Elaborating the Machine
This article began as a review of Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth and has subsequently expanded into a reflection on the psychological consequences of technology and the Machine. While Kingsnorth’s reservations about Capitalism are an overreach, the book is spectacular.[i] The Machine is a key, unlocking the era we’re in. It makes evident our analogous relationship with the dawn of Christianity. The Machine is a name for the Gnostic Demiurge or Lucifer that contemporary people can comprehend without recoiling. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. You’ll get it by the end of this article, and certainly by the end of Against the Machine. This article became an integration of Kingsnorth’s views, and subsequently, brought them down to earth. Kingsnorth speaks history. I speak psychology. Thus, this article won’t be a raving review of the book, but an elaboration through psychology and philosophy.
Sensitive as bucolic authors of fiction are, or I imagine them to be, it is no surprise that Paul Kingsnorth sensed the encroachment of a mechanistic attitude into our culture. The Machine has a mind, and its body is distributed across the world. Like the AI in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, its metallic skin and copper veins may expand to cover every inch of the globe. The Machine isn’t cars, trains, computers, or AI. Each of these are a part of the Machine, certainly, but the Machine cannot be reduced to any of these parts. Nor can it be reduced to a specific time. The Machine is not Postmodern, nor Modern. It is certainly not Romantic, and it is not merely a product of the Enlightenment. It is not reducible to these eras, but it is present in all of them. The Machine is distributed across an expanse of space and time.
It is, at least, a “hyperobject,” in which we are embedded and whose scale is too big for us to capture in one image.[ii] Apprehending a hyperobject is like trying to view the Willis Tower from the street. To comprehend the full scale of the object, you must see it from a distance. Unlike traditional objects, you cannot step back from a hyperobject. You must view it from the inside.
The size, scale, and our embeddedness within the Machine make it difficult to talk about. Rationality requires “well defined,” reducible objects. If our object is ambiguous and irreducible, then it is no surprise that the Machine is difficult to apprehend. Therefore, we need a representation that accommodates the distributed and irreducible form of the Machine. What we need is a theoria. In his lectures on Carl Jung’s Aion, Edward Edinger helpfully describes what a theoria is:
Jung uses the original word theoria to draw our attention to the fact that he is not referring to the modern use of the term theory; the original usage meant a beholding, a contemplation. It was more or less equivalent to a revelatory image (p. 113).
Each part of the Machine signifies the Machine. They point towards a common center, which unifies them. That center, often represented by a symbol, is what contextualizes the examples. It makes them comprehensible. The practice of unifying an array of examples into a cohesive image is a theoria. Against the Machine is a complex, but extremely enjoyable, theoria of the Machine.
What does Kingsnorth’s theoria describe? In other words, what is the character of the Machine? It is the internet and smartphones. It is social media and adolescent depression. It is cars and climate change. It is cities arrayed in grids and the annihilation of communal life. And driving all of that, it is a mindset – the mindset of an engineer. An artificer, the Machine mindset looks down on everything and believes it can be manipulated to perfection. This includes human beings themselves, who indirectly and directly, are being shaped by the mentality of the Machine.
Consider the layout of the modern city. It is a grid, which carves out an aggregation of boxes. Within these boxes are tall boxes reaching to the sky. These obelisks have floors (flat boxes), and within those are rooms (boxes). And in some of those rooms are cubicles, where people stare at glowing rectangles for eight hours a day, five days a week. What kind of personality produces this? An artist? A matriarch? I’ve already given away the answer: an engineer. We engineer our world, constantly creating new technologies to ‘perfect’ our lives.
However, as we change our world, our world changes us. In Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett, the author explains an interesting study which demonstrated how we determine who is attractive.[iii] If you take ten pictures of women’s faces and rank-order them 1-10, participants will settle on a norm. Someone will be the hottest. If you make a composite of those faces, averaging them out, and you include that composite face in the lineup - it will be the new winner. Simply, the average of all faces is hotter than any individual face. Hotness is an abstracted ideal from an aggregate of stimuli.
Makeup does something similar, and more. Primer, the “base coat” of makeup, approximates the tone of one’s skin. If you have light and pink skin, there’s a primer to match. When applied, it covers up any pimples, birthmarks, blemishes, etc. In other words, it removes ‘outliers.’ Primer averages one’s skin, flattening the variability. Just as the hot ideal is the average of many people, the hottest version of your skin is the average of your otherwise variable skin tone.
However, primer isn’t the only form of makeup. Further makeup exaggerates sexually-relevant aspects of one’s face. For example, blush imitates the blood that flows to one’s face when aroused. It takes one aspect of the face, which is sexually-relevant, and turns it up. Thus, makeup averages and amplifies.
This dynamic, averaging and amplifying, occurs across many domains of attraction. Facial averageness and prototypicality (i.e., how feminine a female face is, or how masculine a male face is) predict attractiveness.[iv] Enhanced eyelashes predict higher ratings of perceived attractiveness and health.[v] However, the attractiveness of eyelash-length to eye-width ratios, a measure of the “fullness” of one’s eyelashes, has an inverted-U relationship; meaning, very full and very sparse eyelashes are less attractive than middle-full lashes. And this is true across ethnic groups.[vi] What is most attractive is not merely more of a sexually-relevant feature, redder cheeks, longer eyelashes, or plumper lips, but an average and amplification of sexually-relevant features relative to the whole. Attractiveness is an ascent towards an ‘essence.’ It is a hyper-average, or a supernormal stimulus.
Plastic surgery is an extension of the same process. Operations like rhinoplasty or genioplasty approximate the supernormal face. Breasts augmentations, liposuction, Brazilian butt lifts, lip filler, and more, approximate the supernormal. Plastic surgery is not different from makeup in kind; it’s a difference in magnitude. Both utilize technology to approximate supernormal ideals. However, plastic surgery is more invasive, allowing us to supersede some physical constraints. In other words, makeup can change the appearance of one’s nose, but a rhinoplasty changes its structure. This grants the individual far more freedom.
Absolute freedom is the freedom to destroy. It allows one to their parts from the whole. The length of one’s eyelashes can fail to account for the width of one’s eyes, or one’s breasts can fail to account for the size of one’s frame. The only limiting factor is one’s taste. The “bimbo” is an example of this. She doesn’t understand that the beauty of her parts is in relationship with the whole. Each part is seen as separate from the gestalt. Thus, her sexually-relevant parts are blown up to clownish dis-proportions. Yet she is still constrained by her corporeality. If her breasts were expanded too significantly, she would have back pain. If her hips were widened too far, she couldn’t walk.
Unlike makeup and plastic surgery, cyberspace is unconstrained by corporeality. One’s digital appearance can be exaggerated without the consequences that occur in life. Online, you can expand your breasts as far as you want. You don’t feel pain. Widen out your hips. It doesn’t matter. Digital you doesn’t walk. Eyelashes can be impossibly long, waists impossibly thin, and muscles impossibly defined. Do whatever wins in the attention economy. In the digital world, one comprised of images and not of bodies, there is no reality constraint. With the right tools, you can create anything you can dream. For better or worse.
Once our ideal was informed by the 150 people in our village. Now, we have a “global village” inhabited by beauty-tech addled adolescents. There is an arms race of attraction, frenzied by internet life. Under these conditions, what happens to our ideal? It will ascend to mere fantasy, where heaven splits from earth. Hips will widen, lips will expand, breasts will blow up, and every possible niche will be ‘perfected’ in image. Those who render images will utilize tools that are uninhibited by the restraints of embodiment. We will reuptake those rendered images, again and again, until we reach a tipping point where our desires cannot be manifested in materiality at all.
This cycle feeds the Machine. In the arms race of ideals, we become increasingly dependent on the tools that imitate transcendence. How long after makeup was invented before young women were expected to wear it? As plastic surgery becomes more efficient and affordable, how long before it’s the norm? And once it is, there will be a call for evermore elaborate technologies to achieve the new ideal, informed by the world we created.
Transhumanism, the religion of the Machine, replaces Christ as the redeemer with technology, believing that in building AI, “we are making God.”[vii] In her book, Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington marks the beginning of the Transhumanist era with the birth control pill. Unlike earlier medical technologies, the pill doesn’t try to fix something broken but interrupts something healthy. Such a technology adjusts the standards of health. Before the pill, the measure of health was the human form, in a Platonic sense. It was our conscious experience of human beings living functional, healthy lives “as God intended.” Insofar as a person was operating well and expected to remain so, medicine had no reason to intervene. The pill, in stark contrast, attempts to ‘improve’ upon a healthy person. But what does “improve” mean? Improvement implies a new ideal, not the healthy form, but healthy plus something new. That new element approximates an ideal beyond “merely” human. It is an ideal not as God made us, which every civilization before now would have had some deference for, but as we make ourselves. Transhumanism and the pill are expressions of the Machine.
The Machine carries with it a new ideal for human beings. When materialism repressed spirituality with curses like “superstition,” it set the stage for the projection of spirit onto matter. Spirit is a domain of phenomenology, the same as matter, with correspondences in psychology and reality (difficult to measure, though it may be). Thus, any denial of the reality of spirit is to deny an element of ourselves. Yet the psychological architecture that corresponds to spirit, those aspects of our neurology that “participate” spirit, have not died.[viii] The spirit-in-us lingers. Thus, transcendence is conceptualized in materialist terms. In the materialist age, angels are aliens,[ix] and transcendence is the Metaverse, “evolution,” body augmentation, AI, and the birth control pill. To modify the Roman poet Horace, “You may drive out [spirit] with a pitchfork, yet [he’ll] be constantly running back.”
With no spirits to aspire to, the only remaining authority is oneself. There are no higher powers, only lower materials. There is no God, nor angels, nor saints. The vertical dimension of reality is flattened; a parodic reading of “as above, so below,” where above and below are equated. The only reliable authority is “I.” I determine the length of my eyelashes, size of my lips, color of my hair, and size of my muscles. Neither God, nor my parents, nor a mentor have any say. In the Machine age, the summum bonum is the ego. The highest value is the Will, with power at his right hand.
If all of reality is strictly material, and the universe is unwinding like a clock, every motion determined from the outset, and free will is an illusion, just another consequence of mechanistic causes, then how can I judge you for not living up to your potential? How can I judge you for being anything other than what you are? If you are messy, rude, or destructive, you are not that way because of any choice that you made. Rather, you were destined to make that choice. It would be unfair to judge you for any trait over which you have no control. To judge you for your catastrophizing or self-indulgent whining would be akin to judging you for your race – neither of which you have any control over.
In the common materialist universe, your Will is perfect as it is. Insofar as you behave poorly, it is because of matter – perhaps a “chemical imbalance” in your brain (which is nonsense).[x] Purifying one’s spirit requires an engineering of, or disassociation from the contaminating influence of matter. Transhumanism, through body augmentation or a retreat into a digital realm, is an ascent to pure spirit. All that ought to exist, according to the Transhumanist, is a fantasy world perfectly mapped onto our desires. Nothing is that is not Willed.
The Will privileges freedom and power; freedom from constraints and the power to destroy them. This begs the question, freedom to do what? The power to do what? The Will wishes to be unconstrained but forgets that it is a body. Let’s restate Horace plainly, “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.” You may sever your purposes from their natural intent, but it comes back in parodic form.
Consider bodybuilders, particularly men. Through obsessive work and technology, they alter their appearances to fit their ideal physique (what of their body they can see). They are becoming what they believe is the most attractive version of themselves; The body-aesthetic perfected.
However, as he approaches his ideal, his attractiveness becomes decoupled from its function. He leaves behind the very reason for being sexually attractive: women. Males and females differ in their preferences for a mate. Men, across age groups, place more importance on attractiveness and physical build than women do, and they care more about these things than the resources and personality that women have.[xi] In other words, men care about aesthetics while women care about resources and personality (and aesthetics but less so than men).
In the case of muscularity, young men desire to be thinner and more muscular than their female counterparts prefer.[xii] In fact, college-age men would prefer to have 28 pounds more muscle than they have and believe that women would prefer they had 30 pounds more muscle. And this is despite women preferring no more muscle than the average man.[xiii]
Women have their own ideal version of a man, one who’s less muscular, more personable, and productive. Yet, if a bodybuilder pursues his ideal self to the extreme, he leaves women’s preferences behind and thereby negates the evolved purpose of attractiveness altogether: Pair bonding and the continuation of the species. His aesthetics become disassociated from their purpose. Spirit splits from matter. He is no longer grounded. Like Icarus, he ascends to pure spirit – only to fall.
However, a bodybuilder’s ambitions are still anchored by embodiment. He must get out of bed, eat healthy, and make enough money to afford a gym membership. He must recover from and prevent injuries. Every day he must push the limits of his abilities and extend himself beyond the line of exhaustion. He has training partners, whom he is indebted to and responsible for. He must be disciplined. Baked into bodybuilding is embodiment in the world – and this protects him.
Without the constraints that bodybuilding offers, self-perfection driven by sexual attraction can lead to a parody of men’s desires. What do men find attractive? Women. Specifically, sexual dimorphic stimuli.[xiv] Sexual dimorphism refers to traits present in women but not in men, and vice versa. It is “femininity,” and men find feminine traits attractive. For example, women with more slender cheekbones and fuller lips are more attractive – cross-culturally and including traditional South American groups with little exposure to western beauty standards.[xv] The hip-to-waist ratios of women are predictors of desirability.[xvi] And the attractiveness of hip-to-waist ratios is present across cultures.[xvii]
Generally, men want women. To attract a woman, they imitate what women want. But what happens if women are not in the picture? If they are mere objects to be admired from afar without corporeality? In isolation, where the criticism of men and the desires of women are silenced, and women are unattainable, men project their desires onto the only canvas available – themselves.
We see what we want. Our targets stand out against the background of experience. In the bowels of isolation and the throes of rabid longing, a young man may see those aspects of himself that are feminine, however thin they may be. Then, he latches onto them, draws out from them his ideal. With makeup, and filters, and surgery, he gets closer and closer to his ideal until he has it in himself. Thus, Pulitzer Prize-winning male-to-female trans writer, Andrea Long Chu said, “Yes, sissy porn did make me trans.”[xviii] For better or worse, we become what we behold. And the Will, which believes itself object and detached from the influence of nature when freed through the power of technology, remains a product of nature. It is not free from matter’s influence – it is matter. The Will is Want.
In 1943, C.S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man.[xix] He may not have known it, but he was repudiating the Machine long before Kingsnorth identified it. In so many words, Lewis argued that the annihilation of spirit (i.e., moral universals), and the subsequent reduction of the world to what Georges Bataille called “base materialism” results in our enslavement to nature.[xx] “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains” (p. 65). When the Will is unconstrained by morals, our nature is free to manipulate the world. It is through our Will that our wants express themselves.
Technology, designed to free the Will from the influences of nature, merely enables our nature to express itself wantonly. This is true for those who create technology and their consumers. Inventors, entrepreneurs, and creators make what they like, or what facilitates their approach towards their goals. Their wants manifest in their creations. And those manifest desires, enable the corresponding desires of the population. They remove the boundaries between consumers and the wants that align with their own. Whereas the features of experience that creators do not want remain unfacilitated. Thus, the world begins to take the shape of those at the top. Above forms below. And if no morals supersede the desires of the ruling class, if nothing is above them, then the wants of rulers shape the lives of the ruled.
“Each new power won by man is a power over man as well” (p. 58), said Lewis. Thus, those elites, who have ‘freed’ themselves from moral and spiritual constraints, will impose on us their wants. Unless we realize where we are heading and reconcile ourselves with reality, we and our masters will be ruled by appetites.
While we could end our consideration of the Machine here, I cannot leave you hopeless in good conscience. A diagnosis is an insufficient cure. We need a treatment. The ego is constantly in action. Thought is an analogue of movement. If worship of the ego, its Will, is the cause of the Machine, a treatment for the Machine is silence. As I have written elsewhere, silence is relaxation. It is the seventh day. It is giving up. In silence, the thoughts which obscure our view of reality pass away. Quiet contemplation of Being reveals what is outside of our Will. Birds chirp without of our efforts. The wind blows of its own accord. Nature breathes despite our deliberations.
A dei sacrificium intellectus may seem paradoxical. You may be asking, what should we do? I am answering, no-thing. We should do no-thing, not because we have resigned to our fate, but because the silence of no-thingness subdues the ego. Contemplation gently guides us to our place. Instead of incessantly thinking about ethics, we can simply notice when the good appears. Instead of insisting on a system, a product of the Will, we can acknowledge where we are succeeding and where we are failing. Humility, the gift of presence, is an antidote to the Machine. Being is the alternative to the Will. And Being speaks when the ego fades away.
[i] Kingsnorth argues that Capitalism is a driver of Machine ails (e.g., ecological destruction, loss of hearth, commodification of everything, etc.). He is largely correct. However, throwing the baby out with the bathwater – especially, when that baby pulled billions out of abject poverty – would be reckless. Capitalism remains the preeminent economic system. The question is one of integration. Can Capitalism, which succeeds because it fits to human nature, simultaneously be fit to long term human nature and nature outside of humanity? This is a difficult question to answer. We might start by arguing over capital’s place in our hierarchy of values. If money and comfort are a part of creation, certainly they are good. Yet rendered bad when elevated above their station. This, I believe, is what may reconcile Kingsnorth’s critique with Capitalism and its successes.
[ii] Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press.
[iii] Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal stimuli: How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose. W. W. Norton & Company. P. 36-38
[iv] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513823000879?via%3Dihub
[v] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Febs0000192
[vi] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-41739-5
[vii] Multiple Transhumanists have made this claim. See Kingsnorth’s article in Touchstone: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=36-06-029-f&readcode=10996&readtherest=true&utm_source=chatgpt.com
[viii] I’m using “participate” like Owen Barfield in that we conspire with reality to bring about the phenomenology of spirit. See Saving the Appearances.
[ix] Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.
[x] Ang, B., Horowitz, M. A., & Moncrieff, J. (2022). Is the chemical imbalance an “urban legend”? An exploration of the status of the serotonin theory of depression in the scientific literature. SSM – Mental Health, 2, 100098. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100098
[xi] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250151#pone-0250151-t001
[xii] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00050067.2022.2033951
[xiii] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.8.1297
[xiv] Fiala, V., Třebický, V., Pazhoohi, F., Leongómez, J., Tureček, P., Saribay, S., Akoko, R., & Kleisner, K. (2021). Facial attractiveness and preference of sexual dimorphism: A comparison across five populations. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.33.
[xv] Gangestad, S. W., & Scheyd, G. J. (2005). The Evolution of Human Physical Attractiveness. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 523–548. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143733
[xvi] Braun, M. F., & Bryan, A. (2006). Female waist-to-hip and male waist-to-shoulder ratios as
determinants of romantic partner desirability. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 23(5), 805-819.
[xvii] Furnham, A., Moutafi, J., & Baguma, P. (2002). A cross-cultural study on the role of weight and waist-to-hip ratio on female attractiveness. Personality and Individual Differences, 32(4), 729–745. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00073-3
[xviii] Chu, A. L. (2019). Females. Verso.
[xix] Lewis, C.S. (2001) The Abolition of Man. Harper One.
[xx] Bataille, G. (1985). Base materialism. In A. Stoekl (Ed. & Trans.), Visions of excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939 (pp. 45 - 52). University of Minnesota Press.