This post is part of a series revealing the table of contents of upcoming Issue Twenty. As is our custom, we’ll be discussing one article per weekday in order to give you a taste of what is to come.
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“Reclaiming Humanity Against the Machine: An Interview with Paul Kingsnorth”
We all recognize the encroachment of new devices and technologies in everyday life. It might take the form of AI “suggestions” for writing an email, or a setting in that new car to “assist” your driving, or perhaps an advanced woodshop machine marketed to the slogan, “Making Things Should Be Easy.” These things started trickling onto the scene years ago, but the tap has been lately opened wide. It seems that a digital, virtual, automated future is all but set in stone for future generations, with the powers-that-be as the driving force behind such a dystopian model. For those of us who feel powerless against this weight of inevitability, is there any way to change course?
In Issue Twenty, Joshua and Mike connected with bestselling author and deep thinker Paul Kingsnorth, who has been recently promoting his newest book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth has spent more than 30 years engaging “the Machine” – the systems, technologies, and influences that have come to dominate modern society. For this interview, they discuss those forces at play; how the Machine moves into all of our creative realms, including the workshop; and how we can take a careful and thoughtful look at new technologies as they arrive.
And when we can see the Machine objectively, we have the power to decide how much influence it can have in our lives – how celebrating human-centered work can be a rallying cry for those seeking to resist its control. “My own metrics, though I haven’t managed to lay them out so well, are also built around dependency.” Kingsnorth says. “I want to avoid technologies of dependence… We have to be aware of what these systems are doing to us, and think hard about how to opt out of them in our own lives as much as we can or want to.”
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