If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is Reefer Madness for iPads.”
The market is so efficient at metabolizing dissent, the critique and commodity become indistinguishable
What I find more interesting is the anti-tech culture gestating underneath the conversation. At its most extreme, you have writers such as Paul Kingsnorth. I should say upfront: I quite like Kingsnorth, despite disagreeing with him. His Against the Machine, published last fall, hit the New York Times bestseller list and draws on Jacques Ellul, Wendell Berry and Simone Weil to argue that the techno-capitalist apparatus he calls “the Machine” is hollowing out our civilization. Kingsnorth – English writer, Green movement veteran, former Wiccan, now Orthodox convert living in the west of Ireland – describes an existential spiritual crisis downstream of industrialism. He writes convincingly; his description of techno-capitalism corroding embodied experience is moving. Critics had bones to pick, his characterization of the Gospel chief among them, but it got me thinking about how I use tech and what it’s taken from me.
That’s a successful book. What I’m more impatient with is the cultural milieu Kingsnorth comes out of.
After I read Against the Machine, I picked up a book about space exploration by chance. There is something arrogant baked into the Kingsnorth position: that technology is essentially dehumanizing. And the Kingsnorth set does mean all or most technology – not just consumer tech like smartphones or social media. (The outer fringes of his belief system occasionally even have problems with the alphabet and symbolic thought, but that’s a piece for another time.) Focusing infrared light from 13 billion years ago on to a detector the size of a tennis court is awe-inspiring – and in a way fully compatible with the sacred.
The tech-skeptical set loves to call the optimists arrogant, and sometimes they’re right. Silicon Valley has produced no shortage of men who can’t understand why some people might not want to “solve” death. But the skeptics have their own arrogance, one that’s not often recognized. When you dismiss the entire trajectory of technological development as a spiritual catastrophe, you’re also dismissing the people whose lives depend on it. Smallpox killed roughly 300 million people in the 20th century before a vaccine eradicated it – is that a spiritual catastrophe? Are eyeglasses? Is hormonal birth control really the threat to “what it means to be human” that some would have you believe? A water filtration plant is technology. An MRI machine is technology. There are many writers who can only accommodate these things as more tentacles of “the Machine” – which in practice, though certainly not in intention, is both dishonest and cruel.
The result is a framework so primitive it can’t distinguish between a cochlear implant and a Neuralink chip. And, more controversially, the ambition to explore the cosmos is not an affront to God, it is a profound expression of gratitude and worship.
There are still things worth salvaging. The best version of this instinct comes from writers such as Ivan Illich, whose 1973 Tools for Conviviality argued that tools should extend human capability rather than replace it. The question such writers ask is narrower and better: at what threshold does a technology stop serving people and start demanding that people serve it? That’s worth taking seriously. But asking good questions doesn’t immunize you from a deeper problem.
I’m beginning to wonder if the whole anti-tech project isn’t itself a product. I want to be careful here, because the obvious retort writes itself. Kingsnorth needs to pay his mortgage. I like his work. I’m glad he wrote the book. But there is no position so oppositional it can’t be absorbed into the market. Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism applies whether you want it to or not.
The anti-Machine manifesto hits the New York Times bestseller list. The less philosophically committed writers in Kingsnorth’s wake run Substacks with thousands of paying subscribers. The homeschool-and-homestead aesthetic is an Instagram category complete with brand partnerships.
Not all of this is de facto cynical – the Amish do business with the “English” for a reason. But the market is so efficient at metabolizing dissent that the critique and the commodity become indistinguishable. When the anti-technology conference circuit commands $30,000 speaking fees or tickets of more than several grand, you are no longer warning people about the market. You are the market.
The honest position, and the boring one, is not a lifestyle. It’s definitely not flashy rebellion. It’s a set of questions you keep asking. Is this tool making me more capable or more dependent? Is this platform connecting me to people or performing connection for an audience? Am I choosing this technology or has the choice already been made for me? Unfortunately, you can’t feed your family with an attitude like that.
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