Against the Machine

Invigorating … No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact * New Statesman *A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology’s promise of power and autonomy * The New York Times *Truly Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age – and rightly so, for Ginsberg was a howling prophet * TLS *Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker… his insights are sharp and layered. He is an astute critic of the fashionable nonsense that passes for contemporary politics * City Journal *There’s lots of food for thought here about alienation, rootedness, the self, the past, religion and science… One that wriggles around in your brain a while * Shortlist *The most powerful and important book I have read in years. This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the Machine – Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His EmissarySomething in our common life has long seemed bewildering, even ominous, and Paul Kingsnorth makes it finally clear what we’re up against. The gears clanking around us are not working at random, but with increasingly inhuman intent. Now I see what I must do. Now I understand – Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing EastAgainst the Machine is an eloquent and erudite critique of the perils of modern technology. But it’s much more than that. It’s a searching, moving meditation on the fate of humanity in a world where money and mechanism have displaced meaning – Nicholas Carr, author of Superbloom and The ShallowsThank God for Paul Kingsnorth! Serious, furious, and always consistent, this is a Christian thinker who does not sugarcoat his convictions – Justin Smith-Riui, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It IsKingsnorth has done something extraordinary: he has captured the spiritual crisis of our time in language so compelling I could not put the book down. The vision he paints is a bleak one: a post-human, machinic future. But as long as our world still has space for voices this vivid, I dare hope we have not yet succumbed to the Machine – Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer living in the west of Ireland. He is the author of ten books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the novel The Wake, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.