nobody else can.”
Nobody else can. That is the driving force behind every parallel society, pop-up village, and emergent social order that attempts to live as purely human rather than as an automaton. Based on the quote above, I would invite Kingsnorth to explore the parallel societies movement for a much-needed respite from the Machine. Because, as much as I agree with many of Kingsnorth’s diagnoses of modernity’s ills in Against the Machine, I don’t think individually retreating to the fens or the mountains is an attractive, let alone scalable, option for most people. Instead, I see an opportunity to use technology with intention, deliberation, wisdom, and restraint to found new, enduring communities and hopefully rejuvenate old ones.
Maybe we can’t fully escape the Machine, but we can certainly try to rewild it on our own terms.
I close by inviting you, dear readers, to discuss. What do you think? How do you negotiate life in the Machine? What traditions or places still root you? Are there technologies you use with deliberate restraint? Please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you!
Selected resources for further reading:
Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth
The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
The Need for Roots, Simone Weil
The Abolition of Man & That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis
Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry