The Tragedies of Longing for Home

Paul Kingsnorth. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Thesis, 2025. $32.00. 368 pp.

I have a very distinct memory of sitting in a Manhattan hotel room back in 2016, crying hard after finishing Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. Long before TikTok and Haidt’s The Anxious Generation were on the cultural radar, Sales’ book was an early report on the distortions and damage digital platforms and devices wrought in the lives of young women. It broke me and made me resentful of digital technologies and the companies behind them because of their willingness to prey on the vulnerable and take advantage of young people’s search for identity and belonging.

I expected Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity to have the same effect on me. Having worried over the evolution of digital technologies since the late 1990s, I looked forward to encountering a kindred spirit. In many respects, Kingsnorth did not disappoint, rolling out a devastating analysis of how we are increasingly coerced out of our humanity by the behemoth force he calls the Machine. Indeed, Kingsnorth proves to be an unyielding prophet when he writes in staccato: “Want is the acid. Capitalism is the battery. Growth is the engine. Greed is the forming energy that moves us to where we are inevitably headed.” Where most naysayers of this digital age warn of the coming apocalypse, Kingsnorth sees the Antichrist—the Machine has already taken over. What is sacred has been made profane, and what is profane has been made sacred. The essential elements of our humanity have been destroyed. The only move left is to head for the hills.  

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Kingsnorth begins by putting a finger on the disquiet we have all felt knowing that no one is driving the accelerating bus of technological change. Surveying the post-pandemic landscape and seeing such seemingly disparate phenomena as the state-mandated digital proofs of vaccination, the totalizing digital surveillance that reduces our lives to data, the decline of Christendom in the West, and the unregulated advances in artificial intelligence, he posits that there is something bigger behind them all: the Machine.

The Machine means not only digital technologies and their commercial industries. It also includes the modernist ideologies of positivism, scientism, and progress that have led us to this precipice of Western civilization. Here, Kingsworth identifies “technique”—Jacques Ellul’s name for the instrumentalizing spirit that prioritizes efficiency and control over all else—as the fuel for the technological manifest destiny found among today’s transhumanists, evolutionary biologists, and techno-cheerleaders like Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil. 

While Western modernity is typically associated with the benefits of modern science, industrial capitalism, and liberal democracies, Kingsnorth reminds us that these benefits have come at the cost of uprooting the “older ways of seeing and speaking.” Grounding himself in Simone Weil’s claim that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” he laments the loss of “real culture” that is sustained by past, people, place and prayer. Kingsnorth grieves the folly of this modernist uprooting most acutely in globalization’s disregard for local culture and particularity. His critique of cosmopolitanism’s casual dismissal of longstanding traditions that once defined what it meant to belong is reminiscent of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld. There Benjamin Barber raises concerns about the diminishment of traditional tea culture in the face of McDonald’s expanding presence in Japan. 

In one sense, Kingsnorth echoes modernity’s earlier observers and critics. Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber worried that a spirit of transaction and indifference would grow as people found their lives increasingly mediated by the market and state, rather than their family and village. Where these late nineteenth-century thinkers wondered how industrial capitalism and urbanization might deaden the soul, later critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse warned that the totalizing logic of consumer capitalism would result in the “colonization of the life-world.” And yet, while these thinkers saw the shifting sands of the self and community stemming from changes in social structure and institutional systems of power, Kingsnorth seems locked in a mode of analysis that only sees ideology and belief as the determinants of historical change. As a result, his arguments easily slip into the binary ways of thinking that define the culture wars between liberal progressives and conservative traditionalists.

This slippage is most evident when Kingsnorth moves to link the technocratic impulse for power and control to the politics of progressivism. He writes: “The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest.” Seeing a through line of radical individualism running between transhumanist faith in human progress and contemporary social justice movements advocating on behalf of racial and sexual minorities, he views venture capitalism and progressive politics as advancing a “culture of inversion” that subverts and destroys foundational ways of being human. 

In this ambitious argument, it’s curious that he doesn’t account for the significant differences between techno-libertarianism’s prizing of freedom for freedom’s sake and civil rights activism’s prizing of dignity for the historically disenfranchised. Further, his preference for seeing the world in terms of ideological battle—where we are all forced to play on one team or the other—becomes a strategic weakness that cuts off the possibility of finding common cause with those stationed on “the other side.” 

For instance, he would likely consider someone like sociologist Patricia Hill Collins as problematic liberal elite invested in the culture of inversion for her critique of Eurocentric masculinist epistemology. But, in doing so, he would miss out on the fact that his fight against the coercions of Enlightenment positivism and scientism is exactly the same as her fight to create space for black women’s ways of sense-making. In fact, her advocacy for a black feminist epistemology that values received wisdom, personal narratives, and bonds of sisterhood is aligned with Kingsnorth’s nostalgic longing for a world that has room for “mythology, folk cultures and the mythical underpinnings of religious faith.” To simply dismiss advocates of progressive liberalism as parts of the Machine is to give up on building a coalition of co-belligerents needed to effectively resist it.

Finally, in suggesting that today’s technological and capitalist excesses are merely a manifestation of a leftist revolutionary impulse to dismantle social order, Kingsnorth chooses not to consider the possibility that an older justice-seeking set of progressive ideals has been co-opted and distorted into a social media-friendly identity politics that is fashionably coercive. This omission is especially puzzling given Kingsnorth’s personal account of feeling betrayed by an environmental movement that changed on him. When he saves his most bitter words for describing the vapid promises of machine environmentalism that wants to “3-D print out our food,” it is clear that the corporate takeover of the environmental movement is what most violates his sense of what was good, true, and sacred in the original movement with which he once identified. 

Indeed, the impetus for collapsing corporate capitalism and progressive politics into his notion of the Machine begins to make sense when he expresses exasperation with finding his advocacy of living in the small, the simple, and the rooted to now be dismissed as the “wrong” kind of green in the face of the modern, global, and progressive kind. And, as the Western world unevenly reckons with its legacies of colonialism and racism, he is upset to find himself yet again on the “wrong” side of the identity politics ledger simply because he is white and male. 

In the end, even though I might disagree with his conflation of technocratic capitalism and progressive politics, I get it. I really do. When we are betrayed by the causes to which we had sincerely given our lives, and when we feel ourselves and our loved ones threatened by strident forces that display no regard for the particularities of our circumstances, we become radicalized. I understand because I have had the same experience, and I know what it is to be left embittered. Sadly, it seems that the particular past, people, place, and prayer that Kingsnorth longs to protect and champion are part and parcel with the very features of Western imagination and the centering of white experience that have become the sources of my own encounter with betrayal and pain. 

His blanket derision for left-leaning movements that seek to amplify the voices of the marginalized make me doubt that people like me are included in his picture of the good life. And his ease in regularly scoffing at the rhetorics of “liberation,” “openness,” and “diversity” signal an indifference to how those terms can represent hope and healing for those who have endured exclusion and being silenced. Even when he seems to be pulling his punches—"I can’t stand what these woke people are doing. But I can understand why they’re doing it. The fact is that the culture which is crumbling… is also a culture I never felt comfortable with”—it feels too little, too late. 

Kingsnorth longs for a restored sense of home in his post-imperial Britain. In contrast, as a child of transpacific migration, I have always been cut off from a mother culture that rejects me for being too Americanized and rendered perpetually foreign in the United States where I was born and raised. The experience of Asian Americans like me is often one of liminality defined by tension and exile. As a result, the very question that Kingsnorth values—“Where are you from?—is the very same question that is notoriously alienating for Asian Americans because we are always asked this question. It is the sharp end of a stick ever poking at the fact that we obviously couldn’t be “from around here.” We are only culturally legible in the Western imagination if we confirm that we are from Japan or Korea or China. And in the same breath, our chances of belonging are best if we abandon this particularity of racialized experiences and keep our heads down when aspiring to live the American Dream. Where do those of us defined by such homeless liminality fit in Kingsnorth’s vision of local particularity? I’m not so sure that we do.

So here we are: the plight of living in a pluralistic society. Kingsnorth and I are both invested in fighting off the dehumanizing and impoverishing effects of our technological systems, ruthlessly powered by a ravenous capitalism and imperialistic visions of human mastery and technological control. And yet, because of our social locations and respective life experiences, we have each become radicalized and suspicious of those who have hurt us and taken away what we value and find essential to our sense of safety and personhood. How do we live together in a pluralistic society where different kinds of people with different kinds of life experiences would like to find belonging and feel at home? How can we be human together? This is the perplexing question we desperately need to address to have any chance of resisting the Machine.  

Honestly, I’d be delighted to be among Kingsnorth’s reactionary radicals and raw ascetics who carve out a new way of living, free of the digital dictates and the tyranny of technique. But I would want to know this: how do we cultivate a life-world where we not only live on a human scale with a meaningful sense of place, but seek the welfare of all people, actively reaching beyond those who look and think like us? And how do we live into such local particularity without descending into the dark sides of tribalism?

We all long for dignity in a world that is constantly stripping us of the very things we treasure. And Kingsnorth is right: Our problems are ultimately spiritual problems in need of spiritual solutions. Perhaps, amidst the duress of this present age, we ought to heed Wendell Berry’s call to return to the surest place where we can submit ourselves to the restorative powers of the divine and seek clarity and healing: 

“When despair for the world grows in me...
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water….
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”