This was originally published at Compact. And Kingsnorth himself left this review of my review, which makes me quite proud:

If you’re not from New York and you walk through Greenwich Village without a map or a smartphone, there’s a decent chance you’ll get disoriented. The narrow streets of the neighborhood intersect at unexpected angles. Most are named after people, not numbers, and even the numerical streets are confusing: West 4th Street is crossed by West 10th Street and West 11th Streets. But if you wander a little ways uptown, eventually you’ll find yourself on the Grid Plan. The avenues count down from east to west. The streets count up from south to north. Every block is the same length and every corner at a right angle. It all makes rational sense. You don’t have to think anymore or pay any particular attention to your surroundings. You can just trudge forward like a robot and know you’re moving in the optimal direction.

In the 1998 Bennett Miller documentary The Cruise, Speed Levitch, a brilliant and eccentric New York City tour guide, says this about the Grid Plan:

To me the Grid Plan is puritan, it’s homogenizing . . . Let’s just blow up the Grid Plan, and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles, rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807.

I don’t know if the writer Paul Kingsnorth has ever watched The Cruise, but his new book, Against the Machine, is like Levitch’s critique of contemporary civilization writ large. He even calls the uniform, systematized physical landscape we inhabit today “the Grid.” Kingsnorth’s central concept, however, is “the Machine”: the matrix of social and technological forces that have degraded humanity over the centuries into something less than we once were.

The Machine is hard to contain in a definition: it is capitalism, scientism, hubris, the internet, individualism, rationality, globalization. Like the straight lines of the Manhattan cityscape, its structures force a single perspective on the world onto us, shape us into the semi-autonomous moving parts of an orderly pattern, and corral our spontaneity, our imagination, and our spirit into the narrow channels of its architecture. It is efficient and productive. It is also a catastrophe, Kingsnorth argues, for humanity and the natural world. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic,” he writes.

Kingsnorth’s alienation from modernity goes back decades, to his early adult life. He was once a radical environmentalist. Around the turn of the millennium, he was an activist who blocked road construction projects with his body and protested the World Trade Organization. His political dispositions remain fundamentally what they were two decades ago: hostile to technocracy and globalization, committed to localism, humble before nature. But the world has changed radically since then, as many former activists of his (and my) age will attest. This, too, he believes, is the work of the Machine, which “thrives on change like a horse on hay,” and “will ensure that everyone who lives long enough ends up in a world they barely recognize.”

Once a man of the left, Kingsnorth is now deeply critical of what he believes it has become: capitalism’s handmaiden. Bent on dismantling every institution, tradition, and cultural artifact in sight, progressivism uproots whatever stands in the way of the Machine’s perpetual remaking of the world. Respect for one’s ancestors, a sense of belonging in a physical place in a human community, even the recognition of our own biological limits are eviscerated by the left’s revolt against everything. This intellectual demolition prepares the ground for capitalist reconstruction. “Progressive leftism,” he writes, “is market liberalism by other means … one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments … Whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.”

But Kingsnorth is no conservative, at least in the way the word is conventionally understood; his indictment is too sweeping and radical for that. His condemnation of the Machine dovetails with a critique of the market that has long been associated with the left. Kingsnorth doesn’t mention Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, but both writers trace the origins of the totalizing global civilization we live in today to the same historical moment: the enclosures of the common fields in England. To both Kingsnorth and Polanyi, this was the moment in which traditional, organic, earthbound human communities that had developed over centuries were uprooted forever, and the individuals that comprised them were transformed into so much human coal for the steam engine of nascent capitalism. Peasants were torn from their land and forced to wander into the towns and cities and sell their labor for a subsistence wage. As Kingsnorth writes, the effect of enclosure was “to destroy older, more localised, customary communities and cultures … Without uprooting older communities and ways of life, from English artisan weavers in 1800 to Papuan tribal people in the 2020s, the Machine cannot operate.”

Marx, too, famously wrote about the Enclosure Acts, but while he recognized their cruelty, he regarded their introduction as the emergence of a superior—if amoral—economic system, in place of “the idiocy of rural life.” Like Polanyi, Kingsnorth has more respect for traditional societies. To him, they embody the world as it was before contracting the spiritual disease of modernity. He sees the enclosures as the first step in the Machine’s colonization of the world. After enacting a radical transformation at home, English capitalists went on to rip to shreds the traditional cultures of people all over the planet, building a vast empire in the process.

This is another perspective Kingsnorth shares with Polanyi. To Polanyi, the global free market system did not grow out of traditional human relations, as John Locke believed, but was forced onto them. The ways in which people have sought to shield themselves from its most destructive effects, far from being artificial impediments to the market, as classical and neoliberal economists claim, were to Polanyi the tendrils of natural human relations poking through cracks in the concrete parking lot laid over them. Kingsnorth sees the same in the myriad movements against what the Machine has defined as “Progress,” from the Luddites to the Zapatistas to the populist movements of Europe in this decade. These have all been defenses, however desperate, against the Machine’s relentless march of conquest.

We all exist today as conquered people, Kingsnorth believes, whether we recognize it or not. The majority of humanity now lives in cities, entirely dependent on the Machine for every aspect of living, from our entertainment to our self-fulfillment to our day-to-day survival. We marinate in a global corporate monoculture, our ties to the places we live in and the people around us further attenuated with each generation. With more and more of our lives lived online, there is hardly anything left that isn’t mediated by the Machine.

The Machine’s telos, Kingsnorth argues, will be fulfilled when there is no more distinction left between it and humanity. We’re on the brink of that moment with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the dream of transhumanism, which openly pursues that goal. “An ideology built on remaking nature,” Kingsnorth writes, “will inevitably include human nature in that project.” Many of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world are confident we will soon embed computer chips in our heads and become cyborgs, or upload our brains to the digital cloud and abandon our humanness altogether. Such soul-eating technology is, for Kingsnorth, demonic.

There is a natural temptation to situate Kingsnorth’s ideas into our conventional political categories. But Kingsnorth regards both left and right as ideologies of the Machine. The left has sought human liberation by expanding the Machine’s reach: through technology, social engineering, and centralization of power in the state. The right claims to cherish the traditional folkways Kingsnorth speaks of, but worships capitalism, whose very dynamism tears asunder any authentically human culture that threatens to sprout its first roots. Politics itself, in Kingsnorth’s view, is inherently unequal to the challenge that faces us, as politics is bound by ideology, and “ideology,” he writes, “is always the enemy of genuine, rooted culture.”

Our dilemma is not political, but spiritual. A few years ago, Kingsnorth became an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Superficially, his religious faith may distinguish him from the godless world he critiques. But in fact, Kingsnorth believes, the ideology of the Machine is itself a religion — an inverted one that puts ourselves in place of God. Instead of searching for our salvation through the divine, we create it for ourselves through technology and political ideology. Ultimately, through transhumanism, we aim to become gods ourselves.

This was the promise of the snake in the garden. We ate the apple then, and we devour it still. We abandoned our humanity to the Machine a long time ago. Now we’re feeding it our soul.