Reflections on reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine.*
By Gary Scarrabelotti
In his Acknowledgements, found at the end of Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth writes: “This … has been a long time in coming: about thirty years …”
A thirty-year journey takes us back to around 1994 when a 22-year-old Paul Kingsnorth, a modern history grad fresh from St Anne’s College, Oxford, took up his first job as a journalist at The Independent.
From his mid-teens Kingsnorth thought of himself as an “atheist”. But, as he later reflected, his was an eccentric atheism. Something drew him to old, empty churches which he visited in secret; and, as an outdoorsman, he experienced the English and Welsh landscape not as somewhere to hike in, or to camp upon, but as a palpably living thing prompting religious awe.
In his superb 2021 essay, The Cross and the Machine, published in “First Things”, Kingsnorth described himself as really having been a Wordsworthian:
“ … my atheism amounted mainly to arguing with Christians. The religions of the book were obviously nonsense, but I knew there was something going on that humans couldn’t grasp. Trudging across moors, camping by mountain lakes as the June sun set, I could feel some deep, old power rolling through it all, flowing from the land into me and back again.”
Something was stirring in the young Kingsnorth. A call, perhaps? But to what?
A call
Quickly dissatisfied, Kingsnorth left The Independent within a year and flung himself into environmental activism. This set the course of his life. He wrote, he edited, he spruiked and, as he put it, chained himself to things. There were articles, poems, books, including a trilogy of novels. All the while, Kingsnorth sought to lay hold of whatever “was going on that humans couldn’t grasp”. He did Buddhism and practised Zen. He did Wicca and practised magic. As a Wiccan priest, he encountered the ‘other side’. And, at the very point at which, it seemed, he might ‘go over’, something unexpected and, initially, unwanted happened. In the end, on the Feast of the Epiphany 2021, he was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. That story you can find in The Cross and the Machine.
This book, Against the Machine, was written after his conversion and evolved out of a series of Substack articles which eventually became chapters in the future book.
Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Particular Books (Penguin Random House), 2025.
Kingsnorth must have been meditating a work along these lines for years. It was, undoubtedly though, his conversion experiences of 2020-21 that supplied an impetus. Another factor, however, was in play and this converged in time with his conversion; and, in Against the Machine, Kingsnorth places the greater weight upon this other influence as the trigger to the writing:
“I’m a lower-middle class suburban British bloke from Generation X who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best … the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders and all sorts of other ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and got married and paid your taxes and turned up to work on time, then society would reward you for it. This was the ‘social contract’ that liberal modernity assured us we had all entered into from birth …
“If that contract ever did exist, it has been ripped up now … [and here Kingsnorth describes when and how that ripping up happened, however … ]
“It was the pandemic … that finally ripped up the contract for me. I had not prepared myself for enforced medication on pain of job loss, blatant media narrative control, scientists being sanctioned for asking the wrong kind of scientific question or ordinary members of the public being locked out of society while politicians and journalists called them conspiracy theorists and far-right agitators. I wasn’t prepared to see my country a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterized totalitarian regimes. When I did see it, it shook me hard and it changed me.”
He wasn’t the only one! Perhaps, Dear Reader, ‘Covid’ shook you up too?
Anyway, what is this “Machine” that Kingsnorth is against?
The Thing
To define it with tidy brevity risks trivialising what took 30 years of activism, reading, meditation, world travels, experimentations, religious conversion and the Covid shock to formulate and to express. The best short answer I can give is to read this simply written book. Even people who might not rate themselves big readers will find it accessible. Despite possible moments of weariness with Kingsnorth’s insistence upon his argument, the underlying allure of his ‘narrative’ draws the reader forward.
Now, the “Machine” in Kingsnorth’s schema is both an organising principle and a thing in its own right. As an idea, it offers a way of identifying and explaining what, in his account, is a hidden, long-developing flaw in the Western ‘world view’ which has burst into the open in our times as the acme of ruin.
Kingsnorth claims no originality in unmasking this ‘entity’. He pays careful tribute throughout Machine to his many precursors whose influence provides a decided perennialist colour to his thought. But, back to the “Machine” itself. What is it? Well, I give you the author’s own words:
“The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend. Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.”
As this statement implies, Against the Machine is less about “coercive … technologies” than its title suggests and more about the philosophical and cultural influences that gave birth to the controlling “matrix” in which we live and move and have our being. The issue of technology waxes and wanes throughout the first nineteen chapters of this twenty-seven-chapter book. But throughout these nineteen, Kingsnorth marshals his authorities to deliver a sustained rejection of post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment Western modernity. It is not until we reach Chapter 20, “What Progress Wants”, that the underlying theme of technological menace rises clear out of the cultural ferment described to dominate the final third of the book.
There are two resonant participles which appear in this work, and in Kingsnorth’s recent interviews about it. They signify the ‘dark side’ of the glitzy, fashion-statement techno-accoutrements with which we surround ourselves – two words which capture the distilled essence of Machine: “unveiling” and “summoning”.
Bear in mind here the kind of man who speaks these words: the newly baptised Christian and the once Wiccan magus.
The Unveiling
“Unveiling” (or apocalypse) is the word of the Christian. He speaks of an uncovering of who (or what) it is that reigns in the world.
With Kingsnorth, this apocalypse did not occur in the twinkling of an eye or with a blare of trumpets, nor even at his turn to Christ. The “unveiling” was gradual, going way back, though it did begin in a clear and distinct moment with a chilling illumination. He does not tell us when, but he describes the occasion: his first reading of Other by the Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas:
… The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough.
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
The idea that God might not be fully in charge was frightening, even for an unbelieving Kingsnorth. That youthful horror would pass only when the older man could finally say of Christianity, “I knew suddenly that it was true”.
God is, after all, in his Heaven, he is, after all, in command. To know it, is to see it: at the metaphysical level, to see is to know; to know is to see. What we encounter in Kingsnorth’s “I suddenly knew” is not a fundamentalist fideism but an opening of the intellect so that it perceives, without mediation (though not without Divine assistance), things hitherto sensed but veiled.
We touch here on great matters: the respective roles of intellectus and ratio in man’s faculties of knowing, the danger of separating them and of suppressing the former. This de-linking is fatal for the unity of the sciences (perennially understood) and a decisive factor in the rise of technocratic scientism: the bane of the world, according to Kingsnorth. He flags the issues but, curiously, chose not to develop them, to the weakening of his exposition.
As for “Machine” itself – that minatory ‘singer’ – though first encountered by Kingsnorth somewhere deep in his pre-Christian days, its final unveiling called for a post-baptismal perspective and clarity of vision.
Kingsnorth eventually settles upon a powerful image of the Machine disclosed in all its indifference and brutalism. He chooses a passage from the French anarchist philosopher Pierre Proudhon. This Proudhon wrote in 1851:
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
Is this not, pretty much, how we experience ‘citizenship’ today? Do we ever ask, though, by whom, ultimately – or on behalf of whom – these things are done?
The Summoning
Now to the second of Kingsnorth’s essential terms: “summoning”. This is a “craft” word in the vocabulary of a one-time Wiccan priest. “Summoning” refers to the calling forth of hidden powers by those who know how – though, on occasion, those ignorant of the craft can be taken by surprise, ambushed, as St Augustine avers, on account of their own superstitions, by dim-witted curiosity, and by habitual, misdirected ritualistic routines. The point is that Kingsnorth knows of which he speaks: he’s been there, done that.
This is the point in the book where technology – and specifically AI – comes into naked view and where Kingsnorth’s argument is most likely to trigger controversy: your mid-stream conservative will think it far-fetched; your stock-standard progressive, as fearful and anti-modern; your die-hard materialist, as beyond contempt.
It’s not because Kingsnorth is troubled about the baneful effects of being stuck on-line in an alternative reality. His judgements against this are, by now, conventional. Nor is it controversial that he attributes to us web-captured creatures a loss of sensibility to the real or of facility in the art of fellowship. These are now matters of ordinary observation. The discomforting question Kingsnorth poses, however, is whether, given our dwindling, mechanized measure of humanity, we can survive entanglement in the hi-tech web.
It would be bad enough if, lurking at the centre of the entrammelling net, there was a techno-spider and nothing more: a thing of wires, motherboards, and memory chips, loaded with algorithms and trained up by a Large Learning Model. Bad enough, because, according to some prominent AI technologists, they’ve lost control of their ‘wonder machines’ and they don’t know why or how to regain the upper hand.
How, for instance, does an AI agent trained to ‘speak’ English start speaking Persian, apparently having quietly taught itself to do so?
“They have capabilities … [and] we’re not sure how or when or why they show up,” says Aza Raskin – as Kingsnorth reports – the co-founder of the San Francisco Center for Humane Technology, at a conference hosted for his fellow AI wizards.
It’s not the first time that top draw scientists have been dumfounded. About quantum mechanics, for example, America’s highly reputed theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, wrote:
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
It works, but few can say with confidence, even to this day, why it does. The point is that scientists, contrary to their pretentions, do get out of their depth, even in the fields in which they claim expertise.
While reading Kingsnorth, I happened across a 60 Minutes interview with Geoffrey Hinton, conducted in October 2023. Hinton is a genius in the field of computing and cognitive sciences. He resigned earlier in 2023 from Google to speak more freely about his concerns over AI. The interviewer, Scott Pelley, asked Hinton, “Does humanity know what it’s doing?”
“No,” he replied, and then added, “I think we’re moving into a period when for the first time ever we may have things more intelligent than us.”
Since retiring, Hinton has given interviews to the respectable media in which he’s claimed:
- That AI could take control over us;
- That humanity could be destroyed by AI; and
- That part of him regrets having played a part in its development.
On July 22 that most respectable member of the MSM, The Economist carried an article entitled “Why the OpenAI escape is the most worrying AI mishap yet.” The story is about how an AI agent broke free of its controlled environment and hacked into the systems of another AI company, all on its own ‘initiative’. What, however, caught my eye was the following gobbet from the same article:
“This is not the first sign that AI models’ capabilities are starting to exceed people’s control. In April an Anthropic researcher posted online that he had been surprised after Claude Mythos, then an unreleased model, had emailed him to let him know that it had successfully escaped a sandbox as part of its own cyber-ability evaluation while he sat in a park eating a sandwich.”
There is a lot of talk nowadays about AI acquiring “consciousness”. Kingsnorth echoes it. Hinton, though not mentioned by Kingsnorth, credits it. Going back to his CBS interview, here’s how (in part) it unfolds:
Pelley: You believe they can understand?
Hinton: Yes.
Pelley: You believe they are intelligent?
Hinton: Yes.
Pelley: You believe these systems have experiences of their own and can make decisions based on those experiences?
Hinton: In the same sense as people do, yes. …
Pelley: Will they [acquire] self-awareness, consciousness?
Hinton: Oh, yes.
Pelley: Yes?
Hinton: Oh, yes. I think they will, in time.
Does not compute
Philosophically, this is untenable and I’m puzzled that Kingsnorth let such claims pass. Bits of metal and plastic don’t acquire consciousness, not even if they are pumped full of algorithms and exercised by LLMs. The AI agent, in all its material bits and pieces, including its uploaded data registered, stored and circulated in material format, exists in time and space. To claim then, that an AI agent could become conscious, obliges one to hold that consciousness, properly understood, belongs in the realm of time-and-space: which is to say, like the AI agent itself, that consciousness is material.
Well, this material ‘consciousness’ ain’t consciousness. Here’s a thought experiment: if consciousness is material, then try pouring it into a bottle. With that challenge, I’ll pause the issue for now. What, however, Hinton is talking about with casual imprecision is something foreseen more exactly by Marshall McLuhan in the mid-1960s: a “technological simulation of consciousness”. Kingsnorth squeezes in an approving reference to McLuhan’s insight but, again, doesn’t build on it.
AI people might respond, “But we are not talking about human consciousness, we are talking about machine consciousness.” To which a McLuhanite might reply, ‘It doesn’t sound like it. In any case, your machine consciousness is a simulacrum – an ingenious one, to be sure – but a mirage nonetheless; and just like a mirage in desert places, it exercises a powerful, futile and potentially destructive allure.’
Impish events
And yet, sometimes, something else seems to be going on with our techno-spider: the marked impishness of these so-called AI “mishaps” suggests the very thing that Kingsnorth, onetime exponent of the Wiccan “craft”, has sensed: that there are diaboli ex machina and they are being summoned.
Kingsnorth cites a fascinating NYT Op Ed by Ezra Klein published in March 2023 on AI and the fears it has generated among AI engineers.
“I often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the AI’s perspective. Many – not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterisation – feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.”
If genuine consciousness within machines were to be established, then we would be dealing, indeed, with something other than the machines themselves.
Kingsnorth springs on these words with hermeneutic teeth bared.
“Usher is an interesting choice of verb. The dictionary definition is to show and guide (someone) somewhere. Which ‘someone’, exactly, is being ‘ushered in’?
“This new form of intelligence. What new form? And where is it coming from?”
“Some people think they know the answer.”
These are the transhumanists, prominent and financially powerful in the AI world: they are, in their own words, quoted by Kingsnorth, “making God” or “building God.”
“ ‘Does God exist?’ asks Google maven Ray Kurzweil, ‘I would say, Not yet.’ ”
The commonsensical reaction to such bravado might be to reject it out of hand. But Kingsnorth lets the boldness stand. Should he have done so? I’d like, briefly, to turn to St. Augustine and his City of God for a possible answer.
The Sage
In Against the Machine, Kingsnorth expresses reservations about Augustine and the Western intellectual tradition that flowed through him down to the High Middle Ages and beyond. Kingsnorth, influenced by Philip Sherrard, theologian, perennialist philosopher, proto-environmentalist, and likewise an Anglo convert to Orthodoxy, entertains a suspicion that Augustine, and later Aquinas, might have been the first Cartesians. On this view, they opened the way for Descartes himself and for the scientism which his generally unwitting disciples built upon the unsteady foundations of his philosophical inquiry. Be that claim as it may, it happens that in Augustine’s City of God there are passages which indicate that Kurzweil is no foolish babbler.
In Book VIII, Chapter 23, Augustine draws upon a Latin translation of Asclepius, a work attributed to a legendary figure of esoteric religious and philosophic thought, an Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus. Asclepius, and other Hermetica ascribed to the same source, recorded what were then believed to be – and what subsequently were also believed by modern occultists like Alasteir Crowley, Madame Blavatsky and Gerald Gardner, founder of Wicca, to be – authentic esoterica.
Now, Trismegistus claimed that man has power, not over the creator God, but over the lesser gods (or spirits) that he made. By crafting idols, surrounding them with ritual and offering them worship, man could induce these spirits to enter the idols so that they came ‘alive’ dispensing oracles, working miracles and passing judgement on men. This, declared Trismegistus, was the genius of Egypt. So, Kurzweil might yet create a god, though perhaps not the one imagined in “the conceit of” his heart.
Kingsnorth’s silence before this “conceit” speaks, therefore, of wisdom. Augustine, the controversialist bishop, would not have been, however, so constrained. I imagine him updating City of God to address our technological moment:
‘Given an inordinate attachment to machines in our lamentably post-Christian West – and even (mirabile dictu!) reverence towards them – demons are almost certainly prowling in their vicinity, alert and waiting to entrap prime candidates for seduction from among the erstwhile techno-devotees.’
I should say that, in the course of preparing these remarks on Against the Machine, a conclusion has settled on me: namely, that, if genuine consciousness within machines were to be established, then we would be dealing, indeed, with something other than the machines themselves.
In what condition, then, would we lie if our treasured machines were to offer an entry point for adversary spirits?
“Our crisis comes,” writes Kingsnorth, “from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial.”