Justin Owings and Ty Abernathy joined Geoff to discuss Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book, Against the Machine.
Our two-hour, fire-side, dog-accompanied conversation covers a lot of territory—raising children in the age of the Machine, entrepreneurship, globalism and financialization, corporate bureaucracy, technocracy, rootedness, homelessness, skin-in-the-game, limits, GenZ—and we hardly scratched the surface.
Wendell Berry receives a great deal of attention in the book (and in our conversation, especially from Ty, who I think has read more of his work than Justin or me). As it happens, I attended Kingsnorth’s talk late last year at the Berry Center in Port Royal, Kentucky:
Kingsnorth filled the venue (the Port Royal Baptist Church) and then some, and I should thank Ashley Fitzgerald (episode 6) for putting that on my radar early enough for me to get a ticket and make plans to attend.
A list of some of the books and authors mentioned in our conversation (most of which Kingsnorth references in Against the Machine; some of which he does not):
- Wendell Berry: Several of his books and essays. Of note, Kingsnorth wrote the introduction to Berry’s 2017 collection of essays, World-ending Fire
- Iain McGilchrist: The Master and His Emissary, The Matter with Things
- Leo XIII: Rerum Novarum
- Langdon Winner: Autonomous Technology
- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
- Jane Jacobs: Dark Age Ahead, Nature of Economies, The Death and the Life of Great American Cities
- Simone Weil: The Need for Roots
- Neil Postman: Technopoly
- Nassim Taleb: Skin in the Game, Antifragile
- Lewis Mumford: Technics & Civilization
- Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality
Justin is on X and you can read his longer-form posts at justinowings.com; this 2021 post is particularly relevant to Against the Machine and our conversation. We mentioned Un•AI•ify, the tool he built to detect AI-writing; here is more about that.
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