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In 2009, Paul Kingsnorth co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, which invites writers and artists to imagine new stories beyond the myth of progress and human centrality. The project peers into the gap between the collapse of this myth and what comes next. This willingness to face cultural unravelling shapes Kingsnorth’s approach in Against the Machine.
His book poses the central question, who are we? This is not a philosophical enquiry, though. It is an existential one, undertaken on behalf of a civilisation that seems to have forgotten the answer. We are “living in a metastasising Machine which is closing in” on us and which is polluting our skies, woods, past, and imagination. The book explores the roots of the current western cultural malaise; where the Machine came from and how it contributed to that malaise; how its values manifest and what they are destroying. It then offers a “guide to practical and spiritual survival and resistance”.
These are not new concerns for Kingsnorth. He began his career as an environmental activist and journalist. A prominent voice in the green movement, he was formerly editor of The Ecologist. He is also a poet and novelist, and he conjures fable-like currents through the book. It is a title that represents the culmination of decades of his wrestling with the Machine.
The Machine in question is not just technology. It is the “nexus” of political, economic, cultural and technological power, and it is destroying the Earth and reshaping us in its image. The twin revolutions of Reason and Technology accelerated the Machine’s reach but did not live up to their promise. Instead, they led us to trade people, place, past and prayer (Kingsnorth’s “four Ps”) for the self, science, sex and the screen (the four Ss). Many people are happy with this. At some level, we all enjoy the Machine and its fruits. We are all complicit in its rise. But drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s work, Kingsnorth suggests that our left-brain dominance of calculation and control has eclipsed the holistic, meaning-making capacities of our right hemisphere. Modernity has systematically uprooted us from sources of meaning. We might enjoy the gifts of the Machine for a time, but underneath, Kingsnorth suggests, we are discontent and rootless.
To find the cause of our rootlessness, Kingsnorth dwells on but ultimately moves upstream of arguments about inequality, colonisation, capitalism and environmental breakdown. These are symptoms of something else: the spiritual crisis at the heart of modernity. A secular society has largely replaced a Christian one, and we are the first civilisation to understand itself without looking to something bigger. This is where the book moves past an anti-modernity polemic towards a deeper enquiry into what humanity needs in order to stay human. Part of that, Kingsnorth believes, is a relocation around those four Ps – people, place, past, and prayer. These are capacious terms. As are culture, and home, and God. But still, these ideas echo across cultures, providing infrastructure around which lives can flourish.
It is flourishing that the last part of the book explores. We must all think about “drawing a line, and saying ‘no further’”. If you write an email using AI, it is possible, Kingsnorth suggests, to draw a line between that and eventually getting your brain uploaded to our shared digital plane. For Kingsnorth – who converted from Wicca to Orthodox Christianity a few years ago – part of his own ‘no further’ has involved moving to Ireland with his wife and children, going off-grid, homeschooling, and working a subsistence farm.
He imagines a “system built around community bonds, local economics, and human-scale systems” and “a politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion”. He expresses rage and sorrow against the Machine whilst recognising his reliance on it too: his income comes in part from his online writing. The world is driving us “daily deeper into the maw of the technium”. He laments the Machine from within it.
But, he says, we can move to its edge. We can resist it with our minds, our hearts, our lifestyles. This felt to me the thinnest part of the book. Kingsnorth wants us to reclaim our old bonds with Nature and God – both of them outside of the Machine, yet increasingly hard to access. His book points to the doom that is everywhere, and suggests we can walk away – but how, and to where? These are questions beyond the scope of one book though. They are cross-generational and cross-cultural work, and Kingsnorth’s deeply researched and rousing analysis is a tributary feeding their flow.
Whether you agree with his diagnosis and prescription will depend in part on whether you accept that the Machine has its own power and is fundamentally reshaping our souls, or whether it is a benign result of our choices and options, which – instead of being a cause of malaise – has brought health and prosperity our ancestors couldn’t dream of. Kingsnorth is writing for a wide audience, not for any left- or right-wing ideology (though there are parts that will surely be taken as such).
Who are we, then? Kingsnorth does not offer neat answers but insists on asking the question with urgency and depth. This might be uncomfortable for an age of five-step action plans and on-demand everything. He asks us to stare into the abyss with him without offering clarity on how to climb out of it. His anti-modernity stance is not a new one. He writes in the tradition of thinkers such as Lewis Mumford, C.S. Lewis, Wendell Berry, Simone Weil and Alasdair MacIntyre. But his book extends long-standing conversations about what it means to live well on a damaged planet, to remain rooted when rootlessness is the default, and to preserve our humanity even as the Machine tries to remake us. It is a confronting, ambitious, richly researched book, helping us to navigate “the strange perils of the world that is rising”.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth. Particular Books, 2025. ISBN: 9780241788400
