The AntiChrist Is Hiding Inside Your Smart Fridge
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Luddite
13 min read
Kingsnorth explicitly invokes the Luddites as a model for 'reactionary radicalism' against the Machine. Understanding the actual historical movement—their craft-based protests, the specific technologies they opposed, and their vision of a 'moral economy'—provides essential context for his argument that technology should serve human capability rather than replace it.
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Enclosure
14 min read
The enclosure of the commons is presented as the origin point of Kingsnorth's 'Machine'—the moment when communal land was privatized and peasants lost their 'partial independence.' Understanding this historical process in England illuminates his thesis about how people became dependent 'hirelings' rather than self-sufficient communities.
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Ivan Illich
15 min read
The article references Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality' as a key framework for evaluating technology—that tools should extend human capability rather than diminish independence. Illich's broader critique of institutionalization in medicine, education, and transportation deeply informs the anti-Machine philosophy Kingsnorth advocates.
In his 2025 book, Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth’s enemy is no less than the Antichrist. But Kingsnorth, to use the words of another Paul, “wrestle[s] not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual wickedness in high places.” For Kingsnorth, the Antichrist is not a political leader or even a person, but instead the Machine, a system that includes progress, modernity, and the accelerating growth of technology. The Machine’s body is the network of roads and internet cables and electrical wires crisscrossing the globe, but it is ultimately a system, one that began with the enclosure of the commons and that has increasingly enclosed more and more aspects of human life. It feeds on culture, human independence, and communities, leaving behind a homogenized, flattened, bland, spiritually-dead society. These are bold proclamations, and Kingsnorth’s diagnoses deserve serious deliberation.
The book unfolds over four parts. The first part outlines a perhaps rose-colored view of a pre-Machine pastoral past where people enjoyed, in the words of Rector of Cookham, Berkshire, “comfortable . . . partial independence”—an independence that has now been replaced with “the precarious condition of mere hirelings” (46). The general thrust of this section is that, while we may have been peasants, the powers that be largely left us alone to do as we would, to survive from the sweat of our brow, to have community with man and communion with God.
The second part of the book looks at how the Machine has unraveled that community and communion: the enclosure of the commons, imperialism wreaking havoc on the wider world, and the rise of technology. In modernity, in contrast to our ancestors, we are now dependent on a consumerist and capitalist system that, if it were to collapse, would leave us with little to nothing. We would not have the skills, neighbors, or faith to support ourselves. Kingsnorth explains:
...A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city. If she is lucky, the city will also serve her. If she is unlucky, she will end up juggling three jobs and trying to scrabble together enough pennies to feed her children. The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but it treats its
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