‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth,’The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game’ by C Thi Nguyen reviewed by Guy Lancaster (opens in new tab)

Paul Kingsnorth describes his book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, as a ‘final attempt’, after a lifetime of writing and approaching the subject in a piecemeal fashion, to try to outline the shape of what he calls ‘the Machine’, perhaps best described as the historical ‘triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralised over the local, the system over the individual and the community,’ all of which constitutes ‘a change in our human re...