By Noah Hickey,Tara Isabella Burton

Copyright thedispatch

What distinguishes, after all, a good technology from a bad one, one made for human flourishing and one designed to push us into subservience? That question, left all too unexamined in Against the Machine, turns out to be the book’s crux. Kingsnorth and I agree, I think, that browser-enabled smartphones and robot priests and AI chatbots that generate sermons or therapeutic advice are terrible for humanity. But what about penicillin, books, bicycles? What about the ultimate technology, language itself? Kingsnorth condemns those who make “the rookie mistake of treating technology as neutral.” But is the alternative to treat all that is not strictly “natural” as wicked?