The Romance of the Machine
On Paul Kingsnorth’s new polemic about digital technology
N.B.: This post began as a “what I am reading,” in the hopes of generating a model for shorter posts, but it rapidly developed into a “how I am reading.”
I was asked to read Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, with a group of “well-read dudes” that meets monthly in a church library. I am eager to field their recommendations. I owe this group an immeasurable debt of gratitude for having introduced me earlier this year to The Betrothed (1842) by Alessandro Manzoni (in a newly published translation by Michael F. Moore), which I now count among my top 10 favorite novels.
I was genuinely interested in learning about Kingsnorth, who has been variously branded (and repeated with bemused pride on his website) a “communist, anarchist, reactionary, crazy collapsitarian, woolly liberal, soy boy, nativist, cave-dweller, Luddite, Romantic, Anabaptist, left-wing oikophile, eco-socialist, eco-fascist, doomer, nihilist, ‘lower middle-class eco-toff’ and — my current favorite — ‘environmental activist turned apocalyptic mystic.’”
His own self-description is no less provocative: “If you forced me to label myself at gunpoint, I might call myself a conservative hippy, an Orthodox Christian anarchist, or a reactionary radical.” In the past, I’ve been sympathetic to the prophetic voices of Kentucky’s Wendell Berry and Virginia’s Joel Salatin, the self-described “Christian Libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.” Their accounts of local culture and practice have provided insightful critiques of top-down and centralized planning, which often cuts against the grain of nature and community. So I was curious: what is all the fuss about?
In part, it’s about Kingsnorth’s recent conversion to Christianity, which he recounted in a widely distributed essay in First Things in June 2021. Many ask: How was this environmental activist swayed by the claims of Christianity, especially with all its talk of “dominion” over nature? More skeptically: Did his conversion, like so many other recent public professions, merely baptize his previously held beliefs? Having now read the book, I can say that we have thin answers to the first question and some warrant for the second. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of Kingsnorth’s conversion, I am somewhat concerned that it sits uncomfortably alongside other types of myth-making that are offered in his response to our modern condition of rootlessness. We’ll see how these elements play out in a few instances below.
Our interest in this change of heart, however, is not what the book is about. It is a polemic, a manifesto, a call to arms about the ubiquity and menace of digital technology, free-market capitalism, and much else. Never dull, it is a rip-roaring mashup of story, poetry, assertion, invocation, and provocation. And many of its examples are deeply problematic, posing a challenge for readers, even those who may be sympathetic to its central claims.
Here’s a fairly representative passage from Against the Machine to give you a general flavor of the argument and style. After 120 pages of warm up, Kingsnorth unveils the heart of his thesis:
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic. The degree of control and monitoring which we endure in ‘developed’ societies, which has been accelerating for decades and which has reached warp speed in the 2020s, is creating a kind of digital holding camp in which we all find ourselves trapped. The rising paranoia that extends now across the political spectrum throughout the Western world—the anger and confusion, the sense of promises broken and established systems gumming up—all of this, I think, can be traced to the rise and consolidation of the Machine, this great matrix which strips from us our understanding of what a human life is, and makes us instead lonely cogs in its drive for self-creation.
All of the enclosures, the destruction of alternative lifeways, the early modern revolutions, the fanning of want, the unsettling of peoples, the journeys of the Black Ships, the myth of progress: all of it leads here, to the triumph of technique, to the kingdom of the Machine. All of it funnels us only one way: towards the new techno-Babel we are building. We live today after technique’s triumph; the ructions of the present are the manifestations of its victory. In trying to understand these ructions, we tend in the West to resort to binary divisions. Left versus right, local versus global, traditional versus modern, sacred versus profane, good versus evil. At times they have their uses, but none of them will fully serve us in this inquiry. Another binary is rising now; has been for centuries, perhaps, but is now clear in the new light.
‘It is easy for me to imagine’, wrote Wendell Berry in his extended essay Life Is a Miracle, ‘that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.’ Berry wrote those words twenty years ago, and the great division he foresaw is now upon us: Life versus the Machine. The tension between the virtual and the real, the digital and the organic, the constructed and the born, undergirds all the rifts and ruptures that are opening up within our crumbling society. Where will they lead us— and how, today, are they coming to fruition in the world we are already living in? (p. 121–22)
Eddies of Close Reading
As I read along, I often found myself agreeing with his techno-skepticism, not because of an argument per se but because of a certain disposition, of finding fault with the modern world in all its profound incoherence. Kingsnorth offers some genuine insights, tracing the origins of our many discontents — political, economic, and environmental. But, occasionally, I would also find found myself being pulled out of its main current into what can only be described as swirling eddies. I would set the book down, go look something up, and then come back to the text, with some puzzlement about the way things were being stitched together. Some connections are forged by genius; some by manic madmen. It’s up to us, as close readers, to sort out the difference, since the text — and this text in particular — lays claim not just to our temporary attention but also to our enduring sympathies, imaginations, and responses. I reserve a place for negative capability in reading, but Kingsnorth’s alarm about the state of the world and our enslavement to “the Machine” should heighten our requirements for proof.
In several instances, I spent considerable time away from the book trying to track down the “real story” behind the examples Kingsnorth gives. After reading a passage about Robert Bly, for instance, I spun off and read his novel Iron John — well, read half and skimmed the rest — and it lived up to its reputation as a wild riff on the “devastating effects of remote fathers and . . . the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture.” I could spend hours traveling down those rabbit trails. (So many references to hair!) My main gloss reinforced my impression that Kingsnorth is operating in the same tonal register as Bly, with its entertaining and often bewildering admixture of myth-making, grandiose assertion, and cultural lament.
I also spent time looking for more historical and cultural context for Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world from 1603 to 1868. Kingsnorth summons Commodore Matthew Perry’s ominous “Black Ships” (as in the quotation above) as omens of the digital menace that likewise looms off our our shorelines today: “. . . four great ‘ships of evil mien’, the like of which they had never seen before. The biggest were three times longer than the largest ship Japan had ever built, and unlike the Japanese vessels they were built partially of iron. They belched black smoke into the sky, and were bristling with weapons—cannons, guns—which the sword-wielding samurai, Japan’s aristocratic warrior caste, had never encountered.” So styled, this clash between Manichean forces of good and evil invited scrutiny. After dipping into a few accounts, including W. G. Beasley’s admirable The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan, it was clear enough that Kingsnorth’s setup requires the flattening of the motivations of the interlopers and the exclusion of any mention of the Chinese, of the internal dynamics of the shogunate, and of the brutality and cruelty of the samurai. With these historical particulars, it seems best to keep these events complicated rather than impose new symbolism on them in service of myth-making.
By this point, only 100 pages in, I knew that Kingsnorth’s prerogatives as a novelist required him to tell a good story, not to dwell in distracting details. What I learned from these not-so-brief excursions away from the book gave me enough reservations to resist accepting Kingsnorth’s general conclusions and — perhaps more importantly — giving into a kind of existential despair at the threat he describes. To be honest, I enjoyed exploring these eddies — such is the “life of the mind” — even if they enhanced my frustrations with the book that prompted them.
The Fens in Life and Legend
One particular example that warrants further examination is the enclosure of the Fenlands in England’s East Midlands and East Anglia regions. It recurs in the book, not just as a metaphor for relentless technological progress and control, but also as a symbol of humanity’s deprivation of its autonomy and freedom. As such, I wanted to interrogate it and see what it revealed. As I suspected, the history is far more fascinating than the story Kingsnorth wants to tell.
The Fens is a flat, low-lying area, characterized by its wetlands, drainage channels, and agricultural land. Fringed by four lazy rivers, it spreads across an almost level clay plain rimmed with marine silts and deep, black peat. Before human intervention, the tides continually remade the fen’s edge. Most of the land lay only a few meters above sea level, quilted with meres, reedbeds, and wet pasture that supported fishing, fowling, and summer grazing. But here and there rose “islands,” where the six great Benedictine abbeys Ely, Chatteris, Crowland, Peterborough, Ramsey, and Thorney were founded, affording them both isolation and protection.(I viewed brief clips from a 1945 documentary film about the Fenlands, but sadly, I was unable to locate the full version online.)
After seventeenth-century reclamation, the process known as “enclosure,” the landscape was recast. Peat shrank and settled as it dried, leaving some tracts of land below mean sea level and dependent on active water control. Today the Fens are among England’s richest arable soils on peat and silt, yet still defined by sluices, washlands, and pumping that keep the farmland workable against the tide and flooding. For Kingsnorth, they provide an enchanting backdrop for the clash between the noble savages who subsisted on the unaltered landscape and the adventurers and politicians who wanted to transform it for financial gain.
As Kingsnorth tells it:
From the early 1600s, various plans, commissions and Acts of Parliament set out strategies for the enclosure and drainage of the fenlands, but it wasn’t until the 1630s, with the employment of the Dutch drainage expert Cornelius Vermuyden, that the work began in earnest. Setting out an ambitious plan to drain the fens using wind power and the creation of a wide network of dykes, Vermuyden worked in concert with local aristocrats, imported French labourers and teams of “gentle-man adventurers” who received land grants in return for their labour, to turn the fens, finally, into productive and profitable land.
The people of the fenlands had lived for centuries by forms of local subsistence: fishing, waterbird harvesting, eel catching. They harvested the reeds, rushes and sedge for building materials and animal foods. They moved between the islanded settlements on causeways, or through the fens on stilts. The drainage scheme was designed to destroy all of this. Plans hatched in London and carried out by an engineer and labourers from across the seas would end their way of life. Some of them decided to fight back. (p. 44)
Here we have the fall from grace described in the first paragraph, with villains sketched out a bit too neatly, and the paradise lost in the second. If it sounds like a just-so story, that’s because it is. It’s not just that the facts are wrong but also the characterization of the players, the dynamics, and the incentives, which are all far more interesting than Kingsnorth seems willing to admit.
Enter Margaret Albright Knittl, professor of economics from York University (Ontario), who published “an historical whodunit in three parts” of “The Design for the Initial Drainage of the Great Level of the Fens” in Agricultural History Review in 2007. Her careful reconstruction of events is an exemplar of historical engagement with source materials and provides an illuminating account of the early efforts at transforming the Fens.
Knittl highlights that Vermuyden was a volatile figure. His reputation in England waxed and waned — at times a useful tool and at others a persona non grata — and his involvement in the drainage project (pinned to a much later date than Kingsnorth says) seems to have been more as a last resort, after previous attempts by others had failed, rather than as a visionary and enterprising engineer.
More than just the effort of one man, the movement to drain the Great Level of the Fens was a tangle of competing English interests. Knittl’s account pulls back the lens and supplies the missing context. By the summer of 1629, the Crown, short of revenue after dissolving Parliament, sought new income and turned to the fen drainage project as a potential source of wealth. At the same time, the Commissioners of Sewers — local gentry and landowners responsible for managing the region’s waterways — had long debated how to achieve general drainage but insisted on maintaining authority over any scheme.
Knittl lays out the particulars:
When the Commissioners of Sewers struck their bargain with Francis, fourth Earl of Bedford in January 1631, the idea of a general draining of the Wash fens had been contemplated since at least the 1590s and a number of determined attempts had been made by local interests, the royal government and would-be undertakers, in varying combinations, to launch such an enterprise. One, headed by Chief Justice Popham, had reached so far as the cutting of a new sewer before it collapsed. No later initiative fared better. However, by the summer of 1629, interest in the idea had reached a new pitch, both on the part of those responsible for finding new sources of income for Charles I, following the dissolution of the Parliament of 1628–9, and on the part of fen landowners. (24)
Several parties vied for the royal contract, including Sir Anthony Thomas and Sir William Ayloffe, but the Commissioners rejected Thomas for demanding high local taxes while concealing his plans. King Charles briefly took the project into his own hands, and only later did Francis, fourth Earl of Bedford, emerge as a preferred undertaker acceptable to both Crown and Country. Bedford represented an alliance of local landowners and investors (“adventurers”) who offered capital and experience while respecting the Commissioners’ oversight. Thus, before Vermuyden’s later and more controversial role, the shaping of the Great Level was already the product of negotiation and tension among royal officials seeking revenue, local authorities defending jurisdiction, and entrepreneurial nobles and gentry pursuing profit and improvement.
While it is true that the commoners became vocal opponents of enclosure, the disturbances that followed are better characterized not as sabotage of the drainage itself but rather as “essentially enclosure riots” — locals filling in the new division ditches to reclaim lost common pastures, owing to the uneven distribution of the effects of drainage efforts. Drawing on historian Keith Lindley’s research, Knittl notes that the protests were concentrated in the drier eastern parts of the Level, where residents lost up to two-thirds of their grazing land, while the wetter Wisbech Hundred, where drainage effects were more beneficial, saw no rioting at all.
As Knittl explains, the outcomes of the drainage projects were unevenly distributed:
When a good number of [the participants and their subcontractors] found their land unfit for habitation (i.e., subject to winter flooding), it became clear that they had privately assumed that their piece would be arable. They clamoured to have the level made ‘winter’ ground rather than just ‘summer’ ground, that is, flood free the year round and thereby fit for habitation. (47)
Seen from this perspective, one can begin to appreciate the complexity and uncertainty — indeed, the contingency — of the drainage projects:
The Commons, left to deal with a flood of complaints, took a very cautious approach, some members seeing them as a grievance in themselves. The Lords were more open to persuasion that the King’s project deserved support, but before a meeting of minds could be reached civil war consigned any hope to limbo. Not until 1649 would the draining of the Great Level be taken in hand again and Vermuyden reappear on the scene. (50)
The history recounted here isn’t just about one group pitted against another. It is an instantiation of what theorists called polycentric governance and the competing human desires for provision, mastery, and improvement. Kingsnorth’s interest in depicting a battle of visions, in the vast Fens wilderness, misses the more complex drama of human motivation and ingenuity in the face of scarcity.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that we find Kingsnorth’s disposition reflected more than a decade ago in his novel The Wake, which takes place in the Fens. The title refers to Hereward the Wake, a hazily historical figure from 11th century, who is said to have led the resistance against the Norman conquest of England, folk hero for a “thriftless race whose only strong passion was a love of freedom.” Here we are presented with an outsize but liminal figure of legend and myth upon whom Kingsnorth can overwrite his narrative of emancipation (a word that ironically invokes his ire and derision in other places in the book). To cite a more familiar example, Hereward is his William Wallace (a la Braveheart), a similar figure from Britain’s past who has been mythologized as a symbol of defiance and freedom.
My problem is that, as a Christian, I want to strive toward truth in all things. My faith is rooted in the Bible because I take its accounts to be true in a fundamental (if not uncomplicated) way, not because it is convenient, self-serving, or conforms to some abstract Jungian archetype. In fact, that is the only reason I submit myself to its claims and moral demands. As the Apostle Paul himself wrote in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ. . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (More on this vein here.) Likewise, it seems to me that we have to apply the same standards to the other stories we tell ourselves about the way the world works. We must confront it in all its dynamic complexity. Modern myth-making is not, in the end, a solution to ennui or rootlessness. Truth is.
Anxiety Without Romance
What I have in mind here, about the stories we tell ourselves about the past and the accounts we give for faith, is akin to James Buchanan’s “Politics Without Romance.” We can and should advance our concerns about the incoherence of modern politics or the rise of surveillance capitalism but without resorting to romanticizing those efforts. That sentiment applies as much to Ayn Rand’s mission to lionize the individual over the collective as to Kingsnorth’s effort to demonize the impersonal forces of the Machine.
Don’t get me wrong. In spite of my argument with Kingsnorth’s book above, I share profound reservations about digital technology and how it changes us (and often not for the better). The effects of technology are age-old concerns from Plato to Hannah Arendt. Setting aside the obvious good of medical and engineering advances, I believe that the effects of digital technology, including social media, short-form video, and AI-generated content (all tightly nested within entertainment and information ecosystems), are changes not just in degree but also in kind. Read Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018) to understand what I mean. The tsunami of information he described is now dwarfed by the advent of generative AI and its avalanche of slop.
I am particularly concerned about the harms to children and teens and on the challenges for education, life-long learning, and emotional wellbeing. See the research of Jonathan Haidt or Jean Twenge, among others. But parents, the ones who have the real power to keep these devices and apps in check, have been incentivized to overlook the problems because these technologies cater to their safetyism and their own convenience. Now those problems — with attention, behavior, and mental health — are growing too large to ignore.
Like Kingsnorth, I am taken aback by the developers of AI who openly acknowledge their own distress at where the technology is headed, about its possible existential threats to humanity. It’s a good question: Then why do they maniacally pursue it without better safeguards? Like Kingsnorth, I am well aware of the utter insanity of these Faustian bargains from myth and legend. One only need to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (or see the new movie) to see what she saw clearly two hundred years ago and what these tech giants refuse to see today.
All the same, we don’t need to tell ourselves just-so stories in order to make the case. The pushback is already underway, as evidenced by Haidt’s early successes in getting phones out of schools. There are many other voices who have called into question the way we currently engage with these devices and platforms: Andy Crouch, Clare Morell, Cal Newport, and Sherry Turkle, to name a few. Pick one of the above and start there. That said, most of us already know how put these devices and technologies in their proper place, but we lack the will to do what’s necessary.
Kingsnorth may not be too far out on a limb in identifying these technologies as spiritual omens. At a time when some tech bros are talking brazenly about the Antichrist and its connection to emerging technologies (stories here, here, here, and here), we should consider ourselves warned about “principalities and powers” that rule over us at our own behest and new lords of humanity “which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of any human design.” Not every invisible hand is benign.