Book by Paul Kingsnorth
I wanted to like this book. I tried.
Kingsnorth writes with conviction. You have to give him that. But somewhere between his critique of industrial modernity and his retreat into a romanticized past, I kept hitting the same wall: this argument is doing exactly what it accuses the machine of doing. It flattens everything into a single story.
His indictment of Western progress is thorough. His alternative is not.
To be fair, Kingsnorth frames his own position carefully. He writes that the choice is not between going forward or going back, but between working with the complexity of human and natural realities, or attempting to supersede them with abstractions. I have no quarrel with that framing. My quarrel is with where he lands inside it. Because his answer, when you strip away the elegance, is still retreat. And retreat has never been where humans find their way through.
Every major religious tradition understood this, even if it expressed the insight differently. The Buddha did not teach escape from the world. He taught a middle path through it, one that required full engagement with what is, not nostalgia for what was. The Stoics were not quietists either. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations while running an empire at war. Seneca wrote from inside the court of Nero. The contemplative traditions we tend to romanticize were built by people who adapted, who worked within the conditions they inherited, and who found stillness not by withdrawing from the current but by learning to move within it.
That is the religious argument Kingsnorth misses. Hope has never lived in return. It lives in the human capacity to metabolize the new without losing the essential.
I grew up in the 1990s in the last window of genuine unstructured time. The kind our Baby Boomer parents had, passed down to us before anyone understood it was ending. We roamed. Nobody tracked us. And then the internet arrived, and we got on board. Not because we were coerced. Because it was interesting, and then it was useful, and then it was ours.
Web 1.0. Then 2.0. Then the social layer. Then mobile. Each wave faster than the last. And here we are now: large language models, generative systems, the early architecture of something that does not have a name yet. I adapted through every iteration. Most people I know did.
Kingsnorth reads that adaptation as defeat. I read it as the human thing. Octavia Butler put it better than I can: civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. We have always incorporated new tools into what we are. Fire. The printing press. The telegraph. The internet. The question was never whether to adapt. It was whether to adapt thoughtfully.
Viktor Frankl, writing from inside a Nazi concentration camp, made the distinction that matters here. Mass progress, he argued, consists at most of technical progress. Inner progress is only actually possible for each individual. Kingsnorth collapses that distinction. He sees the technical moving fast and assumes the interior is being left behind or destroyed. I think that is the wrong read. The interior is not fragile in that way. It has survived worse than smartphones.
Here is what I actually believe: the tools coming next, AI, automation, eventually robotics, have the potential to give something back that industrial modernity took. Time. Attention. The interior life. Not because technology is inherently liberating, but because enough of it, done right, removes the necessity of certain kinds of drudgery and hands us back the hours. Miles Neale frames it plainly: AI poses the specter of destruction, but simultaneously co-emerges with the upside potential of a great leap forward in our evolution. These are not properties of the technology. They are potentialities within our own psyche, expressing themselves through AI in ways never seen before in human history.
The cage was never the machine. The cage was always scarcity. Scarcity of time, of energy, of cognitive space. The machine, if we are thoughtful about it, might be the key.
Kingsnorth sees darkness in the signal. I see the noise finally being reducible. And in the quiet that remains, I suspect we will find more of what he is actually looking for than any retreat could offer.
I am against this book’s thesis. Not because I do not share the concern about what we are losing. I do. But the answer is not retreat. It never was.
Signal over noise. Always.