Men Against the Machine
Does God exist? Well, not yet.
Ray Kurzweil, Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google
Sometimes it seems these [technology elites] watch The Matrix and think Agent Smith is the good guy.
Paul Kingsnorth, author
In September of 2018, I woke my son early and took him out to the garage. Luke was a junior at a good school on the west coast of Florida. Luke had once been a voracious reader. He tore through Tolkien, JK Rowling, and Funke’s Eragon like a wolf through venison. Now video games were eating him alive.
I picked up the sledgehammer and went out to the street. He came out rubbing, his eyes. I placed my phone on the asphalt, stepped back and smashed my Android phone. It’s shattered shell skittered across to the curb.
“Want to join me?”
Luke slowly took the sledge. He placed his IPhone on the ground. He hesitated, took a swing and completely missed. Then he lifted high and swung again. This time he brought it down square on the screen.
We made a mistake. We had forgotten to remove the battery. A white-gray cloud billowed out - a noxious mix of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, naphthalene and propylene oxide. It was as if a demon had been exorcised. We jumped back.
_______
We are in a war. It is the war of men against the Machine.
Paul Kingsnorth defines the Machine here. It is not machines; it is not merely technology. It is a kingdom; it is a power. It is an empire that comes and goes throughout history. And, today, its power is waxing mighty to destroy men everywhere.
You think I exaggerate? Look at what it has done to your neighbors, your friends, your country. Look at what Musk’s Starlink has done to the last remote tribes on earth. If you have them, look at what is has done to your children. And the hardest of all to do straight on - look at what it has done to you.
Throughout history, men have fought the Machine and lost.
Throughout history, men have fought the Machine and won.
I plan to tell some of those stories here. I plan to be as open as I can about my own losses against the Machine.
Why write at all? Aren’t there enough Luddite anti-tech scribblers out there feeding the doom scrolling?
I’ll tell you why. Because no matter how many battles we lose, it is a fight worth fighting. Because brothers need to band together to beat an enemy this strong. Because brothers need to go over which tactics work and which do not.
El Cid was Spain’s greatest warrior partly because he sat with his men around the campfire after each battle and went over what worked against the Umayyads and what did not. He reviewed more game film than Brady and Belichick. Yes, this blog will be a place to review video from the body cameras of men who have done house-to-house fighting - throughout history - and if they survived, were ready to go back in the next day.
And I write, brothers and sisters, because one day…yes one day, this is a war WE WILL WIN.
_____
Meanwhile, we get news of battles lost every day.
So let me start with a small win.
After he smashed his phone, Luke went to school - embarrassed to be the only kid without a smartphone. But he got his GPA back up. And then one day he got a letter. It began: “We would like to congratulate you on admission to the freshman class of 2019 at Johns Hopkins University.”
Next: Moses against the Machine