Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
Paul Kingsnorth
Thesis, 368 pages
Published September 23, 2025
In a 2015 interview, philosopher Hartmut Rosa described the postmodern condition: “We are no longer running towards a bright horizon in the future, we are running away from the dark abyss behind our backs.” In our accelerated age, we run harder and faster just to remain in place, like a nightmare in which you keep running because if you stop, “it” will catch you … and you have no desire to learn what “it” is.
This feeling is life in the West today, and Paul Kingsnorth names it “THE MACHINE,” which “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.” He writes, “(w)estern civilization is already dead,” and Against the Machine is the autopsy report.
Alarmist? Absolutely! But like a prophet crying out in the wilderness, Kingsnorth raises his voice before humanity has completely unmade itself. Following in the footsteps of prophets such as Wendell Berry, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, Kingsnorth expresses grave concerns over the impact of “progress” and technology on human society. In retrospect, those voices seem prescient. Writing from amidst the destruction the Machine has wrought, Kingsnorth’s writing is forthtelling, describing a society without roots, without limits, and depressingly, without a future.
Kingsnorth takes the reader on a journey to explore how we got here, with the Machine cannibalizing one and all, destroying every remnant of the natural world. This trek is not for the faint of heart. Kingsnorth’s great accomplishment is a complex diagnosis; our problems are technological and economic, spiritual and social. At every turn, the Machine urges humans to run without limits for self-gratification, disintegrating human relationships and communities, dislocating humans from physical places, and directing the best of our talent and energy to self-fulfillment. We no longer know what it means to live as human beings. We are now consumers, algorithms, and laborers beholden to the Machine. “’Twenty years ago,’” Kingsnorth’s off-the-grid friend Mark says, “’we were fighting to save wilderness from destruction. Now it seems like we’re just fighting to keep ourselves off screens 24 hours a day.’”
The time for this ministry is now, before it catches us.
Humanity is in a mess of our own making. Yet, we are weary. We know we cannot keep running. We yearn for roots and limits. So, what to do? Can we live in the world without our humanity becoming absorbed by the Machine? While deep in description, the book runs shallow in prescription. Maybe this is how it should be — no universal prescription from a singular author, but people recovering their humanity together in real places and real communities. As an antidote to the march of the Machine, Kingsnorth invites the reader to recover the past, to live in human-scale communities of mutual dependence, to root themselves in particular places, and to draw from the spiritual wells which have refreshed humanity throughout history. All of which sounds rather like a local church that embodies beloved community, loves its city, honestly remembers its past, and opens itself to receive the Word of the Lord, which always creates, redeems, and makes a way where there is no way. Today, the urgent calling of the church is to be a sanctuary — preserving, rehabilitating, and liberating humanity from the impact of the Machine. The time for this ministry is now, before it catches us.
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