Conservatism Against the Machine
Late last month, OpenAI unveiled a new social media app, Sora. The basic idea is that it utilizes artificial intelligence to generate short-form video content from users’ prompts. Although the Sora videos are technical leaps ahead of other AI-produced slop, there is still something profoundly uncanny about them — the skin tones are just slightly off, and human movement seems unnatural. And yet many are hailing the release of Sora as the dawning moment of a brave new world.
Of course, not everyone has welcomed this new age with open arms. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled, for example, the rising popularity of older, more analog technology among young people. According to the story, many in Gen Z feel as though they have lost control of their lives to algorithms and the endless scroll of digital life, and so they turn to physical media and flip phones to reassert a sense of self-government. Some have even taken to branding themselves as “neo-Luddites.”
Paul Kingsnorth is among the most radical neo-Luddites in public discourse today. Beginning his career in the environmentalist movement, Kingsnorth’s discontent with the modern world has pushed him further to the right. In recent years, for instance, he abandoned Wicca for Orthodox Christianity. His latest book, Against the Machine, is a provocative manifesto for those who feel similarly unsettled by the march of technological progress and the unreality that seems to be emerging with it. Still, though, Kingsnorth’s radicalism is too extreme to provide a program for preserving humanity’s rootedness — the crisis of modernity can best be answered, in the final analysis, by a more conservative disposition.
The titular “Machine” is Kingsnorth’s shorthand for the engine of revolution remaking the West. “The Machine 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,” he writes. The Machine is not just the technologies of the digital or industrial revolutions, but the Baconian mindset about the conquest of nature that made them possible. Western rationalism, he argues, has resulted in the “triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralized over the local, the system over the individual and the community.”
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