“So this is who we are. You don't have to be a Christian or a Buddhist to see where it has led us, and where it will lead next. Want is the acid. Capitalism is the battery. Growth is the engine. Greed is the forming energy that moves us to where we are inevitably headed. What is

“To those who ask, ‘What can I actually do?’, he [E. F. Schumacher] said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can each of us work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which

“The new nation of America, according to its leader, was best described not in terms of its values, its history, its spiritual beliefs or the makeup of its people, but by how much gold and silver it could produce, and how fast its ships could move. America was expanding, and it

“The flaw in the cosmopolitan dream, now as then, is a simple failure to understand that the world is not ‘rational’, and neither are we. We are crooked timber, and we grow from the ground. Universalist projects ignore that human need for roots, and the attack on culture by

“Since the 1990s—or perhaps since the 1850s—the process of Machine globalisation has been a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural or ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trades unions, national economic plans,

“But the Machine is not simply the logical end point of certain trends within culture and history. It is not simply a collection of advanced tools, historical designs and political power games. It is that, but it is also something else. It is above all a new type of civilization:

“Ellul's technique is an attitude of mind, one which replaces spontaneous, human-scale, organic ways of living with a focus on technical, rationalised, planned and directed outcomes. Technique is not the same thing as technology. Humans have always used technologies, or at least

“Once it is set in motion, through the technological network it itself brings into being, technique will inevitably move towards the construction of a whole society framed by its values. If the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century represented the replacement of human

“Technique’s overpowering of human-scale ways of living was accelerated a million-fold by the rise and rapid triumph of the web. The exciting, free internet which was dangled before us twenty-five or so years ago—Global communications! Unlimited information! International peace

“All of the enclosures, the destruction of alternative lifeways, the early modern revolutions, the fanning of want, the unsettling of peoples, the journeys of the Black Ships, the myth of progress: all that leads here to the triumph of technique, to the kingdom of the Machine.”

“The Machine is virtually impossible to resist, not least because it is found both around us and within us. As Lewis Mumford explained, the ‘myth of the Machine’ comes from within the human heart: we carry its drive for planning, efficiency, profit, clarity, straight lines,

“The age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the

“It is an ‘anticulture,’ because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today's way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which pre-modern, traditional societies were

“Philosopher Patrick Denneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that ‘liberalism’ is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other

“Liberalism did not naturally ‘evolve’ from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the ‘sovereign individual’ from new cloth. The individual ‘as a disembodied, self-interested economic actor’, claims Deneen, ‘didn't exist in any actual state of nature,

“The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth,

“The world of the Machine, which thrives on change like a horse on hay, will ensure that everyone who lives long enough ends up in a world they barely recognize.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 148