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-Riui, 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

2025-07-03
An extended neo-Thoreauvian polemic against a culture of despoliation, consumerism, and urbanism.

The world, writes English novelist and environmentalist Kingsnorth, is dominated by “a metastasizing machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination,” the world of nature increasingly replaced by “a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks.” One aspect of this destructive machine, by his account, is the steady decline of religion—not in itself necessarily a bad thing, but, given that nature abhors a vacuum, “when a culture built around such a sacred order dies then there will be upheaval at every level of society,” and given the absence of that sacred order, the door is wide open to its replacement by things other than the two that we need, “meaning, and roots.” By Kingsnorth’s lights, the origin of so much of the world’s current crisis is an “ongoing process of mass uprooting,” not just from one’s native place (as with China’s relocation of Tibetans and Uyghurs) but also our cultural uprooting from our traditions and our divorce from nature. Kingsnorth often paints with a brush that may be a few hairs too wide: He condemns science, for instance, as “an ideology posing as a method,” when science is likely the only thing that might rescue the world from the worst consequences of climate change, and his insistent view of cities as doomed and soulless places devoted only to profit too often slides into cant. Still, a little fire and brimstone never hurts an argument against things as they are, and if decrying the “the holy effort to which all human will, skill and energy is now bent:making money” gets a little shrill, his closing invocation of a culture in which “people, place, prayer, the past” are rediscovered resounds nicely.

A spirited—sometimestoo spirited—critique of the empty suit that is late capitalism and its trappings.