Paul Kingsnorth: How to fight the Machine

Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

FS: I remember reading Real England, an earlier book of yours, that was also infused with that same negative reaction towards modernity — the carapace of technology and concrete that was covering the authentic country of England. If someone asked you: “Do you hate modernity?” What would you reply? 

PK: Well, the easy answer is yes.

FS: It’s quite remarkable that you say that out loud.

PK: Look, what is modernity? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about a historical time period that we could date, or are we talking about a way of seeing? I prefer to see modernity as a way of seeing, which I often refer to as machine modernity. Iain McGilchrist has this great theory about the hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere sees the parts, and the right hemisphere sees the whole. The left is supposed to be in service to the right, but we have become deeply left-brained in the sense that we’re very good at seeing the parts, very good at making things, at going to the moon, at examining the genes of fruit flies. But have we actually lost a way of seeing that’s much more significant? That’s how I see modernity. It creates lots of things that we find good and useful, obviously. But where’s it going in the long term and what’s the price that’s being paid for it?

FS: Where do you locate the moment that it all started to go wrong? Possible candidates you mention in the book include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the car, and many others.

PK: You missed a bit about the Egyptian pyramids.

FS: Oh yes!

PK: Which isn’t my idea. I’m quoting Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology, who wrote a two-volume book called The Myth of the Machine back in the late Sixties. He sees the first machine society as being Pharaonic Egypt, which he calls “the machine made of human parts”. The human parts being slaves. If you have that enormous top-down thing, you can build something incredible like a pyramid. He compares a pyramid to a space rocket. These are both technologies which, at a cost of human labour and toil, create a technology which takes the favoured few up into heaven.

You could say Egypt was a machine society. Certainly, Ancient Rome was very machine-like in its centralisation, its technocratic ability, its top-down power. What’s happened since? Let’s finger the usual suspects, and say the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution together created a revolution in human seeing in the Western world, which has since flooded out everywhere else.

This way of seeing is highly mechanistic. Through a critique of religion — which has been going on for a long time, but it really comes to the fore with the French Revolution — you create a new theology. A traditional way of understanding this is that during the modern period, we’ve moved away from religion and we’ve moved instead towards reason and science. To some degree, you can say that’s true, but what we also have is a new belief system — a thing we call progress, which is moral progress, technological progress, endless forward movement. If we look at the way that our politics is framed, if we look at the way technology is created, they are all aligned with this notion of progress with a large “P”. So we’re all progressive in that sense. It’s become the ultimate philosophy of the modern world. That’s what we do: we move forward. One of the problems we’re having in the West at the moment is that people have stopped believing in it.

FS: So is this new, or was it ever thus? Has it not always been true, throughout the ages, that there are people such as yourself who yearn for the purity of the past? Ovid was writing about the Golden Age, William Morris in News from Nowhere, and many in between. Are you simply today’s version, or do you think there is something truly specific and new about what we’re going through today?

PK: Well, I don’t mind being compared with Ovid. That’s okay.

You have to be careful: the temptation when you talk like this is to find a particular period in the past and start to romanticise that and say, well, “Everything was great then”. You won’t find a period of history in which there aren’t all the usual human problems, but they are different. In a very general sense, the modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted.

I try to categorise this in the book in a very machine-like way. I call it “the four Ps”, which are “People”, “Place”, “Prayer”, and “the Past”. If you look at most cultures, they’re based on a combination of those four things. The modern world systematically uproots them all and replaces them with consumerism and ideologies and progressive theologies and, ultimately, technology, which is the way that we try to manifest the myth of progress. There is something revolutionary about the way we see, and it’s not normal. I think we see the world quite differently to the way most people have always seen it.

FS: We are very used to people complaining about too much screentime and the deleterious effect of apps. But you seem to see the spread of modern technology, perhaps culminating in AI, as something devilish — a kind of evil force or spirit? 

PK: If you listen to the people who are in Silicon Valley, really pushing the creation of superhuman intelligence, they all talk like prophets or priests or religious philosophers. Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, is always talking about the singularity, the point at which machines become more intelligent than us and run away with themselves. He was once asked: “Does God exist?” And he answered: “Not yet.”

You have seen lots of warnings from people about how AI could become superintelligent and destroy us. Many of those warnings are coming from the people creating it. It’s not just weirdos like me. The journalist Ezra Klein went to a bunch of these people and asked why, given that they’re warning us it could destroy the world, are they creating it? And he said they couldn’t answer the question. They ended up more or less feeling that they had a responsibility to usher this new being into the world.

We’ve got superintelligent AIs being created. Nobody really knows how they work. They’re already talking to each other in ways people can’t understand. They’re already persuading teenagers to kill themselves. Something very sinister is going on. Pre-modern societies wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding it. It’s like the Book of Genesis. Why don’t you just take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and become as the gods? If you rebel against God, you can be God. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to create God, make God live forever.

FS: But is this just the excitable rhetoric of Silicon Valley technicians, or do you actually think there’s an external force of some kind that is being made manifest? 

PK: I’m a Christian, so I do believe in external forces of evil. I don’t want to get too carried away with that because it’s very easy to predict the rise of the Antichrist every five minutes.

It’s a kind of a feeling, it’s an intuition. I’m not trying to prove anything. But I think given that all these people talk in spiritual terms about this stuff, we should see it in spiritual terms.

FS: In the book you do name it the Antichrist. You say these machines are not just machines. They are something else. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life. 

PK: I think that’s true. I’ll stand by that.

I don’t know what the mind is. I don’t know whether the mind is the Antichrist or whether it is a man, or whether it’s something demonic, or whether it’s something that humans can create. I’m not sure we’re actually capable of creating a mind, even though we think we are, but I have the strong sense that something quite dark is happening.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to put a name to it, but let’s just see what happens over the next five years, because either AI is going to be a bubble that bursts and we’ve all made a fuss about nothing. Or we’re going to be moving into very uncharted territory.

FS: Let me take you away from the perilous topic of the Antichrist towards the easy topic of the culture wars. That will be plain sailing.

PK: It’s less interesting though.

FS: You describe your reaction to the roiling culture wars as having three distinct phases. Could you describe them for us?

When I looked at the warring teams, my first reaction was to look at the mad woke Left and want to join the team against them, because some of the stuff they say is just so crazy and offensive.

And then the second reaction is: actually, no, I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get involved in that. I think I’d rather go and live in a forest. Or a monastery. Because that’s actually a trap. I think it is a trap.

And then the third reaction was to look at it and say: “OK, while I really don’t like what a lot of these people are saying, I can understand why they’re saying it.”

FS: These people being?

PK: The postmodern woke Left, whatever you want to call them. The culture warriors who are trying to take the culture apart. And then rising up against them you have these defenders of the West, broadly on the Right. You know, “we must defend our traditions” and all the rest of it. And when I look at that, I’m not sure what traditions we’re defending at this point?

I’m not sure what the West is, so if you’re going to defend the West or indeed attack the West, you need to think, “well, what is it then?” And if I’m talking about the Machine, I think that is what the modern West now is. It may not be what the West was in the Middle Ages, but this thing we call the West now is really a manifestation of this modern way of seeing. I actually don’t want to defend that.

So, I find myself in this kind of bind because I come from here and I’d rather that place wasn’t dismantled. I’ve got children who’ve got to grow up in it. I want to give them some values, but while I can dislike what a lot of the radical Left is doing, I can see to some degree why they’re doing it.

I’m not convinced by the uncomplicated unquestioning defenders of the West because what they often end up defending is a kind of capitalism, or a very statist version of Christianity. A Fifties-style conservatism that actually they probably don’t really want to live in themselves.

FS: So you are ready to let the West die. I mean, there is a chapter called “The West Must Die”. You write, “maybe we need to let the West die, let it die so that we can live.”

PK: What I’m thinking is that this thing that we call the West, which has become an idol — either because the Left want to tear it down because it’s the cis-heteronormative patriarchy, or because the Right want to defend it because the Left are trying to tear it down — has become a thing which actually doesn’t have anything to do with real culture at all.

It’s almost like a trauma response. We’ve lost all of our actual, real culture. If we go back to those “four Ps” — “People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — most of us aren’t living in most of those things anymore.

So if we let go of this notion of the West, whether we’re attacking it or defending it. Maybe we can concentrate on creating human scale cultures again, which is, I think the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this Machine way of seeing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have big arguments at all, that none of these issues matter. They do. You have to stand up for things that are true. You have to stand up against things that are wrong or evil, but actually the real stuff is going to come from trying to recreate real culture again.

FS: That is the final part of your book, really, where you conclude by offering a suggestion of how we might live inside the Machine. What you move towards is a kind of secession from the crumbling culture around us, an acceptance that it’s dying and will not survive. Will you just talk a bit about that? How would that work for people?

PK: I think it’s already crumbled. The things that we used to believe in have pretty much already gone. That gives you the freedom to start again. Not that you’re going to start with the blank slate, but you need to draw on the best of the past. The Machine rips up everything from its roots, and that’s a kind of liberation process, but it’s also a destruction process. You need to try and build from the bottom up.

This is all very doomy. We’re talking about the Antichrist and things. But for a Christian, the coming of the Antichrist is all good, because it’s all fine after that. Everything gets sorted. So we’re waiting for that day.

Even though the world looks crazy and horrible and depressing, there’s a hope to it precisely because everything’s falling down, and you can now say: “Well, how are we going to get back to actually trying to be human again?” Once you face this kind of digital Moloch that’s around us, you actually have to ask what it means to be human.

Coming back to the whole Antichrist question, I quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, a mad Silicon Valley eccentric, who’s very opposed to AI. He thinks AI systems will destroy us. And if anyone is developing AI in their countries, then you need to bomb the data centres of that country and destroy their electricity network. He’s a kind of Silicon Valley Ted Kaczynski.

FS: Yes, the bombing of the data centres. It’s in the book. You say: “bombing the data centres, this is the mindset of the raw ascetic.” I would say, although you’re not explicitly calling for it, you’re not not calling for it…

PK: You could bomb the data-centres, which — if they were developing superhuman AI — would be a good idea. But unless you’ve changed your way of seeing, someone’s going to build more of these things. They always get built again, which is the argument people use against Yudkowsky, because if we stopped building AI, someone else would build them.

FS: There’s the polite version of Paul Kingsnorth, and then not far beneath the surface there is the much more radical activist. You talk with great affection about the Luddites, who were smashing looms and rejecting the Industrial Revolution, and the Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the fens. 

PK: I’m very happy to call myself a Luddite. People always call me a Luddite. I embrace that because what the Luddites did was reject certain types of technology that were going to enslave them. You can see what these people [in Silicon Valley] are trying to build. And then you say: “What the hell are we going to do about that?” I started off when I was 21 as a road protester and I believe in non-violent direct action. I kind of still do.

FS: So you’ve come full circle? 

PK: The principle behind that is very Gandhian. Which is that if you need to destroy a technology, which is going to in itself destroy life, then it’s a justifiable thing to do if you’re not harming people. But I don’t how you would apply that to an interconnected global digital system because there is no heart.

There’s no central computer that you can just hit with a pickaxe and the whole thing shuts down. Which is why it feels more like an interconnected way of seeing the rise of some being, or just the rise of our own slightly warped way of seeing, turning into a kind of technological system, like a central nervous system. There isn’t really any way to shut that down other than seeing differently. So I do move between these poles. Do I think we should bomb data centres or do I think we should read Iain McGilchrist? Or do I think we should do both?

Probably both, but I don’t know.

You’ve got to draw your own lines, decide what you’re going to do, decide what you’re not going to allow to happen. I’m not going to ever use an AI. I think if you don’t draw lines, you’re just going to get sucked in.

FS: The other sensitive aspect of this book is how your ideas relate to the ascendant radical Right in politics.

We had that huge Tommy Robinson march last week, animated by protest against immigration and a desire to reassert the indigenous culture. It would be possible, I think, to read this book and be inspired to go on those kind of marches. You use the word indigenous a lot. When describing what you don’t like about the West, you single out “the insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties”.

What did you mean by that?

PK: This is the promotion of the global system of western capitalism around the world, which just razes all cultures and homogenises them. I’m very clear in the book repeatedly, actually, about what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what’s going on these marches in London. I don’t even read the news really, but this sort of manifestation of Christian Nationalism is balls. And I’ve spoken out about it quite clearly actually.

I gave a talk a couple years ago called “Against Christian Civilisation”, which was specifically about the manifestation of what’s basically idol worship, where you take Christianity, which is a spiritual path of renunciation and radicalism, and demands to reject wealth and reject the idols of nations, and you turn that somehow into a new crusade of waving pictures of people around and talking about muscular Christianity. It’s just the endless corruption of the Christian faith that’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it’s absolutely nonsense. And in terms of indigeneity, I would never talk about that in an uncomplicated way.

I’m actually very clear in the book when I do talk about that. And I’m also very clear about what I’m against, which is all this kind of stuff you are talking about. When you start talking about cultural purity or racial purity, at least on the hard Right, then you’ve been suckered. I start the book by talking about Simone Weil’s book, The Need for Roots, and Weil is certainly not any kind of Right-wing or far-Right character. But she writes this book during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and she’s French and she’s fighting for the Free French in London. And she says that everyone is uprooted in the modern world. And what the Nazis have done is they’ve taken that concern and they’ve turned it into this hideous, monstrous racial thing. How can we actually root ourselves again without getting sucked in by that?

So you have to be able to talk about this in an intelligent way and in a sensitive way, which I hope I’ve done in the book. I don’t think anyone could seriously read that and not be very clear about what I’m for and what I’m not.

But be careful of idol worship. Don’t worship the idols of nations or the idols of false versions of Christianity or religion. Anything that involves you raging against a bunch of people who are different to you. Whatever side you’re on, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the serious discussions about what it actually means to be rooted and what you should actually be doing politically, but I really see what’s happening in the West at the moment as a manifestation of that massive process of uprooting and just people on all sides of the spectrum.

FS: You end up by embracing a political label: reactionary radical. What does that mean?

PK: John Calhoun uses the phrase “reactionary radicals” when critiquing E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian: he says, look, you can’t divide people at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into the two simple categories of workers or capitalists, the working class and the bourgeoisie, because what the Luddites are doing in communities like them, is trying to resist the coming of the factory system, the coming of capitalism, because they can see it’s going to completely destroy them. It’s going to destroy their industry. It’s going to turn them into wage slaves, it’s gonna destroy their households. So they’re reactionary in that sense.

They’re reacting against that system, which is a good thing. But they’re radical as well because they don’t react against it because they want to go back to the past as if it was perfect. They want changes as well, right? They want things that will actually benefit them because the system currently does not benefit them.

He calls these people reactionary radicals. And I think if you look at tribal people in India resisting dams or the West Papuans, resisting logging firms in the Indonesian government, or the Fen Tigers or the Luddites throughout history, what you can see is reactionary radicals. You can see people fighting the Machine, but from a perspective of wanting a radically different way of living.

So it’s not a simple sort of reaction where you just go, “oh, everything was wonderful in the past. Let’s go back to that.” But neither is it an ideological radicalism like you would get with the Marxists, where you say: “we’ve got a grand utopian theory of everything and we’re just going to impose that now even if we have to kill everyone and put them into camps.”

It’s based on human scale culture. It reacts against the Machine. So I like that. I like that as a phrase. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what I think I believe in.

If we’re going to talk about politics as a way of seeing, you have to have a politics that is rooted in the past, that’s rooted in reality. Rooted in nature and eternal things, but that doesn’t idolise them. Or turn them into excuses to hate a bunch of people who aren’t the same as you, which is the problem that we’ve got at the moment, and that’s what the Right’s going to end up doing if it’s not very careful indeed.

“People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — however you want to formulate it. But it has to be against the Machine, literally, and it has to be very careful that whatever it does not become the worship of an idol and the excuse to project your anger and fear onto somebody else, which is why for me, my Christianity’s important.

Because if you’re going to try and be a Christian properly (and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it) the two great commandments are that you love God and you love your neighbour. And, by the way, Christ says: “Everyone is your neighbour.” That’s what the Good Samaritan is about.

So you actually have to try and do the thing that is possible for you to do. That is a good thing in your life at the human scale.