Rejecting The Machine
In conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
I was first drawn to Paul because I find myself hard to place politically. I feel alienated by the progressive left. I feel disheartened by the commodification of everything. I have a conservative temperament, and think there is much from the past worth holding onto. But when I look at many conservatives today, all they seem to care about conserving is their own fame and follower counts. They care more about the culture war than their own character. Many fight for Western civilisation but few fight for their own civility. Plenty wish the world wasn’t so prideful or self-obsessed, but seem blind to their own vanity. A lot of talk about faith, little living it.
Paul Kingsnorth is not like that. He not only writes beautifully, and formidably, but with real integrity. He isn’t at war with the world but with himself. He isn’t trying to score political points, or build a personal brand. I see a lot of people losing their souls to the demands of constant commentary and keeping up a public profile; Paul writes with a deep concern for the human soul—both his own and ours.
So I was just thrilled when he agreed to have a conversation with me, partly because I know how busy and in demand he is, but also because it felt like a chance to speak with someone different, someone rare. We talked about our shared sense of shame around social media—whether that’s something spiritual or just being English and thinking it’s all very bad manners—how he is trying to protect his family from the Machine, and how modern culture pretends shaming is bad, but does it all the time.
Paid subscribers can access the full conversation, where we go on to discuss romance and relationships, how the Machine is destroying our ability to love one another, and how we can find a way out of the desert. We also talk about growing disillusionment among Gen Z and our search for re-enchantment. Toward the end, I ask Paul about the way forward, and he has some suggestions on how to escape.
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I left this conversation feeling more confident in my convictions and more inspired than ever to fight this thing. Something is shifting, a rebellion is starting, and it’s hard not to think Paul is at the forefront of it, whether he wants to be or not. Paul says that young people need to lead the way. I don’t think he realises he already is.
Here’s the conversation, I hope you enjoy. And please, subscribe to The Abbey of Misrule here, you won’t regret it:
Freya India: Paul, there is so much I could ask you. Your essay series on “The Machine” is, in my view, the best articulation of what’s happening to us in the modern world, and where we are headed.
But you are also a father of two, including a teenage daughter. Girls are really struggling right now, as we can see with rising rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. Almost everyone I speak to knows a girl or young woman who is falling apart in some way. On my Substack I’ve been trying to work out why, and from my own experience, it’s clear that social media and smartphones are major causes.
In your short story “The Basilisk”, you describe our addiction to phones and the internet as if we are possessed, as if our devices were designed by a demon. You write, “There is a reason they call it ‘the web’...a reason they call it ‘the net’. It is a trap.”
To me social media seems specifically designed to trap girls and young women. These platforms prey on our vulnerabilities. Our faces and bodies are rated and reviewed on Instagram, our popularity publicly ranked on Snapchat. They also draw out our deepest vices. Every typical female bullying tactic—passive-aggression, reputation destruction, social exclusion—is easier online, from the block button to read receipts to full-blown cancel culture campaigns. Basically, if a demon were to design a tool to tempt girls and young women away from “the Enemy”, it would look a lot like Instagram. It is the perfect way to distract, demean, and degrade us. And this demon would, of course, call our degradation “empowering”, our vanity “self-expression”, our sitting alone in our rooms staring at screens “connection”.
All this to ask, how do you resist the Machine while raising a teenage daughter? It’s getting harder to escape. You mentioned in one essay that you won’t have a smartphone in the house because you “despise what comes through them and takes control of us. It is a prelest, all of it, and we are fooled and gathered in and eaten daily.”
How do you protect your family from falling into prelest, and do you still fall prey yourself? Has writing your essay series and forthcoming book affected how you raise your daughter?
Paul Kingsnorth: I don’t quite know how it happened - time seems to move faster as you get older - but I’m now old enough to be your father. My generation - Generation X, as Douglas Coupland, I think, dubbed us - grew up before the Internet, and I’ve come to see this as both a privilege and a curse.
It’s a privilege and a curse for the same reason: that I lived through a time before the web and was able to grow up without it ruining my childhood and teenage years; but now I have to watch it ruining those of my childrens’ generation. I remember a time when you could climb a mountain or walk into a wood and be away from civilisation; there were no smartphones or garmins to tie you into the digital world outside. I remember sitting on trains or in cafes and seeing people talk to each other rather than stare into their little Satanic Rectangles in a silent trance. I remember clubs and festivals when people danced to the music rather than filming it. I remember record shops and bookshops and secret nightclubs before the web killed them off. I remember what small towns were like before Google maps and AirB&B bleached all the mystery and interest out of them. I remember when people still got lost and it sometimes changed them for the better. I remember when you would go somewhere and not know what it was like before you arrived; you couldn’t look up the reviews or the photos online. The world was just more interesting. And a lot less stressful.
Everything you say about what smartphones and social media in particular do to young people, especially girls, is true and I have seen it myself. It breaks my heart every time I see a toddler with a phone or a tablet, already having their mind conditioned for the future they are coming into. I do feel like the Internet is a curse. It tempts us with dopamine hits and social connections and endless information and entertainment, and in return it sucks away our souls, and the souls of our culture. I realise that to some people this might sound hysterical, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. We’re on the cusp of the AI revolution, and very soon our entire perception of reality is going to be challenged at its roots. You quote me as talking about ‘prelest’, which is a Greek word meaning ‘spiritual deception.’ It seems like a good description of what the world of tech is doing to us.
I am just as susceptible to all of this as anyone else. I can get lost down a YouTube rabbithole for hours if I’m not paying attention. Many years ago I had a Twitter account and I noticed that it brought out my most obnoxious and attention-seeking and cruel side. So I made a conscious decision in my life to keep away from these technologies as much as I can, because I know what they will do to me if I don’t. I have no social media accounts, I’ve never had a smartphone, we don’t have a TV in the house and I don’t use satnavs, even though this means I get lost more often. My wife and I made a choice ten years ago to walk away from our urban lives in the UK and experiment with living in the Irish countryside and home-schooling our children. That was at least partly to keep them away from the technological system that was swallowing their peers. My children have never had phones, though they do now have laptops to work on.
I’m proud of the fact that my teenage daughter not only doesn’t have a phone but has become an evangelist for a smartphone-free life to her friends. Interestingly, I don’t think this is because of evangelism from me (being a teenager, that’s more likely to push her in the other direction anyway!) Something is happening in her generation - she’s not too much younger than you - which I see as positive and even exciting. While people like me grew up before the web, her generation have always been surrounded by it. In some ways, that means they are more vulnerable to its pressures, but it also means that they are clearer about its threats. And so there is pushback going on now. Your writing is an example of it.
I think that’s exactly right, there is a pushback happening. I’m hopeful that my generation will be stricter with social media when it comes to our own children, and try hard to preserve their childhood.
It’s interesting that you say social media “sucks away our souls”. I saw a popular, mainstream Substacker describe selfies as “profane” the other day and it struck me. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt also talks about the “spiritual degradation” caused by social media, which is something I’ve always felt but couldn’t articulate. Degrading is the word. When I scroll through ‘X’ I feel my faith in the world, in other people, and in love, degrading. It’s hard to put into words, but I think of that feeling when you walk into a beautiful, dimly-lit church, where your soul feels a little lighter, where the world feels different—the exact opposite of that feeling is scrolling through TikTok. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s doing the opposite to your soul.
I’ve also always felt that something about social media degrades our dignity. Everyone talks about feeling insecure or anxious after posting themselves online; for me, the strongest feeling was always shame. There’s an indignity to it, I find—to selfies, status updates, the whole thing. I remember as a teenager every time I posted a selfie on Instagram my heart would pound; it felt wrong, I felt ashamed. Checking how many likes I had felt humiliating. And I don’t think this is unique to me—girls joke about throwing their phone across the room after posting on Instagram, or shaking with anxiety. There’s something in that, I think, worth paying attention to.
I’ve written before about how sharing personal moments online degrades them, almost desecrates them. It reminds me of how my mum has always had this aversion to cutting up family photos—to stick on the wall or put in a scrapbook or something—because she felt it was wrong to cut off someone’s neck or chop off an arm. It’s a feeling like that. Hard to explain rationally, but a sense that something is too special to be treated this way. I just don’t believe we should offer our personal lives up to the market. I don’t post selfies because I don’t want to offer my face to be rated and reviewed. I don’t post my memories because it’s not up to strangers to tell me how valuable they are. If I have a daughter someday I don’t want her to be a product on display. And if I wouldn’t want it for her, why would I want it for myself?
So maybe we do need a little more shame, some stronger cultural norms around these things—where sharing private moments seems strange, where it would be unthinkable for a 12 year-old to have an Instagram account, or shameful to take selfies in sacred places. (Reminds me of another poetic line of yours: “When I see people taking selfies on mountaintops, I want to push them off.”) The other day I watched a group of young women take selfies together in a restaurant the entire evening, barely exchanging a word with one another. While eating, they started editing their photos in silence—one hand editing, the other holding their cutlery. They looked possessed. This is the same generation who say they feel painfully alone. What are we doing?
I wonder what you make of this feeling—that social media doesn’t just harm our mental health, but degrades us spiritually. Do you think that sense of shame is a warning of some kind? And what’s the way out of this? Is there a way to have a presence online while protecting our souls, our dignity, and what we feel to be sacred?
This is very interesting, because I have long felt exactly the same. In fact, I think that this sense of degradation, or profanity, is at the heart of my objection to social media and to the Machine in general. There are a lot of studies I could quote or arguments I could make, and many people have made them much better than I could - Jonathan Haidt, who you mention, is one of the very best at doing this. But at the root of it for me it is just some deep sense of wrongness. Of sacrilege. And that’s hard to justify in the language of our culture.
I sometimes wonder how much of this is cultural. If being English, and being from the pre-Internet generation, just gives me a feeling that what is happening is just bad manners. When did it become appropriate to watch pornography in train carriages? Or to watch a film on your tablet with the volume up in a public place? Or, as you say, to sit in a restaurant curating your online presence on your phone? I realise I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man, but perhaps we need more grumpy old men, and women, to put things right again.
Speaking of which, you might be too young to remember Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for ‘decency’ on the TV, who was very well-known from the 1960s to the 1980s. At one point she led a fairly big movement of mostly older, mostly female and mostly Christian campaigners for ‘traditional values’. She was the original critic of the ‘permissive society’ as it was called back in the sixties, and by the time I was growing up she was a running joke amongst the ‘sophisticated’, university-educated, alternative comedy types. Everybody knew she was a fossil and her values were repressive and wrong. Except … these days I find myself basically on her side. She was right about where it was all going, and I suppose that if she could see our pornified present, full of anxiety and anger and broken, fragile young people, she might feel grimly vindicated.
What she represented back then was a culture of limits that was being superseded by a culture of liberation. We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad, and that we should not judge or condemn any behaviour at all, however socially damaging. But no culture in history has ever believed that. And in fact, in the age of ‘cancel culture’ we don’t believe that either. We still shame people for all sorts of things - racism, sexism, homophobia and a host of ‘isms’ real or imagined. What we don’t shame is personal vanity, sexual licence, anti-social behaviour or any expression of sexuality, no matter how niche or damaging. What we have done is to promote personal ‘liberation’ to the exclusion of all other values - and that particular value just happens to be the one which is most easily monetised. The result is a culture in which the pressure to Instagram yourself is both psychologically damaging and highly profitable. The culture is profane and commercial at the same time. They feed off of each other.
We can all feel in some way that this is wrong: that we have let something vital go. The key thing is that, as you say, at some level we seem to feel ashamed of ourselves for the way we are living - and we are deeply unhappy, especially the young. Recently I gave a talk in which I pointed out that the Christian list of the ‘seven deadly sins’ which we used to be told to avoid in order to live a Godly life - lust, gluttony, greed, envy, pride, wrath, sloth - are now the basis of our economy and culture. We don’t avoid them - we actively promote them. This ought to tell us how off track we are. How many people will openly accept that their addiction to TikTok, Instagram etc is a problem, and that they don’t like what it does to them - but then go right on doing it? That’s how we know it’s an addiction. The question is how to break out of it.
I completely agree. It’s hard to break out of the addiction, but I think we have to be honest about what’s actually at stake here. Like our ability to love and be loyal, for example. I think a big fear for young people at the moment is commitment. Commitment to anything, really, but especially to each other.
As you say, the Machine killed mystery, and I think it took romance with it. Now we find our partners by swiping through endless people like products and advertising ourselves like things. When you say Airbnb has “bleached all the mystery” out of small towns, that’s how I feel about social media and falling in love. Romance is dead. You can’t wonder what your crush is up to you anymore because you can just watch their Instagram Story. You can’t wonder where they have been, what music they listen to, what their life is like; it’s all there, listed on their Facebook profile like a product description, their personality packaged into their Instagram grid. And now it’s not just places we review, but people. We leave reviews of one another constantly with our likes, comments and Tinder swipes. Again, profane.
I don’t think this is a small thing. I genuinely believe that what you call the Machine is destroying our ability to love one another. You talk about a time when people wandered in nature and got lost, when people talked to each other on trains instead of looking down, but what I’m most envious of is how people used to fall in love, how they used to stay in love. Many young people today were exposed to online porn before they even had a first kiss. Many of us have never known finding love without swiping and subscription models. We have never known flirting before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat Stories with flame emojis.
Romance is being killed in other ways, too. Our therapeutic culture pathologises love, convincing us that everything is a trauma response, that being dependent on someone is a deficiency. Science and reason remind us that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Now a crush on someone is just an attachment issue.
Ultimately I think we are raising a generation full of doubt. The psychologist Erich Fromm talks about “faith” and “doubt” as being character traits, as sort of dispositions of the soul. We are a chronically doubtful generation—of ourselves, of the world, of love, of each other. And we think this feeling of doubt is a reason not to commit to things, whereas really, we are doubtful because we don’t commit.
So, if I’m honest, I’m probably asking you about this because I just like talking about marriage. I love to hear about love, and what it takes—the compromise, the sacrifice, and what comes from that. My generation is starved for love stories. Or commitment stories, you could say. So, what would you say is the value of a committed relationship? Do you also think the Machine has degraded our ability to love? How do we defend marriage and commitment in the age of the Machine, and how important is that?