Paul Kingsnorth is proposing "Six Ways To Resist The Machine." Click that link to be directed to Kingsnorth's article, which appears on a website maintained by Plough Magazine. Plough advertises itself with the slogan, "another life is possible."
Since I have always claimed that "possibility is my category," you can see why I like the magazine. I liked Kingsnorth's article, too, and I think you can read the whole thing by using that link in the first paragraph. The reason you should want to read the article, and to consider the strategies proposed by Kingsnorth, is summed up in this excerpt (emphasis added):
The American historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, in his massive study The Myth of the Machine, published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970, attempts to chronicle the rise and triumph of the system of power and technology which now increasingly entwines us all. He calls this system “the megamachine.” In the first pages of volume one, he explains what he means by this:
“The last century, we all realize, has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology.… Never since the Pyramid Age have such vast physical changes been consummated in so short a time. All these changes have, in turn, produced alterations in the human personality, while still more radical transformations, if this process continue unabated and uncorrected, loom ahead.”
Mumford’s “megamachine” manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Mumford predicted that this structure would allow “the dominant minority [to] create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized, collective organizations.”
This, I believe, is where we mainly find ourselves today. We are trapped within this Machine, whose momentum is always forward, and which will not stop until it has transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, religious faith, and the many deeper values that we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend. Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences, and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.
Any effort to create a "totally human world" is, in essence, an attempt to deny and defy what I call my "Two Worlds Hypothesis," which is my suggestion that we live, simultaneously, not only in a "human world" that we create ourselves, by what we, collectively, do (what I generally call the "Political World"), but that we live, ultimately, in a world that we did not create, the "World of Nature," or (for those willing to be a little "religious") the "World That God Made."
It is really very important that we understand our subservience to and our dependence upon that "World of Nature," that world that existed and exists before we do any human and creative work at all.
Of course, we do need to give great attention to that "Political World" that we can shape, ourselves, and in which "possibility" (for both "good" and for "evil") is the category that prevails. But ultimately, we depend upon - and our "human world" depends upon - the "World of Nature," the "World That God Created" - and if we have any serious thought that we can supplant that world with a "totally human world," we have lost our way entirely.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/six-ways-to-resist-the-machine
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