A book, a series
Many of us sense that something is not quite right with the world. Like a tickling on the back of the neck. A kind of spider sense. That nagging itch. As Morpheus puts it in The Matrix, “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
This is ground where conspiracy theories sprout, I’ve argued:
When life feels as if you have awakened locked in the trunk of a car careening down a rutted mountain road, you want to believe – you need to believe – that someone, anyone, is sitting behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is better than no one at all.
“Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity” by Paul Kingsnorth attempts to get at the root of it. (I’m partway through the audiobook.) Kingsnorth suggests that behind Man’s increasing alienation from nature and himself is a system, a technological-cultural matrix. Cultured in capitalism over centuries and fueled by money, always money, it is colonizing our own culture, reducing humans to inputs, and leaving people spiritually barren.
From a review last fall, “The Machine, he writes, is the sum of the forces ‘controlled by and for technology’ that have, since the inception of modernity, been ‘uprooting us from nature, culture and God.’ ” We have raised innovation to a secular faith, “a religious vision for an irreligious society.”
Kingsnorth resists categorization. “Some of Kingsnorth’s explanations align with Trumpism and the American Christian right,” reviewer Alexander Nazaryan notes. And yet he argues that left and right are both being subsumed by the Machine. A Machine in the latter stages of cultural collapse.
“I’m hopeful about the fact that the Machine can’t last,” he said. “I don’t think it is spiritually or ecologically or culturally sustainable.”
Over at Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink (subscription required), they’ve begun a series with an overlapping subject, only focused on contemporary issues of power. Downstream of the Epstein class, “millions simply sense that something is amiss, wonder how decisions are made, and grow alienated from the system. Life feels hard, but it’s even harder to see upstream through the fog and understand why.” The Epstein files provide clues to what’s happening, Giridharadas writes in the introduction. “But access does not equal understanding” the underlying operating system. And the network.
Giridharadas wrote on Monday, “When you live and die by the network, you never know whom you’re going to need, when, or how. Every friend is a potential steppingstone. Every phone number is a key. Every door must remain ajar, no matter what you might glimpse through its crack.”
Does it look suspiciously like child sex trafficking? Look the other way.
Another curiosity about now the network operates is women’s place in it. Or not in it. “What are seeing in the Epstein circle is a strange hybrid of patriarchies,” Giridharadas writes this morning (crediting contributor Kate Manne), “a new-world commodification and fungibility and trading of women and girls, on one hand; and, on the other, a persistent old-world sense of where women belong and don’t belong.”
“To understand the present, we must understand the machinery that produced it,” Giridharadas writes. And yet.
We, the disempowered, are still looking to “out” the men behind we perceive sit behind the wheel. Pursuing them gives us a false sense of agency. If we could just expose them and their schemes, we think, our lives would improve. In that pursuit, we don’t have to look at ourselves.