For some time now, the gold standard of localism discourse, at least on Substack, has been Paul Kingsnorth. In his long-form essays on “the machine”, he casts a full-scale vision of how modern technocracy is not simply an overreliance on machinery or technology, but that modern technocracy is a combination of ideology, wealth, and power made visible. It’s not so much that antibiotics or knee replacements or microwaves are bad in and of themselves, but that they are indicative of an ethos that has gripped the world: that efficiency has made the whole inhuman, stripping it not only of local affections, but of the practices which make those affections possible. The fact that we pray via an app instead of in church is a symptom of a much larger rot, and that rot goes by many names.
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