Against the Machine

On the Unmaking of Humanity

De: Paul Kingsnorth

Narrado por: Owen Hall

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human

In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With masterful insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how your very soul is at stake.

It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Writing in the tradition of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil, Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic, poetic, and erudite, Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“The most powerful and important book I have read in years. This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the Machine.” —Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary

“Something in our common life has long seemed bewildering, even ominous, and Paul Kingsnorth makes it finally clear what we're up against. The gears clanking around us are not working at random, but with increasingly inhuman intent. Now I see what I must do. Now I understand.” —Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing East

“Against the Machine is an eloquent and erudite critique of the perils of modern technology. But it’s much more than that. It’s a searching, moving meditation on the fate of humanity in a world where money and mechanism have displaced meaning.” —Nicholas Carr, author of Superbloom and The Shallows

“Thank God for Paul Kingsnorth! Serious, furious, and always consistent, this is a Christian thinker who does not sugarcoat his convictions.” —Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

“Kingsnorth has done something extraordinary: he has captured the spiritual crisis of our time in language so compelling I could not put the book down. The vision he paints is a bleak one: a post-human, machinic future. But as long as our world still has space for voices this vivid, I dare hope we have not yet succumbed to the Machine.”—Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress

an answer to the question

Paul gives us not more ammo for complaining, but instead points us toward a solution, or the many solutions.
-Fr. Moses Locke

Absolute best!

It aligned with what I feel and have been feeling for many years now, but listening it just made everything more clear. Thank you!

To defeat the machine, the West must be superseded

This is not a book for the faint of heart, as Paul Kingsnorth presents in well researched detail how the Technocracy casts disruptive innovation in a sort of secular faith, which promises freedom while ultimately leaving people in mental and functional slavery—all as it robs humanity of our anchors to place and other real persons. I see this book as reaching the logical destination foreshadowed in previous books such as The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich, and How the World Made the West, by Josephine Quinn; and it's advancement is chronicled in exacting detail in America América, by Greg Grandin. All of this is taking place while the world's natural environment—which supports your life and mine—is being destroyed by extractive greed, and the parts on AI can be fully terrifying.

Kingsnorth points out that capitalism and oligarchy are of the same substance. The author demonstrates that want is the acid that has eaten away previous cultures and values, and replaced them with its only approved value: making money. Capitalism is the battery using the acid. Growth is the engine. And greed is the force that moves society to where it is inevitably headed. The brake on this headlong rush to death is limits (an anathema to libertarians). And the antidote to it all is: You shall not covet—that especially means not letting advertisers manipulate your desires (a taller order than some might expect, but necessary nonetheless). Kingsnorth describes this totalizing system of techno-capitalism and modernity, the "machine," as advancing itself via Sex, Science, the Self, and the Screen. As a test of this hypothesis, ask yourself how much of your waking hours are dedicated to screen time? Likely much more than you should or is healthy for you. These four S's represent the core components of modern technological culture that supplant more grounded traditional values—and this same economic carpetbagging is now eating the "machine's" own house.

To counter this ruthless advance of the "machine," Kingsnorth advises advancing the four P's: People, Place, Prayer, and the Past—these are foundational cultural elements that the modern "machine," or technological society, has displaced. The causes and remedies that Kingsnorth presents do not follow clean left-right ideological lines, as the author asserts that the economics of capitalism and the politics of progressivism spring from the same roots. The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to no one—in this context, development is the new colonialism and progress is actually colonization disguised as charity. We need to see the world as an organism rather than a mechanism—it's a person not a thing. Technology is not creation—it's only rearranging what's already there, even that (falsely) considered spiritual.

Kingsnorth's solution to this problem of the "machine," which he describes with unsettling clarity, is that the West must be superseded—it's the world of mammon, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. We need to learn again to distinguish intelligence from wisdom. This moral economy is the exact opposite of the free market (better described in practical terms that oligarchs are free to manipulate desires and consumption and extract from everyone else who is not free). Having established that the West must go, the book is unclear on exactly what is best to replace it with for the purpose of recovering the four P's. Kingsnorth suggests individual actions of self expression in what he calls a rain dance—perhaps the solution to the problems caused by the West's Enlightenment are spiritual after all.

Amazing

This book is provoking, and poignant and timely. Well written, engaging, I highly recommend to everyone, whether you agree with everything or not!

Truly, a revolution and thought. Read this book if you want to help save Humanity.

If only I could use words and prose the way Paul Kingsnorth does I could possibly do this with Justis, but alas, I have to say things like brilliant, superb, regulatory, worth every minute. As soon as I finish listening, I started over again and will likely listen to it several times.

He has made me look at some of the things I have supported and allowed in my life that I no longer will, the cost is too high. I will keep moving my line, away from the machine and toward s life.