Against the Machine

 Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth is an expansive polemic aimed at the general forces of modern life. The "machine" of the title proves an elusive concept to define. Kingsnorth directs his ire broadly: he rages against the construction of the pyramids, ecomodernism, AI, the sexual revolution, capitalism, the West, automobiles, the grid, the internet, supermarkets, vacation towns, and on and on. I remember taking a class in college on Film Noir, and one of the joys of the course was that it took the whole term to define what exactly that was. This book is like that--a bit short on solutions, but eager to lump wide-ranging social ills into its mechanistic antagonist. Kingsnorth himself is strange, curmudgeonly, and explicitly Luddite, and Against the Machine is an amusing read. I found myself nodding along, while not fully connecting everything to the central argument. Putting our phones down and breathing clean air is always a welcome goal. This book is like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing in its eagerness to reclaim the physical, natural world and to celebrate embodied humanity.