"... But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 147

"... of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don't really want to begin, and we don't really know how to. Does any child want to grow up?..."

“The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment,..."

"...as to create parallel or “alternative institutions” in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all.’”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 144

"... as a form of class warfare in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial and xenophobic) much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate,..."

“America, said Bly, was ‘the first culture in history that has colonised itself’.…
In The Revolt of the Elites, [American historian Christopher] Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood..."

“The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine

"...but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 130

“Liberalism did not naturally ‘evolve’ from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the ‘sovereign individual’ from new cloth. The individual ‘as a disembodied, self-interested economic actor’, claims Deneen, ‘didn't exist in any actual state of nature,..."

"...presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of ‘liberty’, when in fact, it was something quite different.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 129

"...The other two—communism and fascism—were shorter-lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism—the elder brother—is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story,..."

“Philosopher Patrick Denneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that ‘liberalism’ is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries..."

"...is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 128-129

"...The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation, a one-word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated,..."

“It is an ‘anticulture,’ because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today's way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which pre-modern, traditional societies were built..."

"...We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 128

"...the human impact on the natural world and the rapid falling-away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history...."

“The age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles,..."

"...domination, within us daily. Human cultures can either trammel or release these desires upon the world. Our culture, such as it is, glorifies them and sets them loose and running.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 127

“The Machine is virtually impossible to resist, not least because it is found both around us and within us. As Lewis Mumford explained, the ‘myth of the Machine’ comes from within the human heart: we carry its drive for planning, efficiency, profit, clarity, straight lines, organization,..."

“All of the enclosures, the destruction of alternative lifeways, the early modern revolutions, the fanning of want, the unsettling of peoples, the journeys of the Black Ships, the myth of progress: all that leads here to the triumph of technique, to the kingdom of the Machine.”
#PaulKingsnorth, ATM

"...one which exists to remake the world in the image of technique itself. The kind by which, today, we are all increasingly enslaved.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 116

"...but for most of history they have been designed to augment human work rather than to entirely replace it. Technique, on the other hand, when it is taken up as a way of seeing, gives birth to an entirely new type of technology:..."

“Ellul's technique is an attitude of mind, one which replaces spontaneous, human-scale, organic ways of living with a focus on technical, rationalised, planned and directed outcomes. Technique is not the same thing as technology. Humans have always used technologies, or at least tools;..."

"...Something which we are midwifing into existence every time we click and swipe, whether we know it or not. The question is how we can begin to understand it.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 115

"...It is above all a new type of civilization: one which is replacing all previous human ways of living, cultures and value systems, with something novel and totalising; something which, in some indefinable way, seems to be struggling to be born through us...."

“But the Machine is not simply the logical end point of certain trends within culture and history. It is not simply a collection of advanced tools, historical designs and political power games. It is that, but it is also something else...."

"...exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 108

"...tribal cultures, religions…anything that interferes with the path of commercial expansion and its associated culture of individualist liberalism. Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested,..."

“Since the 1990s—or perhaps since the 1850s—the process of Machine globalisation has been a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural or ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trades unions, national economic plans, nations themselves..