The Machine and its Enemies: Genealogical Amnesia, Writing, and Anti-tech Resistance

Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, writers have been among the most vocal sources of resistance to AI. Some have been drawn into a broader and deeper form of tech-resistance. This paper poses a critical question: can anti-tech resistance guard, or protect, the process and practice of writing? The paper examines the work of British writer, “recovering” environmentalist, and recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Paul Kingsnorth who offers a scathing critique of the modern dream of progress. Progress has become, for him, a form of totalizing technological capture that he names the Machine. The paper argues that primitivist critiques like Kingsnorth’s suffer from a genealogical amnesia that leads them to misunderstand their own resistance and takes for granted the technologies (like writing) that support it. In conversation with Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, the paper argues that writing should instead be guarded as a form of technological inheritance.