What We Talk About When We Talk About "The Machine"

Or, Why Not Just Burn the Whole Thing Down?

Discontent with technology is a thorny briar patch, with some weird friends. We ask questions about what then is to be done, if blowing it all up isn’t the way forward.

Uncomfortable Bedfellows of the Localism Discourse

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.

For Kingsnorth, that rot—comprised by power, wealth, and ideology—is called The Machine. This lumbering beast generates new minions, and affects the way which we see what humans are for, how humans relate to one another, whether places can be seen as holy and yet not produce anything of monetary value. This lumbering beast, devouring whole cultures in its yawning maw, makes impossible the world of the past, and requires resistance of a total nature in order to wrest human existence from the beast’s mouth. Resistance demands that we live in hope, raise families in faith, and commit ourselves to particular places. Kingsnorth’s work on this point resonates broadly with many. And so, given the way in which this vision has begun to create a sub-Substack culture, it’s important for things to be more clearly marked out.

To be clear, I want to signal my broad sympathy with what I’ve summarized above. My last book, on how these dynamics affect our notion of church community, largely resonates with these concerns. And yet, any theory worth its salt has to be asked some questions and stand up to them, partly concerning the practical outworking of critiques. Ethics, after all, may begin in moral description, in criticism and judgment, but must offer something of a vision of how to move forward.

But, as with any good idea, there are others who share similar sentiments but have their own plans about what this means. In what I’ve summarized above, there is little that the so-called “Christian nationalists” wouldn’t affirm. Though for the most part, I take these folks to be what happens when LARP enthusiasts move on from being a squire, and to try emulate LARPing’s politics and religion, their reach online continues to ensnare many.¹

In no way do I take Kingsnorth to be adjacent to this movement, but I want to flag this overlap only to say that a thick commitment to particular places has overlaps with some very nasty things. But in the same way, it’s also important to say that one can be committed to particular places, and argue that technocratic elites dominate the ecosystem that most of us live and work in without bolting on ethno-nationalist pretentions to a love of particular places. When this confederacy of nationalists mentions technology, it’s not so much critical of technology as a formative influence so much as who controls the technology.²

So much for the Christian nationalists. But their example points us to an interesting problem—shared premises of critique with very divergent outcomes. If the Ignatius O’Riley Cosplayers represent one possible trajectory out of this shared critique, I want to highlight another worth comparing and worth taking more seriously: that of violent response to a technocratic world, seen in the work of Theodore J. Kaczynski, otherwise known as the “Unabomber”.

The Memory Hole Which Violence Creates: Remembering Kaczynski

If you know anything about the Unabomber, you know that Kaczynski was a former professor who lived in the woods and mailed explosive devices to universities and to airlines, maiming dozens before finally being caught and sentenced to life in prison. In the heyday of his campaign, his manifesto was published in the Washington Post in exchange for stopping his mail bomb campaign. This was the late 1990s, the early days of the Internet, and so, if you know of this story, you know it offhand and in fragments. If you read any summary of him, it emphasizes that this was done out of perhaps some mental illness or some derangement. His writings are referred to as “screeds” or the rantings of lunatics, unfit for evaluation but fit for dismissal out of hand.

But did you remember that his manifesto was called “Industrial Society and Its Future?” Did you remember that the manifesto was primarily and completely about the effects which a technologically-driven society would have on human agency, on marriage, on medicine and on psychology? Did you know that, while in prison, he published two more volumes on the topic of technological critique, both available for purchase on Amazon?

What is striking about the manifesto itself is that it begins by questioning whether or not violence might be useful for its aims. What he’s says that he’s after here is a total-system critique, but not a new and different world order:

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. The revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively graduate process spanning a few decades…Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.³

He writes that a technologically-based society creates all manner of “surrogate activities” which substitute for real goals, goals consistent with people having actual agency to make changes in their lives. Writing in 1995, he couldn’t have seen the ways in which this describes the proverbial bullshit jobs that David Graeber would write about much later, or how people devote endless hours to activities which do not further their virtue, their agency, or their aims beyond simply being sated by money or pleasure. He writes of runners running for the sake of running, of people accumulating wealth for its own sake, collecting stamps or golfing, and in doing so, nails his society to the wall.⁴

He writes about the breakdown of small scale communities, a concern which led him to quit his university position and live in the wilds of Montana:

The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups…A technological society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.⁵

His world of concern, in other words, overlaps almost entirely with Kingsnorth, with some important deviations, which I’ll get to in a moment.

It’s the final part of Kaczynski’s vision that, I think, is the most important, and one which I find contemporary tech critique falling into: the technocratic world, for Kaczynski, is totalizing:

The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it would be to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom…Thus permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons prepared to accept radical, dangerous, and unpredictable alteration of the entire system.⁶

If you accept his description of the ways in which a technocratic regime has infiltrated all aspects of human life, then it becomes difficult to see how he wouldn’t start mailing bombs to those he connected with facilitating this damage, despite his opening caveat. Though his disavows the need for violence at the beginning, you can see him setting himself up for a logical conclusion: if technological means are so encompassing, inhibiting freedom at every point, there is nothing less than a total response necessary.

The question that needs asking, then, is why others agreeing with his premises do not take his approach? If tech offers such a conscripted world, there can be no quarter given, but only a response, in freedom, which strikes back at the very heart of that which constrains the world. His vision is that of revolt against the Matrix, of the saboteurs sacrificing their own shoes to clog up the machines, of recognizing the total nature of the problem requiring a total solution. When there can be no dialogue, then only violence can speak.

We might say that we can accept his description, but that violence just isn’t prudent, or that violence isn’t the best way to engage in struggle. But I don’t think he leaves you that option. If the rot is all the way down, and the stakes are nothing less than human agency and freedom to construct free lives, then there is nothing left to lose. There will be no place to build unless ground is wrested from the totalizing grip of the technocracy.

Finding the Way Forward: Prioritizing the Soul, Scavenging the Machine

Before coming to the main point that I think creates distance here, let us begin with two things which start to distinguish Kaczynski’s work here from his Christian counterparts, including Kingsnorth: 1) Kaczynski’s emphasis on power, and 2) his absolutizing of agency.

These, I think, help create daylight between Kaczynski and other tech critics, but they don’t, I think, yet resolve the question I posed above. For Kaczynski, the issue at stake is the ability of the human to act with power, to carve out their own destiny, with this ability as the reason for freedom. In writing about the good life, Kaczynski doesn’t have a political vision in mind so much as one which would correspond to the natural world:

The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control.⁷

In proposing “wildness” as the alternative, he’s proposing that human existence isn’t orderly, but freely and creatively interacting in ways which are occasionally destructive. It’s not quite Darwinian, but it does valorize a free and wild world over against a managed one in ways which should make us pause. For wilderness has no direction, no observable telos in this vision: it is just pure will.

This is our way in: our way to begin sorting out the difference, despite the overlapping criticisms.

It doesn’t seem that this wilderness is the end vision of localism but rather ordered communities. And so, if the end vision isn’t natural chaos but ordered communities, as I take it Kingsnorth and others have in mind, this calls forth a very different vision of the freedom appropriate to that end. For Kaczynski, natural chaos is desirable because of natural freedom, constricted by the tech overlords. But for his Christian counterparts, it’s not so much unrestricted freedom which is desirable such as moderated freedom, and that moderated freedom is what enables us to have communities instead of wilderness.

If it’s not unrestricted freedom, but moderated freedom that is desirable then, it doesn’t seem that the criticism of technology as totalizing in the world can stand up. For if the world is ensnared all the way down, on what basis could we rebel at all, much less in violence?

A pursuit of moderated freedom is only possible in a world in which possibilities exist, in which there is an ability to do otherwise than as the technocrats command, as opposed to Kaczynski’s option, in which the world is one of power and counter-power, totalized by this conflict. Either the world is totally ensnared—in which case, there is no place to escape from the technocrats, and better to punch our way out—or there are cracks in the machine which technology has not gone, and more importantly, technology cannot go.

Only in this latter version is there a Christian possibility for something other than what Kaczynski proposes.

For the Christian, this place technology cannot go is the soul: that which is not constrainable by technology, though its habits and desires can be altered by technology.

It is here that the point of resistance begins—not with piloting alternative living arrangements or economic systems for their own sake—but living in accordance with is needed for the soul to flourish. And by living in this way, we will find that we no longer need the Machine, but that the Machine always and ever needed us to flourish. What is a social media company without users, or an industrial complex without consumers? It is a hulking shell waiting to be repurposed, buried, and raised again to new life.

This is not a call for acquiesence or quietude, but an appeal to begin again in localism. For at stake here is not first the kind of social conditions which make this or that life possible, but what kind of creatures we are interested in preserving. And for the Christian, the one worth preserving is one capable of sustaining the soul.

And so, my modest proposal to localists is this:

Continue on. But do not become enamored with the rhetoric that the darkness has already ensnared you tooth and nail, that the Machine is totalizing. If this were so, there would be no way to hope or to move forward. There would be no reason to not follow Kaczynski down the hole, for in a world in which we have no speech, only violence can pierce the stalemate.⁸

Continue to dream of local practices, of good and slow lives, but do not think of our agency as for its own sake, or our freedom for its own sake. Build small places, and be willing to accept their limits, and to accept that losing will happen. And most importantly: know that technologies involve loss, but that, because they are not totalizing, they can be reframed. For swords can be turned into plowshares, and hoarded wealth into community goods.

But the struggle begins with the soul, with prayer, with learning to love God in privation and to live in ways consistent with that value of the soul. And thus, even technology can be put to modest use, a more human end. For in the summation of all things, even technology will cease, rendered no longer necessary in light of a creation made fully alive in the presence of God. But until then, we dig, plant, speak, and find more or less humane ways of doing that.

1. If you want to read the longest exposition of this, God have mercy on your soul. I have no idea what Kevin DeYoung means here by “fine retrieval”, as the theology is ankle-deep, and the racism is much deeper. These are not serious people, though the demonic things they play with are serious indeed.

2. Spoiler: they want to control the technology. The CN, broadly speaking, are less concerned with the virtues of being a Christian so much as they are concerned with making sure that religion is a stand-in for national values. For the best work on this that I’ve read, see Tobias Cremer’s recent Godless Crusade, an ethnographic survey of these movements in the U.S., France, and Germany, and how these bear similarities and function in analogous but not identical ways.

3. P. 2. All references are from the printed version, also available on Amazon. Neither he nor his family make any money off of the publications.

4. P. 35.

5. P.21-22.

6. P. 47.

7. P. 86.

8. See Hannah Arendt, in On Violence and On Revolution.