Where We Find Ourselves in History Today

It is the year 2025. We are 213 years out from the invention of the first commercial steam engine.

It is 155 years since the construction of the first modern factory, 140 years since the invention of the commercial motor car, 122 years since the first manned flight, and 115 years since the invention of the neon light.

We are sixty-seven years on from the coming of the microchip.

It is eighty years since the first atomic bomb exploded, sixty-five years since the first contraceptive pill went on sale, fifty-six years since man walked on the moon,

and a mere eighteen years since the invention of the iPhone.

It’s been an eventful two centuries.

In this same time period, the earth’s human population has grown from one billion to over eight billion, the earth’s climate has begun to shift, half of the planet’s forests have been destroyed,

and the sixth mass extinction in history has begun.

The lifestyle of the whole of humanity has been transformed, for better or for worse, by the vast technological and commercial forces that these developments, and many more, have unleashed.

Now we stand on the brink of another development: one which has received endless hype and not a little hysteria, whether positive or negative.

This is the development of artificial intelligence. If it lives up to even half of the hype that is currently swirling around it, it may be more transformative than anything else.

Maybe all of this explains why our times seem so unstable.

We can all sense the craziness in the air, the feeling of our moorings being cut one by one. It feels hard sometimes just to stay upright as we live through what feels like a threefold earthquake:

a global ecological breakdown,

the cultural disintegration of the West, and

the rise of networked technologies of control and surveillance which daily have us tighter in their grip.

The powers of the world sometimes seem to be merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the internet, the power of the network itself.

Some days it can feel as if we are living inside the plot of a piece of twentieth-century dystopian sci-fi. The twist is that this time Agent Smith is the hero, while Neo has been dismissed as a far-right conspiracy theorist.

What is at the root of all this – and how might we navigate it?

The American historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, in his massive study The Myth of the Machine, published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970, attempts to chronicle the rise and triumph of the system of power and technology which now increasingly entwines us all.

He calls this system “the megamachine.” In the first pages of volume one, he explains what he means by this:

The last century, we all realize, has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology.…

Never since the Pyramid Age have such vast physical changes been consummated in so short a time. All these changes have, in turn, produced alterations in the human personality, while still more radical transformations, if this process continue unabated and uncorrected, loom ahead.

Mumford’s “megamachine” manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits.

Mumford predicted that this structure would allow “the dominant minority [to] create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation.

Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized, collective organizations.”

This, I believe, is where we mainly find ourselves today.

We are trapped within this Machine, whose momentum is always forward, and which will not stop until it has transformed the world.

To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things:

• rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, religious faith, and

• the many deeper values that we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend.

• Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences, and truths:

• the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity.

• Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.

This article is based on a talk sponsored by Plough and the Abigail Adams Institute on October 1, 2025, at Harvard University, to mark the release of Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025).