Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, and the need for lines

My neighbors (most of them) outsource their lawn care. They used to fertilize and cut their own lawns, maintain flower beds and gardens. Now that’s done by hired help, men with faster and more efficient machines. “It was taking too long, I’d rather use my time to do something else,” they say.

I am one of a shrinking number of holdouts. I like going outside, working with my hands. Compared to a trained landscaper I’m quite inefficient; two men crews buzz through a lawn in half the time or less with zero-turn lawnmowers and gas-powered leafblowers.

I don’t begrudge my neighbors their choice. I favor active, informed choices, and planning one’s life. But sometimes I wonder: What is the end game of efficiency? Should our goal be removal of all hard things? 

What happens if we could outsource everything? Every effort, including thinking, creativity?

What would that sort of society look like? My guess is it would feel mechanical, uniform, disconnected from the organic. 

Inhuman.

Life is not all about efficiency. Humans need to encounter resistance, do hard things, because these are often the most rewarding. Accomplishing hard things make us who we are.

Today that notion is starting to feel outdated, quaint. Our species is obsessed with ease, efficiency, quantification, improvement. We are increasingly hell-bent on these pursuits, regardless of the tradeoffs.

We are allowing machines to take over. The machine.

In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, author Paul Kingsnorth argues that the modern world is dominated by The Machine. We inhabit a world in which we have replaced our old myths with the Myth of Progress, a tale spun by the impersonal and unerring logic of circuitry. We have replaced spiritual beliefs with machine belief, that life is only material, that which is valuable that which can be measured, quantified and can be “improved.”

***

The elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth viewed the world as an organic entity, a living thing worthy of preservation and beautification. They sought to preserve their natural surroundings. Trees were not resources to be harvested and processed, but nourished and shepherded. 

Conversely Saruman and his army of orcs saw the world not an as organism, but a mechanism. Their goal was to harvest nature, use its improvable elements to create a new and better reality made in the image of the machine.

The machine always needs more. More growth. More reach. 

I believe in the importance of myths, but I also recognize their limitations. Myths must be interpreted. They are subjective, open to more than one meaning. 

Almost everyone swallows The Myth of Progress, without hesitation. It says that history follows a straight line, from cavemen to peasant farmers to utopia. 

Have we made advances as a species? Of course. Anyone who fails to see our huge progress is delusional. I would not want to live in a world without electricity or modern medicine.

But how much is enough? Can there ever be enough? Are we allowed to talk about limits?

Certainly we understand is a limit to how much ice cream we should eat, or alcohol we should drink. Too much of these are unhealthy.

But as for technology? We don’t seem to have guidelines. We have some dim idea that excessive screen time is undesirable. But we seem reluctant to pause, or certainly draw the line of “enough.”

And so we lose the battle to the black screen.

***

I admit this is hard, and the arguments for ever-progress, persuasive.

Where do you draw the line? At indoor plumbing? Trains, automobiles, aircraft? Telegraphs, telephones? Vaccines? Computers, the internet, smartphones? 

Advanced artificial intelligence, robotics, androids, artificial reality?

Far enough out and it seems the only options are soma and capitulation.

What is important is not precisely where to draw the line, but that we have one, or can even think of drawing one, Kingsnorth argues. Because when we draw lines we are demonstrating that we are human beings with self-determination. That we are bounded, and boundaries are a good thing.

Without boundaries we are formless voids. We fall out of touch with physical reality. Nature becomes just a math problem to solve. We are divorced from it and indifferent to the divine. We become our screens.

People, place, prayer, and the past, are our roots. Human beings have a nature. But in the machine age we are uprooted. We know something is wrong; half the planet is mad. The online world is on fire.

Kingsnorth advocates for something quite radical, for those able to do so.

Form local guerilla communities of dissidence. Smash your smartphone. Delete the internet. Burn the data centers.

Rebellion. Overthrow. Return to What Came Before.

Tolkien knew the One Ring had to be destroyed. Anyone who tried to use its power would be corrupted, even those with the best of intent would ultimately fall under its sway. 

AI adoption is shocking and disgusting. Humans ostensibly are in control and possessed of some modicum of free will, but watch the virulent, viral like growth of a tech that destroys education, the environment, jobs, creativity, our very ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. It’s absolutely incredible to me. And yet here we are, like rabbits in Watership Down. We ignore the shining wire, the deadly trap, because the keeper of the wire keeps us well fed, safe, and “in charge.” We become willfully complicit in our own destruction.

We must rebel.

***

This is challenging book to read. You might be hurt. If you are a party adherent, of left or right persuasion, you will be offended. Kingsnorth takes on and takes apart identity politics and free market capitalism. He punches up against authoritarian impulses; he punches down against DEI initiatives.

I did not agree with his assessment of the COVID-19 vaccine, but so what? I’m a grown man.

Read it anyway. 

The questions it poses are ones we must grapple with. It’s a necessary live grenade in a land of stale thinking and blindness; we’re all complaining about politics and social sleights and online offenses when the real problem is machine culture.

While I don’t agree with all of Kingsnorth’s assertions and conclusions, where I am in full and vigorous agreement is the need to draw a line.

If you are unwilling to draw a line you don’t have one. Someone, or something, will fill that emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum, so doom scrolling will fill it. Or AI.

The machine is doing this to us, more every day.

Do you have a line?

Mine is large language models for creative endeavors. Outsourcing my decision-making, my thinking, and myself, to a machine. I will not do it. My writing here is mine, and always will be.

***

In my creeping old(er) age I am cognizant of old man shouting at cloud syndrome. I strive to avoid reflexive negativity. I know we have made positive strides forward socially and technologically since my childhood and my early memories of the mid-late 1970s. I would not want to live in the pre-industrial age.

But when I see people everywhere hunched over screens, staring at hand-held boxes, consuming, I wonder. 

When I see AI derangement and manufactured news, I’m sure.

Technology and progress are not always synonymous. The Myth of Progress is just that. There is only Change, and some of it is good, some not.

***

I feel powerless, we all do, because we are some mixture of willing and unwilling participants in the machine. I used to write for a printed newspaper, now I write for algorithmic platforms that implore me to rewrite everything I type with AI. I write in ChatGPT wastelands of babble and emojis.

But this is how I feed and clothe my family. What are most of us to do, Kingsnorth asks?

The author moved his family out of his homeland of England and into rural Ireland, embracing farming, home schooling, and tech-restricted living.

Most of us aren’t in a position to do this. But we are all capable of the small rebellions.

Restrict your phone time.

Read paper books.

Meet with friends, in person.

Be in nature.

Worship.

How do we become indigenous again in the age of the machine?

Draw a line. 

Where is yours?