Given his avowedly violent abhorrence for technology, Paul Kingsnorth spends a lot of time online. The essays appearing in his latest book, Against the Machine, were published on Substack between April 2021 and June 2023. Yet most of them were reserved for paid subscribers, so he’s now made money from this project twice; though updated and ‘improved’, it’s nothing new.
Designed to support newsletters, podcasts and videos, Substack, which calls itself ‘a new economic engine for culture’, is a mecca for the disaffected, where dissident writers and/or thought leaders (secular gurus) attempt to explain the world today – ‘GloboCap’, ‘the system’, ‘the Story of Separation’, ‘the Age of Iatrogenocide’ and, of course, ‘the Machine’ – to their flocks of paid and/or free subscribers. Substackers use the platform to network with like-minded peers and promote their books, talks and tours to a global audience. However, the once alternative Substack, typically bent on growth, now eagerly ID’s as social media (so, since our parliament ‘amended’ its online safety act, I can’t sign in unless I verify my age).
For a trenchant tech critic who decries the evils of social media (while using one of its less censored platforms to build a readership), Kingsnorth (or his highly public persona) is well known, if more so in the UK, Ireland and, since he found God, the US. Five years ago, he was baptised in the Eastern Orthodox Church: soon after completing a fiction trilogy and shortly before commencing these essays.
‘A spiritual manual for dissidents in a technological age’, the front-flap blurb of the hardcover Penguin Random House version proclaims. Debatable, but you’d first want to define what a ‘dissident’ is and agree on the meaning of ‘spiritual’, so often confused with ‘religious’ when the two needn’t coincide. Which reminds me: prior to his conversion, Kingsnorth practised Wicca, a nature religion that draws on ancient pagan traditions. Now, he accounts for all magic by quoting the first dictum of Aleister Crowley, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, yet conveniently omits the second, ‘Love is the law, love under will’ (not unlike citing the First Commandment while skipping the rest?), the better to neatly conflate magic with science: both involve control and the exercise of will; the histories of both are entwined.
Never mind scientific blindness re the presence of subtle energies to which occultists are born or trained to be sensitive. Decades ago, I practised ritual magic with marginal folk whose holistic values guided creative low-tech lifeways. Our rituals focused on alignment with nature and the divine, healing and harmonising of self, others and the Earth, and I learned firsthand that the diligent practice of magic strengthens abilities that can, yet need not, lend themselves to misuse. Newsflash: abuse of trust abounds in the Christian church too.
These essays (I recall from the few I read when they were new) work online, the context for which they seem designed, even if Kingsnorth wrote them with a book deal in mind. Most of us read less intently onscreen than from a page free of distractions. But the book format isn’t an ideal fit for these essays, the uneven register of which can at times yield levity when the heaviness of the topic warrants sincerity, or which overstress fleeting cultural phenomena: peeves common on Substack, but which might lose a broader audience. His best-made points are understated, e.g.: ‘I understood why people would topple statues of long-dead slave traders whilst filming the whole thing on smartphones made by actual, living slaves (p. 140).’
Prone to black-and-white pronouncements (not unlike some of his bêtes noires), Kingsnorth has the wit to quote many deeper thinkers, using their insights to advance his unoriginal thesis, along with personal anecdotes, biblical wisdom, snippets of history, snatches of techno-evangelistic cant, caustic rhetoric targeting cities, cars, AI etc. Engaging and at times provocative, but despite his late-stage attempts to join the dots between essays, it’s a hot mess.
He writes most compellingly on the devastation of land enclosure. I loved his account of how the Fen Tigers and the Luddites defended their lifeways. Yet two chapters on, he bemoans the complexity of keeping fish as pets. Spot the irony. He harbours nostalgia for wild nature, yet encloses fish in an artificial environment.
Unlike some of Kingsnorth’s sources, this isn’t ‘a spiritual manual for dissidents’. He seems to be writing for a bigger audience of the sort that supports him on Substack: educated, middle-class, green-leaning, sensible, more or less conventional readers keen to have their cake and eat it: to live close to nature yet participate in culture, to walk a spiritual path with ego and worldly status intact, to save both the planet and humanity as if that weren’t a conflict of interest, to save their souls as if they hadn’t already been ceded. Because Kingsnorth, for all his rage and despair, both of which I wholeheartedly share, is evidently not writing for me.
Recently (prompted by Christian pricks of conscience?) he’s offered posts he might once have paywalled for free – if I download the Substack app to a phone I don’t own. He, too, refuses to own or use one. Yet he relies on a platform (are the relative wilds of Substack an online analogue for his rural lifestyle?) that excludes users who share his values. Sometimes he seems a man divided. Halfway through Against the Machine, he vividly describes his supermarket epiphany in 2022: ‘I saw the sheer unnaturalness of this way of obtaining food […] as if reality and the things which point to it had been severed from each other (pp. 157-8).’ And this from a former greenie living on a small farm. A longtime urbanite, I can recall thinking as much back in the ’80s (and don’t get me started on multi-layered surveillance). But this is the paradox of Kingsnorth. One minute, he nails the big picture with consummate acuity; the next, it’s as if he’s only just pulled his head out of his arse.
Granted, it’s not his first such revelation. On a family trip months earlier, he saw ‘something about my world, and by implication myself, that I haven’t been able to unsee.’ Unadult, unadulterated hedonism. ‘I saw that this is what a Machine society looks like. It is all a kind of simulation of a real culture…’ Similar misgivings plagued me in the ’80s, as postmodernism colonised the arts. I navigated my spiritual crisis via magic, then Buddhist practices. So I can relate to Kingsnorth’s quest for meaning, if not his religiosity.
Kingsnorth is in the awkward position of talking to both unbelievers and Christians. (More than half of the back-cover endorsements come from the latter.) At times, his faith obtrudes: ‘Something is coming. Be ready.’ At others, it takes a back seat. Yet it features in connection with his main theme: the loss of, hence the need for, roots and tradition. Has it escaped him that the rise of a faith based on a God beyond nature was the precondition to environmental rape? And what of our relinquished instincts – the defining malaise of the age insofar as a disembodied existence seems popular, if not optimal?
Has Kingsnorth equated instincts with sin? Sex rates among the four core values enshrined by his Machine, along with Science, Self and Screen – the antithesis of Past, People, Place and Prayer, those values he cherishes. The church, he notes, once held the Machine in check, but then came the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment etc. Sometimes Kingsnorth starts to sound as if he simply hates change. I share his dim view of a culture that conflates sex with identity to the extent that sexuality is an outward performance defined by alignment with (authoritarian) ideology and, so, divorced from its transformative potential; its ecstatic, profoundly spiritual dimension. However, unlike Christianity, with its traditions of (at times hypocritical) sexual repression, masochistic asceticism and mortification of the flesh, Wicca (for instance) doesn’t throttle the instincts. You can’t truly honour and understand nature if you deny your own, as two millennia dominated by Christian values has shown us (and don’t get me started on Kingsnorth’s manipulative appeals to the Scriptures).
As a social media platform, Substack seeks not just to enable online publication and self-promotion, but to maximise writer–reader interaction. Typically, paid subscriptions offer more access and/or bonus content. A writer might reserve intimate revelations for those who pay (like a stripper with VIP clients), or dangle participation as bait. Even if writers lack time to reply, users love to comment. Some take their prophet’s words as gospel, others beg to differ, but paying customers tend to want to weigh in to get their money’s worth. And fans are more likely to feel charitable than critics. So a writer exposed to frequent positive feedback, despite sporadic polite disagreement, might conceivably lose sight of their weak points.
Although I’m no Christian, and don’t often open, let alone study, my musty 254-year-old family Bible, assorted immortal verses concerning Christ’s earthly ministry spring to mind. While Kingsnorth is no mean wordsmith, his prose falls short of the King James Version for sheer emotive force. And even if it didn’t, how can the profane likes of Substack, let alone a multinational publishing conglomerate, help him to accomplish his mission? The thing is, as one of the philosophers he quotes once said, ‘The medium is the message’. And what Jesus preached to the poor among others – gospels spread by word of mouth for decades before anyone wrote them down – still resonates because the medium transcended boundaries.
From heart to heart via oral transmission, faith in the divine (of all kinds) retains an immediacy lacking online. Soulful, inspiriting human contact declines in proportion to creeping technological intrusion, while more of us identify as writers, or at least produce vastly more text than we used to. And we’ve reached this dire pass – civilisational collapse, if not quite the brink of extinction – via writing: Kingsnorth’s trade and ultimate faith. Christianity seems not to have changed him essentially; it’s the world that’s changing. So of course his book is a typical product of the Machine he deplores. Back before he was born (just prior to cut and paste), research meant months or years in libraries, not mere days or weeks spent at a screen. Writers had to rely more deeply on inner resources. No digital cheer squad rushed to check for errors, test your theories, or hail the appearance of each new (or old) idea.
But now the West is dying, its culture is inverted, and AI’s midwives are busy assisting the birth of the Antichrist on Earth. What does Kingsnorth advise re our collective spiritual crisis? Reactionary radicalism: defence or creation of a human-scale moral economy. On the one hand, refuseniks should ‘scatter the pattern’ and, if we can’t drop off the map, keep changing survival strategies. Yet on the other hand, we should draw lines and stick to them. Notice any contradiction? Maybe his text lacks unity because its essence is best shared face to face, so the messenger needn’t temper the memo for a disparate readership. I resonate with and respect his aversion and resistance to the Machine. But such avoidance, however wise, ill equips him to impart the big picture. If readers don’t already know or guess as much as or more than he does, they might want to find a less conflicted guide. Raindance, he exhorts in a final litany. ‘Call down the powers.’ So magical rituals are legit after all? That certain ancient gods presided over both magic and writing ought to give Kingsnorth pause.
observer of times 