Kingsnorth used to be a green campaigner, walked away from all that, and now lives on a smallholding in western Ireland, where he went and got himself baptized Orthodox. This book is twenty years of him chewing on one bone. He calls it the Machine, and he doesn’t mean your phone. He means the whole setup — industry, tech, markets, the endless upgrade — running on its own logic and eating anything that’s local, old, or handed down. He runs the thread from the first mills to AI and says look, we didn’t build a tool, we let something loose, and now it’s building us. Berry, Ellul, and Mumford are his people. I find him annoying as hell and quite often right. The ending is where he loses a lot of readers, including me, because he doesn’t offer practical solutions, he offers God. Yeah, no. Still, it was a bestseller and might push you to reconsider sacred cows.