I agree with Paul Kingsnorth about many things. Maybe even most. Like Paul Kingsnorth—an English writer living in west Ireland—I believe that the most pressing issue for humanity in 2025 is how we respond to the threats presented to humanity by the internet age. Like Paul Kingsnorth, I fear a global monoculture: a flattening and mechanistic vision of human beings linked into society only by the twin inchoate energies of information and capital. A world of interchangeable and depersonalized cities in which person-to-person contact has become little more than a “luxury good.” Like Paul Kingsnorth, I worry that so much of what human beings need to flourish—small-scale communities, rooted in tradition and ritual and a shared understanding of a higher purpose—has been lost in an age that instead prioritizes the individualistic pursuit of private desire.
I have in recent years designed as much of my life as possible to escape the tendrils of what Kingsnorth terms “the machine”—he uses the term synonymously with “modernity”—a world in which smartphones and inventors of artificial intelligence and captains of capital alike work to “uproot … us from nature, culture, and God … mere cogs in a giant mechanism we have no control over.” In part inspired by his example, I use a desktop computer instead of a laptop in my home, confining access to the internet to a single corner of my study. I exclusively listen to physical music: vinyls, CDs. I have replaced my iPhone with a mostly dumb flip phone. I drafted much of this review on a Remarkable, a distraction-free e-ink typewriter-tablet with no apps or browser access. I write some of my fiction drafts longhand. I am, in other words, someone well-placed to agree with Kingsnorth that among the most humanistic things a person can do is “raindance on top of your smartphone until it is nothing but splinters.”
Which is why I was so surprised, reading Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine—tantalizing subtitled “On the Unmaking of Humanity”—to find myself more often than not pushing back against Kingsnorth’s rhetoric, and wanting more from his arguments. Far from encouraging me to retreat further into a bucolically embodied existence, Against the Machine made me want to think more critically—and perhaps more charitably—about what human flourishing might look like, not in collaboration with the machine, but with the assistance of, well, machines. Preaching compellingly—if at times bombastically—to the choir, Kingsnorth’s manifesto evokes my inner devil’s advocate.
What distinguishes, after all, a good technology from a bad one, one made for human flourishing and one designed to push us into subservience? That question, left all too unexamined in Against the Machine, turns out to be the book’s crux. Kingsnorth and I agree, I think, that browser-enabled smartphones and robot priests and AI chatbots that generate sermons or therapeutic advice are terrible for humanity. But what about penicillin, books, bicycles? What about the ultimate technology, language itself? Kingsnorth condemns those who make “the rookie mistake of treating technology as neutral.” But is the alternative to treat all that is not strictly “natural” as wicked?
Kingsnorth, an Orthodox convert, makes the convincing case that a more uniform tech-skepticism is the necessary result of a correct reading of Genesis and what happened in the Garden of Eden. After all, our desire to know the difference between good and evil—to know at all—was humanity’s original downfall: “We eat the fruit … our mind is filled with questions … here is humanity and nature, here is people and God.” Maybe language itself is evidence of our primal separation: For Kingsnorth, at the moment of the fall of mankind, a “portcullis of words” falls between “us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again.” At times his account of the fall borders on the Schleiermachian: innocence as a state beyond the conscious division of subject and object. Ultimately, however, Kingsnorth sees the fall as fundamentally about the illegitimate desire to transcend our human limitations. “Outside the garden,” Kingsnorth writes, “we forget the creator and worship ourselves.”
And yet we had language in the garden—Adam names the animals in Genesis 2:20. Christ himself is understood, in standard Christian theology, as the incarnate Word. To be human, even in Genesis, is to exist in, and communicate in, the imaginative realm: to create new ways of making ourselves known to one another. And Genesis 1 reminds us that human beings are to be understood in the image and likeness of God: an image and likeness that traditionally has been associated, from Irenaeus to Augustine to Luther to Herder to Pannenberg, with our intellectual and creative capacities. If we are anything more than just our bodies and our bodily impulses, if the phrase imago dei refers to anything at all beyond the suggestion of an anthropomorphic God, then we need an account of what the creative, intellectual man might have been without sin.
What distinguishes, after all, a good technology from a bad one, one made for human flourishing and one designed to push us into subservience?
Kingsnorth’s desire to condemn the information age wholesale takes for granted that it is obvious which information we do and don’t need. He mocks, for example, “the kind of people who think the Great Library of Alexandria contained ‘exabytes’ worth of information’ rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom…before they ever sit down to their data sets”—yet it’s possible to think of the Alexandrian library Kingsnorth seems to venerate as no less a repository of the sinful human desire to know than that of the digital equivalent he disdains.
Likewise, to this onetime user of the blogging (and friend-making) site Livejournal, Kingsnorth’s immediate disdain for children whose “phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school?” seems too unexamined. If we are able to create real human bonds—what else is friendship—beyond the boundaries of geography, surely that aids, rather than abets, the kind of thick communities Kingsnorth is calling for, even if it complicates their instantiation. Kingsnorth is too quick, I think, to assume that friendships, and maybe even communities, can’t arise in digital space: as a supplement to, if not supplantation of, embodied experience. Rootless cosmopolitan that I am, perhaps, I’ve found that the friendships I’ve made and sustained online (and in many cases have transitioned into offline friendships nevertheless mediated by necessity through digital correspondence) have been all the more grounded and committed for their intentionality.
Kingsnorth is at his best when he is arguing for specific acts of human flourishing (smartphone-smashing, say, or spending time contemplating nature) or against more concrete instantiations of the machine. Kingsnorth reminds us, more than once, that Christendom is dead, that Western Christendom—and the Enlightenment values of self-transcendence to which it inexorably led—contained already the seeds of its own destruction, as did, in Kingsnorth’s telling, every civilization that grew too fast and got too big for its own good. “Forget, then, about defending the West,” Kingsnorth writes. “Think instead about rebuilding a human culture from the roots.” Kingsnorth also largely successfully avoids other forms of culture war discourse, although his arguments about COVID vaccines—another “techno-fix” he opposes both as an (he believes) unproven medical invention and an example of unjust state power—risk not just tendentiousness but incoherence. How can we at once critique a society in which individual human desire to be the highest good there is, and also critique on libertarian grounds collective decision-making—including medical decision-making—that would limit human freedom in favor of the highest good?
Kingsnorth is also more compelling when he writes on another otherwise-tricky topic—gender issues—which he largely (and in my mind, fairly) treats as secondary to the wider philosophical question posed by transhumanism. Quoting heavily from both WIRED editor Kevin Kelly, and the transgender transhumanist and entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, Kingsnorth is able to trace a good-faith version of philosophical accounts of gender and the body that both reduce, and do not reduce, identity to birth sex. While Kingsnorth takes the standard-conservative line on trans issues—that birth sex and gender are equivalent—he’s reasonably generous in understanding why different philosophical priors might yield alternative perspectives on the issue. “The battle over gender,” Kingsnorth writes, “is the deepest level of the ‘culture war,’ and as ever it is not really about culture: it is about the essence of what it means to have a human body.”
Yet, in its desire to celebrate the body over and against the machine, Kingsnorth’s book leaves me wondering what, exactly, having a body—and a mind, and a soul— does mean. That human beings are some confusing amalgam of all these things is hardly a theologically, or even historically, novel concept. Yet Kingsnorth’s book falls short of teasing out a theological anthropology that does not make us into, well, failed animals—a comparison that Against the Machine sometimes, perhaps inadvertently, implies.
“Modernity is a machine for destroying limits,” he writes. “The ideology of the Machine — the liberation of individual desire — sees our world as a blank slate to be written on afresh when the old limits of nature and culture are washed away.” But it’s also true that there is something about human beings that is separate from both nature and culture, and that something does seem to manifest itself in acts of creation and imagination. That doesn’t make the world a “blank slate”—but it does mean, I think, that we need a more nuanced account of what a creative relationship with, and human acts upon, a world that isn’t a blank slate would look like.
In Kingsnorth’s most convincing passages, he helps us see one potential answer. What if the culprit were not information, as such, nor technology, but rather desire: the harnessing of our imaginative capacities for ultimately selfish ends? What if we were to blame not, say, Project Gutenberg (or whatever the digital equivalent of the Library of Alexandria is), but dopamine-grabbing notifications and algorithmically generated advertisements and all of the other forms of attention capture to which the now-manifest noetic realm is subject? To blame the attention economy, rather than the information age?
Kingsnorth is right, I think, when it comes to where he’d like to see us go: “Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A sense of being rooted. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history of generations. Song. Art.” But ars and techne are, I think, inseparable. To have one, we need a constructive—and charitable—account of the other.
