The digital revolution is a spiritual crisis

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Paul Kingsnorth
Penguin Random House, 2025.

Paul Kingsnorth gives us his deeply considered assessment of the post-Christian world: “The dethroning of the old sovereign – Christ, who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order – has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led . . . through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards . . . . We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.”

He asserts that the Machine – techno-economic systems dominating the planet – destroys the natural world and “unmakes” humanity. Previous cultures could be identified by the four “P”s: people, place, prayer and the past, but Machine culture is monstrously characterized by the four “S”s: science, self, sex and screen.

As a child Paul Kingsnorth voraciously read Tolkien and Verne to enliven his mundane suburban life. He grew up to be first an environmental activist, then an investigative journalist writing about resisting globalization. But the Machine’s “genius is the ability to absorb its own critics, co-opt their criticism, and then, very often, commercialize it.” Machine values pervade left-wing and right-wing politics, he asserts. He finds kindred spirits in contrarian thinkers Jacques Ellul, Wendell Berry, Simone Weil and Phillip Sherrard. With G.K Chesterton he opposes both capitalism and socialism, offering as an alternative distributism, “equally distributed small property.” Kingsnorth favours roots, smallness, simplicity and a return to previous lifestyles. An Orthodox Christian and romantic Luddite, he advocates reactionary radicalism “creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four P’s.”

Inescapable machine

Kingsnorth acknowledges that, despite his hatred of “digital anticulture,” he can’t escape it. He produced this volume with a laptop and Substack platform where he publishes essays opposing the Machine. He credits the support, comments and critique of readers as important for this volume. The only way to attack the colonizing efforts of culture, he argues, “is to give them the slip, to learn to live on the edge of this totalitarian society, not simply rejecting it, but passing it through the sieve of God’s judgement.”

For Kingsnorth the digital revolution represents a spiritual crisis and requires a spiritual response. The purpose of ancient Christian spiritual disciplines was “restraining the appetites, fasting from foods, sex, and other worldly passions, limiting needs and restraining desires.”

Kingsnorth’s vivid prose and surprising takes on historical events challenges readers to think and re-think assumptions. For anyone battling the idols of our time, this book lives up to its billing as “a spiritual manual for dissidents.”