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Book

Against the machine : on the unmaking of humanity

Call Number

  • 303.483 K554 (CEN, EAS, OSH)

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Publication Information

New York, NY : Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House, [2025]

Physical Description

xix, 348 pages ; 24 cm

Summary

"In Against the Machine, "furiously gifted" (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original--and terrifying--account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With masterful insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game--and how your very soul is at stake. It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Writing in the tradition of Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil, Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic, poetic, and erudite, Against the Machine is the spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

  • Introduction: Caught in the Web of Its Song
  • Part One: The Western Deviation. The Dream of the Rood
  • The Great Unsettling
  • The Faustian Fire
  • Part Two: Divining the Machine. Blanched Sun, Blinded Man
  • A Monster That Grows in Deserts
  • A Thousand Mozarts
  • Do What Thou Wilt
  • The Great Wen
  • Want Is the Acid
  • Come the Black Ships
  • You Are Harvest
  • Part Three: The Hollowing. Exodus
  • Kill All the Heroes
  • Down the River
  • In the Desert of the Real
  • The Abolition of Man (and Woman)
  • Keep the Home Fires Burning
  • The Nation and the Grid
  • The Fourth Revolution
  • What Progress Wants
  • God in the Age of Iron
  • The Universal
  • Part Four: The Savage Reservation. The West Must Die
  • Against Progress
  • The Jellyfish Tribe
  • The Neon God
  • The Raindance.

Subjects

Genres

Essays.