Against The Machine!

The countdown to my new book begins ...

‘This is the most powerful and important book I have read in years. It is simply brilliant.’

- Iain McGilchrist

It’s four years now since I began writing a series of essays on this Substack about the cultural and spiritual implications of the great age of upheaval we are living through. I didn’t know how much I had to say, or quite where my investigation would go, but that series took me two years to finish, and ended up drawing more readers than I could have dreamt of when I started.

Obviously I hit a nerve.

Two years is a fairly long time to be writing something, but in reality, those essays were about thirty years in preparation. You can trace a clear thread from my first book, One No, Many Yeses, a political travelogue exploring the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s, through my paean to localisation Real England, through my Dark Mountain essays of the 2010s and even, if you feel so inclined, through my poetry. All of it, really, spirals around the same obsession: the rise and rise of the technological-cultural matrix that I have since taken to calling ‘the Machine.’

For all those reasons, my forthcoming book Against the Machine - which will published in September by Penguin on both sides of the Atlantic - feels like a culmination of much of my life’s work. This book, which is built around those essays, is a deep dive into the dehumanisation of the world at the hands of techno-capitalism, spiritually rootless technologies and a culture that has lost its moorings in place, time and faith. It is the thickest non-fiction book I have ever produced, and the most comprehensive. I’m excited to have it finally become a reality.

The book isn’t out yet, but the contents are finished, the cover is designed and I wanted to show it off here because it was readers of the Abbey who made it possible in the first place. Against the Machine is a tightened, improved and sharpened version of those essays, with a new introduction, and it aims to take on the big story of the era. Whether it succeeds, I can’t say - but it’s my best shot at taking the battle to the enemy.

The book will be published in September. I will be saying more about it here as the time approaches, and I’m hoping to be able to offer some kind of benefit to the Abbey’s paying subscribers, since they were the ones who gave me the space and ability to write it. I’ll say more about that here in the months to come - and I’ll also be announcing some public events around the time of publication.

In the meantime, if any of this grabs you, the book can be pre-ordered from the publisher in North America here, and in the UK and Europe here.

Thank you all for reading - and for helping me to make this book a reality.