Paul Kingsnorth at the Wagon Box Inn

James Pogue: There’s always this kind of like weird thing with these events where everyone kind of looks around at everyone around them sort of asking why they are here and what we are doing and this sort of thing. We’ve gotten kind of good at answering it, honestly, with the conference. And I’m going to presuppose that Paul [McNeil] already answered a lot of this earlier. And so let’s leave that aside. But the thing is, what we’ve sort of made here, kind of accidentally, are these two brand names; or maybe three even. There’s like “Machine conference”, which is sort of just what we’re doing; Paul’s Wagon Box; and then this kind of umbrella thing of Doomer Optimism, which is sort of a deliberately obscure moniker. And it’s deliberately obscure in that, it’s a thing that, if it was defined more, it would exclude more people. But it also comes out of a very specific moment in time and a very specific moment in history. And it actually did grow into a meme and a force in the world. And there’s no reason anyone in this room would pay attention to this sort of thing. But it’s weird, like you’ll hear billionaires and politicians, they’ll say Doomer Optimism because it’s just sort of lodged in the brain, about your kind of worldview or approach to things. And so the question of how that happened and why it happened is actually sort of important to understand all of these thoughts in a way. And Ashley is going to tell us about that moment.

Ashley Fitzgerald: OK, so I think, for a lot of us, the pandemic was a big moment of shift in thinking. So during the pandemic I got on Twitter. I lived in Uruguay at the time, nine acres of land and pretty isolated. And I just figured, I’m going to get on the Internet, figure out what’s going on in politics in the US. Hope my family’s OK. And I came across Jason Snyder, who is the guy who started the podcast with me. We became friends. And basically he said on Twitter, I’m kind of a doomer. But despite that, I remain optimistic. And I said “doomer optimists unite!” And then a bunch of people started talking about that. We got invited on a podcast called the Stoa. And they said come and do five episodes on Doomer Optimism. We got Chris Smaje. We got Vandana Shiva. And a bunch of people were like “this is a great idea; you need to keep going.” We kind of like accidentally happened on starting a podcast. And then we started our own podcast. We kept it going for a little while. And people kept bringing guests to us. And we said we don’t need to interview these people, like, you like them. So you’ve got a guest on the podcast. You could be a host. It turned into this sort of like network thing accidentally, where we have hosts that go like deep down the rabbit hole of literature. Some on the rabbit hole of family. Some on the rabbit hole of a return to religion, education, whatever. It started mostly on questions of environment and homesteading and small scale food production as an antidote to our environmental problems. And I happened upon James this way. Through this podcast and through his article in Vanity Fair. I think the one that mentioned Paul McNeil. What’s the quote?

JP: No, no, this is actually interesting. The thing about Doomer Optimism that I really like, and this now sounds like some kind of weird corporate exercise or something. I think the reason it has salience is literally no one does any stuff with it. There’s a community-run podcast and a Substack that’s been updated twice. And yet the idea of the thing has sort of percolated in a pretty intense way actually. Because you can kind of see a Doomer Optimism person even if you don’t really know what it is. And you kind of know like oh that’s my vibe. And so it was a very important thing, I think, for a lot of people, in a moment where it was really intense left/right polarization. Really, really hard to find places where you just talk comfortably, where you could be normal, fundamentally. And in a certain way, I think the vibe was just “you are normal and you have an ecological perception of the world”. And like that applies as much to Col. Chris. He’s going to night raid and take your teenage son. But he understands the material reality of the world and how that informs why bad things have to happen to bad people and this is how this all works. And then it all sort of flows together. And then that can be with Paul [McNeil] who I immediately became friends with. Because we see the world very similarly I would say. But I don’t come from Paul’s religious background. And so you start– it builds a network of like {inaudible} slowly became very pretty. And just as a functioning thing, it’s literally a podcast and some groupchats.

AF: But we didn’t monetize it on purpose. Like we didn’t want to get audience captured. We didn’t want to go for like quantity over quality. So I was making a joke to someone yesterday like it’s like the podcast has an audience only of people who’ve been on it before. Or like our family members. It’s like 2,000 people who listen regularly. They’re all the most amazing, cantankerous, like homesteader, pioneer, Jeffersonian, inventor. Like crazy people. And then another thing that’s really interesting that you mentioned. I was saying to somebody else walking in here. It’s a little bit of a horseshoe. Like Paul McNeil’s like a right-leaning eccentric. And we’re like maybe left-leaning eccentric. But actually there’s so much in common at that horseshoe. And we can actually talk to one another and not make it all about politics and tribal warfare.

JP: Right. And so just to pick up on Ashley’s story there and then we can wind this up. But what was special about that moment is that I coded, within this Vanity Fair piece about national US politics, I coded within it a skepticism of essentially the idea that consumer progress constitutes true progress. And I sort of coded within it a lot of other people saying stuff about how maybe having a spiritual conception and ecological conception of the world would be a better way to approach this. And I didn’t even say that. And all of the Doomer Optimism people. independently, were like “yo, hold on, you sound like one of us”. And so as this piece grew into this kind of weird phenomenon and radically changed my life, it became this alliance where they were like “wow, this is like a big media guy”. And then I actually wasn’t. Like, I was a train hopping anarchist. And so I say all of that because I think the thing that did kind of. a little bit. make it real was having Paul Kingsnorth in the wings. And I mean that very genuinely. Because to the extent to which this sphere of thought and, I don’t know, spiritual-ecological conception of the world and the two of those intertwined or however you want to put it. to the extent to which this thing does have a mega celebrity, I would suggest it is him. It’s funny; there are little tent poles with this thing but Paul is the original And I just remember discovering him because a friend of mine who’s a GQ writer was reading a Substack like it was Samizdat during COVID, and he was telling me “listen, have you heard of this Kingsnorth guy?” And then I discovered him and I didn’t know the whole backstory of his career in Britain and that he was actually genuinely very famous in Britain. But I started asking other people and everyone knew him and everyone knew him independently of the other person because, at least in like the world I was in before I met these people — Orthodox convert guy wrestling with traditionalism, unpicking progressivism and stuff like that — you weren’t really allowed to read that and say it out loud but a lot of people were doing it in private. And that taught me a lot about how the world actually works. And so it was really kind of inspiring and it was incredible Paul managed to persuade Other Paul to come. And it was a huge coup for us because we had already planned this thing about the Machine. A Kingsnorth concept; no one knew what it was, but the guy who had invented it was coming. And I think a lot of people were bowled over because it was small, the snow was high as your face, and it was supposed to be a disaster, like the weather ruined everything. And yet everybody who was there sort of bound together forever, I think, and hopefully that will keep continuing. And it’s it’s been really special; this is not to be sappy but it became a very special community and a real thing for a lot of us, that most people in the world don’t have. And so with all of that I kind of just intro’d Kingsnorth so I’ll skip that part but, Leighton, I met, proof of concept here, I met you through Seneca [Scott], right?

Leighton Woodhouse: Yeah.

JP: Leighton and I had a similar special sort of moment of discovering similar worldviews somewhere along the line here that led to us having a kind of troubled but very meaningful reaction to the L.A. wildfires because we were seeing, from both left and right, in a very real way, a lot of really wrong and hateful stuff going in both directions. And so Leighton is this world famous journalist and you probably know who he is but I’m just to introduce him in the context of this: We had a couple conversations that kind of helped to keep me sane and how, in a similar way to how people found me, help me discover that there’s a sort of like ecological background of what Leighton was doing that’s not necessarily clear when you’re reading stuff about politics or stuff that he’s writing. And I just think that cultivating people like that in the world is so important because it actually gives you — when people are working in that vein they are describing worlds that go beyond the politics you read in the news by definition because most of that politics is not cognizant of material reality. And so I don’t know what they’re going to do, but we have two very brilliant, exciting people coming up here and just a couple years ago I would have never thought that this would be happening. So I’m very excited.

Paul Kingsnorth: I feel like we’ve been very badly talked up. We can’t do anything that disappoint you after that introduction. But thank you anyway. I appreciate it.

LW: So, what’s it like to be a megacelebrity?

PK: Well, I was wondering that myself. It’s quite exciting to know that I am now a megacelebrity. So, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t get stopped on the street very often. I don’t know. Well, we’ll find out after today, won’t we?

LW: So we haven’t prepared anything very organized. We’re just going to chat. I do have one question that I want to kick it off with, which is: The Wake is a story about the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century, which involved the killing of countless people, the destruction of their villages, the destruction of their ways of life, the imposition of a religion upon them, the introduction of the technology of the castle. So I’m wondering, do you think of that as the beginning of, or at least, the sort of important inflection point within the emergence of the Machine?

PK: Okay, we’re into deep history. Just to put this in context, Leighton is asking about is my novel The Wake. So I’ve written three novels, set over 2000 years of time. The first one is called The Wake and it’s set during the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. And it’s written entirely in a version of Old English, i.e., Anglo-Saxon English, which was spoken by the people at the time, therefore making it impossible to read. But it’s still somehow done quite well. It got long-listed for the Booker Prize, which surprised me more than anyone. So that’s the first novel I wrote. The second novel is called Beast and that is set in the present day. The third novel is called Alexandria and that’s set 1000 years from now. And really all three of these novels, I suppose, although I didn’t plan them to be anything in particular, they’re thematically connected with each other, even though they’re a sort of loose trilogy, I suppose. You can read them independently, but they’re also connected. And all of them are wrestling with, I suppose, the twin questions of control and collapse. They’re really about collapse. The first one is really about the collapse of the culture. This is the novel you’re talking about. The second one is really about a personal collapse. And the third one, which is maybe more relevant to this gathering, is about a kind of post-apocalyptic, post-technological, post-Singularity future. I think it’s curious that the fens of Eastern England look quite similar to what they looked like in 1066, but a lot of other stuff is happening as well. A lot of people uploading their minds to the cloud. And so to go back to your question.

LW: Actually, before you answer that, let me ask you, when you were working on The Wake, did you have the idea of the Machine already well-formulated in your mind? I don’t know exactly how the chronology came along in terms of your writing about the Machine and your writing your fiction. Was that a germinating idea in your mind, or was that a fully formed idea that you deliberately inserted into the story?

PK: No. I think if you start deliberately inserting ideas into fiction, then the fiction is automatically didactic and disastrous. We should probably talk about this idea of the Machine before we get into the Norman Conquest, actually. We’ve been talking about it all weekend; no one’s defined it. Because it’s virtually impossible to define this, a bit like America or something. Try defining that. Kinda know what it is, but try putting it into words. Try defining yourself. Try defining anything. If you want to know what the Machine is, you have to buy my next book. It’s called Against the Machine. It’s coming out in September, which you can pre-order. So there’s the plug. I’ve done the plug. Thank you very much and goodnight. So this notion of a machine that we’re living within, that it’s kind of like a giant control mechanism. We know we can feel it, we can experience it, we can see it manifesting, but it’s very difficult to define. It’s not my term. I’d love to pretend that I invented it, but I didn’t. It’s a term I kept coming across when I read poets and novelists writing over the last hundred years or so. It’s a term that D.H. Lawrence used. It’s a term that R.S. Thomas used. It’s a term that Aldous Huxley used and George Orwell used as well. A lot of people since the industrial revolution, talking about machine society and setting it up against a kind of human scale, organic vernacular society. We can all feel this thing rising around us. Today, it’s manifesting very powerfully in digital tech, especially with AI. But the whole thing is wrapping itself around us and making the world very logical, very left-brained, very controlled, very spreadsheet-y. That has been a thing I could feel as a child, I suppose, and all of my books about that in some way or another. All of my writing, all of my terrible poetry is about that. That’s the thing I’ve been able to feel and that’s the thing I could see in films and poetry and novels and all the stuff that I was reading. That seeped its way into all of my writing, even when I tried not to. I would love to be able to write a detective story. It would be great, something fun, but it doesn’t work. The Machine is always in there. I’m always writing about this same thing. And so this non-fiction book I’m doing is really an attempt to kind of encapsulate that; it’s really first based on the essays I wrote: I’ve talked about this for the past few years. I’m really trying to pin this down in non-fiction. But to go back to the Norman conquest, if we want to look at the history of it, we’ll nerd out. The Machine, as much as anything, is, I think, a way of seeing, which manifests as technological innovations around us. So it’s a way that we see the Earth. If we think that things can be rationalised, if we think that they can be controlled, if we think that we can effectively play God and replace ourselves and replace nature, if we think that we can remake the natural world through the use of genetic technology, if we think that we can do that to humans, if we think that we can upload our minds, we are effectively living within what feels like a giant computer program. We’re seeing, to use a cliche, with our left rather than our right hemisphere. We’re completely dominated by a particular way of seeing. And then that will manifest around us in the architecture we have, in the systems that we build, in the computer systems that we create. I mean, there was a discussion this morning about AI, and there were people offering up this notion that technology is just a neutral thing, and what matters is how you use it. And that’s completely nonsense. It’s not a neutral thing. It comes from a way of seeing. If you create that, then the thing that it will do is to take you in a certain direction. And, yeah, sure, it’ll do some useful stuff, but it’s neutral in the way that a nuclear bomb is neutral, right? It can only do one thing. And so as soon as you’ve created a society which sees in that way, then everything within that society will take you in that direction.

LW: I was thinking about an analogy with, if you walk around Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village is one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York, and it’s like the streets are just chaotic. They all run into each other. They’re curved, an angle here and an angle here. It makes no sense because it was literally basically a medieval village. And then you walk outside of Greenwich Village and there’s a grid plan.

PK: The grid is fascinating. There’s something interesting: if you fly across a city at night, especially an American city because they’re very griddy, and you look down, it looks like you are looking in on the inner workings of a computer. Go and get the image up of what a circuit board on a computer looks like, and then look at a city at night, especially a modern grid city. It’s the same thing. You visit the same idea manifesting itself. I mean, I live in the west of Ireland, and Paul McNeil will tell you this, because he came and visited us last year and he made a mistake of trying to drive in an American way around the little crispy Irish lanes. He couldn’t believe the fact — they’re insane, because they’re made by people going with horse and cart around the place. And then you have to drive your cars around them, and you come across a tractor. There’s a lot of negotiation that you have to do for this. That’s a kind of mad, human-scale thing. It doesn’t make rational sense. What if the world doesn’t make rational sense? What we’re trying to do with this machine is — it’s a very, very long process in human history in which one particular culture, our culture, has tried to make rational sense of the world. But the world isn’t a rational thing, and that’s the tragedy of it. So I would say if we’re going to define it, we define it like that.

LW: Let’s get into the narrative stuff.

PK: Let’s get into it. So if we want to nerd out about the history of England, I would like to argue that the Norman Conquest is maybe the beginning of that process, or at least it’s a step forward in that process. You have a great rationalization of religion. You have a rationalization of the landscape. You have the creation of a feudal monarchy — top-down control of the kind that was just being talked about in the last session there. It originates there, really, the feudal system begins when the new Norman King of England takes all the land of England into his own ownership. He says, “All of this is mine.” A situation which, by the way, is still the case. Technically, the king owns all the land in Britain today, and we all just rent it from him if we live there. He’s unlikely to claim it all back, realistically, but theoretically, he could. So you have a system that seems to be one step forward in a process of rationalization and control. Really, that’s what that book is about. It’s about one person trying to fight back against that system, and the person who’s trying to fight back against it is quite a damaged and damaging person in himself. So there’s an interesting question to what happens when a bad guy fights on the side of the goodies, if you like. But I would say that, yes, historically speaking, that is what is happening there.

LW: So one of the themes of the book is that this is a guy who’s re-embracing the old gods, finding the pagan ways, and then finding his identity as an Anglo-Saxon in the pagan ways. He has got a strong contempt for Christianity being brought over and forced onto his civilization. So I’m wondering, in terms of your own faith, how do you reconcile, or do you feel the need to reconcile the notion that, and I realize that you’re not a Roman Catholic, but in this case the Roman Catholic Church, was sort of a part of the apparatus of the machine that was being imposed upon a sort of, an organic indigenous culture.

PK: Yeah, well, God has a sense of humor, It turns out. I wasn’t a Christian when I wrote that book. And interestingly, The Wake was not supposed to be a book that was in any way about religion, really. It was a book that was based on an interesting untold story of a guerrilla campaign of resistance against the Normans by the Anglo-Saxons, after 1066, which went on for about ten years. And I found out about it in about 2008, read a book about it, hadn’t heard about it. I thought that would make a good subject for a novel. So really, it was almost an political novel that I was envisaging. But then this religious subtext crept into it. Now, historically speaking, there were actually not many pagans left in England by 1066, if there were any. England was already Christian. So it was not a country full of indigenous pagans who had been colonized by Christians at all. I just somehow had this notion that arose, — and this sort of thing happens when you write a novel: voices arise — in which this man was one of the last worshipers of the old Anglo-Saxon gods. And he had contempt for — he’s a libertarian, basically. He’s a libertarian. You’d like him. He hates the Christians, and he hates the control system, and he hates the king. And it’s very interesting. I was not a Christian myself at the time. I was much more inclined to that sort of paganism. And now I’m an Orthodox Christian. So I would say God has a sense of humor.

LW: Well, it’s absolutely not a story that romanticizes the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon civilization. It’s extremely violent. The specific Viking ritual that he keeps trying to do to his victims is just disgustingly violent. So if it is a parable of the machine, which I’m kind of putting that on it, but if it is, then is there something to be said for the good that the machine did by replacing the system? Not that the system that followed would then be less violent, but it’s not as if what it replaced was idyllic.

PK: No, it’s a kind of 11th century Cormac McCarthy novel. So that’s the vibe I was going for. No, I mean, like I said, this notion that the Normans are the Machine is not something I had in mind when I wrote that. So you’re always in trouble when you romanticize any particular time in the past, when you point to that and say, “Oh, everything was wonderful here,” because nothing was ever wonderful completely anywhere. Certainly not in Anglo-Saxon England. The Normans were horrific and brutal, but the Anglo-Saxons had slavery , and the Normans abolished it, for example. So, you know, there’s one tick in their box. Humans are humans throughout all societies, but we can create societies which nurture the best side of us and nurture the best relationship we have with the Earth and with each other and we can create societies that dominate and crush it. And this one does the second of those largely, although it also does the first of those and it’s better than some other societies that have been but the direction it’s going in is troubling. So, as I said, as soon as you point to a period in history, or indeed a period in the future, and say everything is fantastic, romanticizing the past and romanticizing the future, both generally bad ideas; unless the Singularity guys get there, we can assume that we’re going to be humans at all periods of time and therefore we’re going to have the same pros and cons and tendencies. And by the way, religion, certainly Christianity but other ways too, are designed to rein in the worst of those tendencies and point us towards the best ones, which are supposed to lead us towards God and make us God-like people rather than demonic people. So we have this kind of choice all the time. But, you know, the system you’re living under, the king you’re living under, none of that’s an excuse for behaving as demonic rather than a God-like way. You know, you have to make your choices, don’t you? So, Anglo-Saxon or Pagan — and I was very interested in that book and what happens when — I was very keen not to write an English Braveheart. In which you have a kind of, you know, terrible — one of the worst films ever made. I mean, I quite like Mel Gibson. It is true. It’s a terrible film. It’s awful. It’s awful. It’s the most unhistorical film. I quite like Mel Gibson, but come on. Come on. Anyway, anyway — I mean, do you want to get into the bit about how he impregnates the former queen of England. You know how old she was when he was supposed to have done that? She was eight. I’m just pointing that out. Anyway, we won’t get into the question of whether William Wallace was a pedophile because it’s not germane for the discussion. But I was trying not to do that because I wanted to make it a bit more complex. So I wanted the hero to not be a hero. I wanted him to be an anti-hero. Actually, he turned out to be a lot worse. He’s actually quite a terrifying character. But you sort of can’t take your eyes off him at the same time. I mean, he described a disturbing voice to write in, but at the same time, I kind of missed him when I finished the book. I wouldn’t like to actually be in his company, but he’s very engrossing, so I don’t really know where he came from. I don’t think I could ever create something like that. I’ve never tried. Sometimes these voices arise and you sort of go with them, but you don’t really know where they came from.

LW: Well, let’s sort of fast-forward to right now. We’ve had a lot of discussion in this conference about AI. which clearly, in your view, is not just part of the machine, but maybe the sharp tip of the machine. There’s a diversity of opinion, I think, in this room about it. What’s your opinion about it?

PK: Yeah, there’s a whole discussion we had about that. AI is broadly demonic, if you ask me. But more to the point, it’s part of a bigger movement within technological society towards transhumanism, towards the so-called singularity, towards the merging of people with machines. At best, AI is going to cause a kind of total reality collapse over the next two years. So very soon, you will find it impossible to know whether anything you watch is real. You’re not going to know whether any essay you read, by me or anyone else, is real. If the AI can write it, you won’t know whether the video, the film you’re watching, or President Trump saying something is actually him at all. You won’t know anything. You will have no clue whether anyone you’re speaking to on the telephone is actually a human, or whether they’re an AI. It’s going to create a kind of rolling reality collapse and paranoia. You could go into the economic discussion about precisely how many people it’s going to make redundant. I was having a chat here with somebody yesterday who was telling me he works in the tech field and is currently preparing for 95% redundancies within his organization. So you’ve got all these things rolling on. But more broadly, the question that AI raises is how human we want to be and what we actually mean by human. So again, this is sort of a sliding scale. I’m sitting here wearing glasses, which is a kind of artificial technology which allows me to see you. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t be half blind if I hadn’t spent my life reading books, which is another technology we created. So we probably have to go back before the written word. Actually, I wrote a whole book about that. I wrote a book called “Savage Gods,” which is all about me wrestling with the fact that writing is a kind of technology that distances you from the world. So you can go down rabbit holes. But what’s happening with AI is we are moving very quickly into a situation in which we are going to sell out our humanity to a machine. However effective these things are, whatever they do, exactly what exactly the reality of them is, they are undermining our basic humanity at a radical level. And they’re going to continue to do that. And we have to ask ourselves to what degree we want to draw lines. And that’s actually the big question in the technological society that everybody has to answer for themselves. Where’s the line you’re going to draw? Are you going to give your kids a phone? If so, when are you going to give your kids a phone? Are you going to have a phone yourself? Are you going to use AI? What are you going to do? Where’s the line you’re going to draw and not cross? What sacrifices are you prepared to make? Because if you don’t draw a line, you’re going to get sucked into a system which is designed by people in Silicon Valley who have an openly spiritual view of what technology is going to do. It’s a religious movement, right? Google is created by a religious cult. This is the way it works. The singularity is a religious movement. You can listen to what these guys say. They’re very clear about it. We are going to move into a transhuman future in which we improve our bodies by merging with technology. Now, maybe it’s all a fantasy. Maybe it won’t work. This is actually the theme of my novel Alexandria. Will it work? Can it work? What do you actually give up? That book is almost a fictionalized debate about the subject, in a future in which half of humanity has decided to go down that route, and some of them have decided to say no to it. How much can you hold off? But, you know, as I said earlier, this is not a neutral situation in which we just have some tech and we can decide to do a good or a bad thing with it. It’s taking us somewhere.

LW: Well, you were cautioning earlier about romanticizing the past or the future. And I think there is somewhat of a romanticization, not just in seeing it as a utopia, but also the opposite, seeing it as like the apocalypse coming, a dystopia. How do you know that you’re not also romanticizing that future by seeing it as this ultimate turning point that’s just one thing and that thing is bad and demonic?

PK: Well, it might be. I mean, look, I had a tendency towards pessimism, but again, you know, no one would call me a Doomer Optimist.

AF: We’re going to get him on the team.

PK: She’s actually been trying to make me an optimist for the last five years. I’m optimistic about some things, but not that. Look, so it’s interesting to use the word apocalypse, because the word apocalypse literally means that something is revealed. This is what the Greek word means, apocalypse. It’s why the last book of the Bible is the apocalypse of John, the revelation of John. It means that a veil is removed and you can see things as they are. So we tend to use this word apocalypse to mean the end of the world, but it doesn’t mean that. It means you can see beyond. You can see the reality of what’s going on. And actually, I think AI is apocalyptic in that sense, because it reveals to us exactly where this technological system is going and the direction that the people who are designing it are taking us in. So if you listen to the people in Silicon Valley telling you what this is — I mean, there’s plenty of this stuff in my Against the Machine book just quoting these people. They tell you what it is. They tell you that they’re trying to create a new consciousness. They tell you that they’re trying to behave like gods. Some of them have created their own religion, literally, which is designed to merge humans with machines and take us into the future. And it’s easy to say, “oh, these are just crazy people”, but Ray Kurzweil, the “prophet” of the singularity, is the director of engineering at Google. He’s defining the systems everybody uses. By the way, anyone with an iPhone might want to ask themselves why on the back of the iPhone there’s a little picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it? Haha! Anybody seen that before? I wonder where that image comes from. But this is not a paranoid fantasy. This is what it’s doing. So exactly what will happen, exactly whether AI is just a bunch of numbers or could be something else. I don’t know exactly. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not a tech guy. But I do know my gut’s telling me that I’m not going there. And so I’m not telling anyone else they should feel the same thing. But everybody has to make a decision about what their engagement is. We have to have an intelligent relationship with technology, which is not usually a blanket yes or no. Because none of us can say a blanket no to tech because we’re all in a system that requires to use it to some degree. So what’s your relationship going to be with it?

LW: I might be a little bit more skeptical of the testimonies of those folks from Silicon Valley. Because I live in the Bay Area. I grew up in the Bay Area. And they’ve been saying that shit for decades, since the 1980s, that the personal computer was going to revolutionize everything in ten years. Everything was going to be different. Because that world, that personal computing world, comes out of left-wing counterculture ultimately. It was a combination of the military-industrial complex and back-to-the-land type people. And so it’s all infused with that kind of utopian idolatry. And it always has been. And so to a certain extent, I think I do roll my eyes at that hyperbole coming from those people. Because that’s what they do. That’s what they’ve always done.

PK: Yeah, and Ray Kurzweil does keep pushing back his date, at which we’re all going to merge with machines. I think it’s gone back to 2045 now. I think it was going to be 2030.

LW: It’s just the guy with the sandwich board.

PK: Yeah, well, it is. But at the same time, this stuff has revolutionized our lives. I mean, look, everybody now has a smartphone. Everybody’s addicted to it. And everybody’s dependent upon it. We all have laptops. We all have the internet. We all have email. I am old enough to have grown up in a time before that was the case. And so actually our lives have been completely revolutionized. We’re all completely attached to screens whether we like it or not. Even those of us who are trying to spend less time on the screens find that we have to actually almost have a kind of 12-step program to avoid them. You know, this is the point that we’ve got to. So even if the wildest fantasies of Kurzweil and the rest of them don’t come off — and to some degree they won’t because you’re not able to, you cannot upload your mind to a machine. What does that even mean? The human mind cannot exist outside the substrate of the physical body, which is again one of the themes of Alexandria. You can’t just do that. So I don’t think that’s going to happen. But lots of other things are going to happen on the way to trying to make that happen, if you see what I mean. So you don’t have to believe the most crazy theories of these guys to see that the revolution is already in progress.

LW: Yeah, and I certainly don’t want to diminish the technological changes that have already happened and that are happening. On the other hand, like this is a controversial subject, there’s probably a diversity of opinions in this room about climate change. But for the last, you know, 30 years or so, we’ve been hearing about the end of the world coming from climate change and maybe it’s still coming, maybe it’s 10 years away. But I have the suspicion that there’s a certain psychic need that’s fulfilled for some reason in the modern world there’s a fantasy about the end of the world and a fantasy about the collapse of civilization. There’s a fantasy of wiping the slate thing and starting all over again, which people seem to need in their lives. I mean, you saw it around COVID when people just embraced the lockdowns and didn’t want to end them. They didn’t want the crisis to be over. And so I just wonder to what extent, without trying to diminish the actual real world transformation of AI, to what extent it might also be developing into kind of a myth, sort of a mythic force that people need to replace climate change which don’t seem to be in the news much anymore.

PK: Well, climate change is just one manifestation of the kind of stuff that Peter Allen was telling us about this morning, if you went to his presentation and watched all the graphs of the collapse of the minerals in the soil and everything else. Climate change happens to be the thing that a certain group of people have turned into a media event. And that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, because it is real in my view. But it’s one of a suite of things that are a result of the industrial civilization that we live in, fighting a war against the natural world, which is exactly a manifestation of that machine mentality. And I thought Peter’s presentation was absolutely brilliant on that, from a very practical level. Like, here’s what we’re actually doing. And the climate is changing. Even if you don’t want to believe that, go and have a look at the state of the soil, go and have a look at the state of the rivers. It’s all part of the same attitude. So it is true that we are quite an apocalyptic society. I suspect that America is maybe very apocalyptic, even compared to Europe, but we all have this sort of strain within us. I started this organization called the Dark Mountain Project in 2009, which was a network of writers and artists, and it still exists, although I’m not involved in it anymore. We wrote a little manifesto called Uncivilization. And it was a call for writers and artists to try and behave as if we were living through times of radical change. One of the points we made in there was precisely the one you just made, that it’s actually very easy to embrace an apocalyptic mindset, which says, “Oh, well, everything’s going to end”. Right? So it’s a total disaster; everything’s collapsing. It’s also very easy, conversely, to embrace a progressive mindset, in which you say, “Well, everything’s going to be fine because technology will solve the problem”. I don’t think either of those things is very likely to be true. The world is probably not going to end in fire in ten years. I mean, it might do, depending on who gets nuclear weapons when, and how many bunker busters are dropped. I don’t know. But it’s unlikely that we’ll get the easy option of having an immediate apocalypse, or that we will have Elon Musk’s dream of living in space like heroes. We’re probably going to get a kind of stumbling collapse at the same time as we get a kind of techno-accelerationism, and we’re all going to have to work our way through this kind of weird combination of both of these things. I mean, you can see it in this country and in many others at the same time, right? I mean, you’ve got parts of the country, and it’s true of Europe, too, that look like they’re in a kind of post-industrial collapse already. And then you’ve got other parts of the country, where you have this kind of techno-utopia, driverless cars and all the rest of it, existing at the same time, in the same place. So that looks far more likely to be the kind of weird techno-feudalistic future that’s emerging, rather than something as easy as conquering the stars or immediately collapsing.

LW: Yeah. My brother is an environmental historian. He wrote a book in which he traces these framings within the environmental movement, and in the 1950s, the Sierra Club was a conservation organization, and that’s what they were. The term “environmentalism” didn’t exist. They were there preserving nature because they saw the way in which the civilization was plowing through these beautiful natural landscapes. And that was their mission until that started to seem passe, because of other threats that were facing the planet. Some of them were more real than others, around the carrying capacity of the planet, overpopulation, and all the crises in the 1970s that were just brought to there. And then the Sierra Club almost suddenly seemed antiquated. And so what I’m I’m trying to get at is that it seems to me like the problem is big enough when you frame it as “we’re losing our wild places, we’re losing nature, the division between human and nature is not turning out well for civilization, this is an existential issue”. You don’t need to gild the lily by saying, “oh, and also, in 15 years we’re all going to be dead”.

PK: Yeah, well, look, I mean, a lot of that stuff is marketing, right? A lot of this, you know, “we have 100 months to save the world”, that’s marketing. But the reason that organizations like the Sierra Club move from just doing conservation to big picture stuff is that they can see that the picture was much bigger than just, you know, “let’s preserve Yosemite because it’s good”. Yeah, you do need to do that. But at the same time, you have a global industrial system which is stripping the seas of fish and destroying the minerals in the soil, changing the climate, and destroying 50% of the world’s forests and causing extinction all over the world, because of this giant extractive machine that we live in so that we can feed ourselves with a load of crap that we don’t need. So what are you going to do about that? That’s an existential question which is about human society, how do we live?

LW: Where do you see the beginning of that, what you’re talking about? Is that a modern phenomenon or is this something that goes back into the deeper history that you bring about?

PK: Well, civilizations rise and fall, and some of them fall because they stripped away their land base. Sustainability is a horrible, boring, corporate word and we all hate it, but it’s also a real thing. If you can’t sustain your culture, your culture dies off. And every civilization that’s existed has died off for some reason, for different reasons. There’s no reason that this one couldn’t do the same thing. We all do the same thing, if it’s not sustainable ecologically, culturally, socially, economically, for whatever reason. So that’s a good goal to aim for. You don’t have to engage in apocalyptic discussions of any kind. You do have to be hard-headed about what’s going on. Because sometimes not wanting to engage in apocalyptic discussions could be an excuse for saying, “Oh, well everything’s fine really. There’s no need to be hysterical, everything’s cool. Let’s just go with what’s going on.” And like I say, it’s about having an intelligent relationship with notions of progress, technology, understanding where it’s going, deciding how much you’re going to participate in it, which is why everybody has a different opinion, because you may have a different personal answer to that. There’s no one blanket thing everybody could do, but you have to understand the kind of direction of travel and where it’s headed and the forces. A lot of talk this afternoon has been about the forces that are actually controlling the culture that we live in and what you can do about them. And it’s important not to be naive about, say, technology, in the same way as important not to be naive about politics, or corporate power, or any of these other things. You don’t have to be hysterical about them. You do have to notice what’s going on and who’s actually in control of it.

LW: We’re talking about some very big themes about human survival, but I want to hear your thoughts also on on the threat of AI specifically to art and human creativity.

PK: Well, we can all see that. We’re in a really interesting tipping point at the moment, because this AI thing, whatever it is, whether it’s just a collection of ones and zeros or whether it’s a more sinister spirit or whatever, what it enables people to do is to undermine human creativity at quite a radical level. So, for example, the number of people using terrible AI art to illustrate their online stuff, for example, is just utterly horrible and it’s taking work away from actual artists and it’s fake. And the same thing as true of writing. I’ve noticed an increasing number of writers making arguments for why writers should use AI, because, hey, it’s convenient and it will help you to get your spelling right and all the rest of it. If you don’t draw a line underneath that, you notice that very, very quickly, indeed, any actual individual creative work is going to be undermined and destroyed by AI slop everywhere. In fact, I was thinking a month or two ago that I was going to start a campaign called Writers Against AI. And I wasn’t sure about it, but then hearing some of the AI stuff today, I’ve actually decided I’m definitely doing it.

Audience member: Signing up right now!

PK: Well, yeah, I’m launching a little thing on my Substack quite soon. It’s going to be called Writers Against AI. And if you want to sign up to it as a writer or an artist, you commit yourself not to use AI. You commit yourself not to support writing that was created by AI. And you commit yourself to supporting people who are actually doing human creative work without getting a crappy machine to do it for them. And you can choose whether to do that kind of thing or not. But again, draw the line. Decide what you want to do. Do you want to support somebody who’s worked out how to become a woodcarver over 10 years and create beautiful art. and you have to pay them for it because they have to make a living? Or do you want to tell some bullshit chatbot to create you an ugly picture of something that you can just spray out there? And do you want to spend 30 years trying to get good at the craft of writing, which I’ve done? I don’t know if I have got good, but that’s what I’ve done. Or do you just want to get Elon Musk’s stupid machine to spray out some crap based on everything everyone else has written? You decide. You decide. Do you want the great novels? Do you want Edgar Allan Poe in the future? Do you want him? Or do you want some piece of crap on the internet to do a fake version of it? Because if you want Edgar Allan Poe, you have to have strange, damaged people wandering the culture, being radically creative. Right? You have to have idiosyncrasy. You have to create the kind of culture that can create Mark Twain. Right? This country’s produced amazing writers. And you’re going to replace them with AI? They would never have existed within a kind of technological society. Huckleberry Finn has no chance to go down the Mississippi in some fricking electric taxi or something. So, you know, what do you want? Do you want the culture that can produce Huck Finn and all the other things that are the best American literature has produced? Or do you want Elon Musk and his stupid spaceships? Which do you choose?

LW: I was thinking earlier today in response to some of the sessions that I feel like there’s a misunderstanding that people who are proponents of AI have when they talk about labor saving — the labor saving promises of AI. Because at least when you’re talking about human creativity, it kind of reminds me of the scene in Karate Kid where he’s doing the “wax on, wax off” thing. And then he doesn’t know why he’s doing it. It’s tedious. He’s done it 10 days in a row. And then, you know, Mr. Miyagi shows him that he’s actually learning these blocking moves but he’s got the muscle memory because he’s done it for so long. And that’s what a craft is. And so it’s sort of like the tedious work in art, at least — that’s the stuff that you have to do to get to the artistic production stuff. That is the shit. Like, that is the process that you don’t get good without it.

PK: That’s exactly it. And you know this is a writer as well, right? So because this society is radically left-brained and focused on content production, everybody thinks that the point is the Content. All we need is the Content. So look, “isn’t AI great and efficiently getting us to the point where we’ve got a ton of Content?” That’s not the point. That’s not the point of art. It’s not the point of writing. The point is that people spend their lives slaving away and probably destroying themselves in the process in order to get to the point that Picasso could have his Blue Period, right? Or that, you know, that [name your favourite poet] has got to the point where they can see beyond the veil and create a work of astonishing beauty. AI is never going to do that. It will be able to do a fake version of it that sounds like that. But the seeing has never been there. The perfection of the craft has never been there. If you’re not prepared to put up with imperfection and insanity and Hemingway blowing his head off or whatever it is, then fine. Have a perfect, relaxed society with nobody stressed and we’re all having CBD all the time and AI is producing bland slop and we’re pretending that we like it. Then you might as well be dead because what’s the point of a society that has no creative juice to it? That does not create beauty, that does not create trouble, that does not damage people in some way, that does not allow them to struggle? You’re not going to get anything of any worth. You might get a ton of economic productivity. Great. Fantastic. And no one will have a job and we’ll all have a basic income and we’ll all be smoking weed all day and pressing buttons. Fantastic. I don’t want to live in that world, thank you.

LW: I feel like, since you proposed probably half the room, that you might have to open it up for questions.

Audience question: You’ve been interviewed for dozens of years now and asked a lot of different questions. What’s one of the more interesting questions you’ve been asked or that you’d like to share with us tonight?

PK: Yes. It’s a very good question actually. I’m kind of put on the spot there. It’s a very good question. I suppose that one of the questions I’ve been asked a couple of times is about parenting. Because I’ve written a bit about how we homeschool our children and try to bring them up in a particular way. So I have been asked, you know, what’s the secret to good parenting? One of my children is here, so he’s probably laughing at that. I actually don’t know what the answer is. But it’s interesting because we can talk about these questions of technology and society and economics and the rest of it. And we can talk about that as individuals. But those of us who are parents have to think about how to sort of release children into this world, sparing them the worst of it, but also educating them so they can navigate it. And the question of how to do that is actually the most interesting question for me. Because we can all have our own theories about what’s good and bad, but kids have to navigate this world that’s full of the stuff that I just talked about, whether you love it or hate it. And they have to remain human. You can’t totally shield them and protect them from that, but at the same time, you have to give them the tools to navigate it. So that’s maybe one of the most interesting questions, is how you do that. And not that I would pretend to know how to answer it.

Q: So in terms of your conversion to the Orthodox Church, in what ways do you see the Orthodox Church having exempted itself from the effects of the machine? And do you think that there is a potential reform within the Protestant Church that would allow it to detach itself from the tentacles of the machine? And do you have any recommendations for those who would still find themselves in the Protestant Church?

PK: Ooh, that’s controversial, isn’t it? You’re going to get into trouble with at least 50% of the audience.

Just like Margaretville all over again, In New York. It’s all yours.

PK: Okay, I’m not going to give any advice to Protestants right now or anyone else. But I’ll tell you what, I would love to say that the Orthodox Church is a kind of bastion of anti-tech intelligence and critique, but it isn’t entirely. I visited Mount Athos a couple of years ago, I visited it twice now. Mount Athos is the Orthodox monsastic republic in Greece, which has existed for a thousand years. Only monks live there; 20 or 30 monasteries. Quite an astonishing place, but I was astonished and depressed when I got there to see monks walking around with smartphones. Would you believe? Not all of them, but some of them. I don’t know why a monk needs a smartphone, especially on Mount Athos. So I would like to pretend that the Orthodox Church has an intelligent critique, but it doesn’t always. Having said that, and this is not particularly to cast aspersions any other form of Christianity or anything, but because the Orthodox Church is very rigid, you know the old joke about the Orthodox is:

Q: How many Orthodox Christians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Change?

That’s the joke. There it is. The Orthodox humor. There’s an actual defence of the tradition which is that we actually haven’t changed our liturgy for a thousand years and no one’s going to. There’s no pope who has the power to do it. Everyone’s a bit ornery, as I believe you would say here, about it. And so there’s a defence of that tradition which means that, for example, the liturgy will not be infiltrated by big screens and AI priests. There’s a little bit of stuff in my book Against the Machine about AI priests, by the way, which has started popping up in various churches around the world. I don’t think we’ll get that in Orthodoxy, but we still have plenty of people with smartphones and all the rest of it. So there’s an intelligent critique that is starting to arise in the Orthodox Church, but actually also in other Christian denominations as well. So regardless of whether you’re Orthodox or Protestant or whatever — I mean, look, my basic line in the sand is: I’m not going to a church that has a screen in it. I’m just not doing it. And luckily I don’t.

Or a restaurant.

PK: Or a restaurant, no. No screen. But no, you know, I just can’t stand that stuff. I mean, look, this is the country of Wendell Berry, right? So you have an intelligent Christian critique of technology here. Don’t need me to give that to you. And that’s a Protestant critique as well. So I’m just saying whatever sort of Christian you are, or indeed whether you’re not a Christian and you have another faith, again, the relationship with technology in your church or in your temple is vital as well. Because again, that stuff takes you in a certain direction. I mean, my view is digital technology will take you away from God. Even if just in the basic sense of distracting you to such a degree that you can’t contemplate anything. So, yeah, that’s — again, what relationship should you have: that’s the question.

We’ve got another Ortho-bro right here:

Q: Hi Paul. Yeah, I have a sort of a very specific Orthodox question. I’m actually glad he went first because this builds on it. So what are your thoughts on iconography and AI? And one of the things I’m concerned about, and not so much at the present moment, but maybe on in the future, is that, you know, if an Orthodox is going to buy a printed icon, maybe you aren’t going to be sure if it was enhanced by AI or generated by AI. Would that even be a legitimate icon? And do you see the possibility that Orthodox practitioners go back to hand-painted icons? You know, the Russians are pretty hardcore until pretty recently about only using hand-painted icons.

PK: That’s interesting. I’ve never seen an AI icon. I’m hoping never to see one. But, yeah, traditionally in the Orthodox Church, obviously icons are hand-painted, and that’s still a big thing right across the Church. You could also get copies that you can buy, because obviously the hand-painted ones are very expensive. I’ve never seen an AI-enhanced one. I hope never to see one. I wouldn’t see the need to do it. But again, you know, this comes back to the same question. Not only do we as individuals have to decide where we draw a line in relation to this stuff, but so do churches and institutions. What are you going to do here? If you don’t draw the line, you just get drawn down that path, because it’s always going to be easy and convenient to do this stuff. So do you want easy and convenient, or do you want truth and beauty? There’s your choice. And, you know, in some areas of life that’s more clear-cut than others. I think in the case of iconography, it’s very clear-cut, actually. There’s no excuse for using AI to create an icon. You don’t need to do it. And again, because the Orthodox are very unchanging, hopefully that won’t be happening much. But I don’t know. Things are moving so fast right now that it’s incumbent on everyone to decide where they stand in relation to it. Whether they love it, or whether they hate it, or whether they’re not sure, you better think about where the bottom line is. It’s a good question.

Q: Hi. So I have a question about technology and the Anthropocene. So I’ve been writing and thinking about the environmental crisis and the Anthropocene for a really long time. It kind of began around the time of the Dark Mountain Project — it seemed to be really interesting at that time, like early 2010. There were so many people talking about environmental crisis, and why it’s a kind of degradation of the natural world. And it seemed like a potential opening for experimentation in modes of living, and relating to the Earth, and so on. But what struck me as astonishing is how, in the decade or more since that time, there has been mostly this solidifying moral code of de-growth, anti-Promethianism, and almost anti-humanism that’s really emerged as the proper response to the situation that we find ourselves in and that you’ve been describing. And I just wonder, my question is, why can’t another kind of, you know, Promethianism or other kind of technical exploration be a legitimate response to the world that we find ourselves in? Like, you know, why couldn’t the SpaceX rockets be another means of achieving truth and beauty, and recreating a poetic relationship to technology in this moment? Like, is that possible? Or why isn’t it?

PK: Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by truth and beauty. I mean, I would see, actually, the technological response to the environmental crisis as being absolutely the mainstream response at the moment. I mean, yeah, sure, there are some activists who think that we should de-grow, including me. But that’s not the mainstream response at all. The mainstream response is, right, we’re going to grow food in vats now. Again, as Peter Allen was saying this morning, you know, we’re going to replace the cattle with synthetic beef. We’re going to use technology. We’re going to get up there into space and we’re going to mine the asteroid belt. That’s the reason they’re very keen to get to the asteroids, by the way. They’re actually full of minerals and water and gold that we need, because we’re stripping the earth of all the minerals and water and gold so that we can put the stuff into our industrial system and into our smartphone so that we can all look at TikTok all day. So there is a potential for intelligent, appropriate technology to enhance truth and beauty, definitely. Humans have always used technology,; there’s no getting away from that. But again, what kind of technology is it? Who controls it? What does it do to enhance creativity, and what does it do to replace it or smother it? That would be my question. And I don’t think that anything that’s Promethian can be anything other than destructive, because Prometheus steals fire from the gods, right? Prometheus does that so that he can seize power that’s illegitimate. It’s the equivalent of eating the apple in the garden. So technology in itself is not the issue if the technology is a tool that we use to do a thing. That’s what humans do. We can’t survive without technology. We’d get eaten by bears in five minutes. A spear is technology, right? So the question is what system of technology is existing with it. So I actually think that, I mean, I wrote a whole book about this, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, and one of the essays was exactly about this Promethian environmentalism, which I think is exactly the mainstream of the movement at the moment. It’s going to be vat-grown food and AI and harvesting of asteroids, and all of this stuff is presented as a solution. But again, it’s the spreadsheet-brain solution. It’s not beauty. It’s not appropriate technology. It’s superpower. So again, some people think that is truth and beauty. Elon Musk thinks it is; that’s how he finds his truth and beauty. So you choose what you think truth and beauty are, I suppose. That’s the point of a human life. But it is a good question, but I think that’s actually where we’re going.

Q: You mentioned screens distancing us from God. I’m wondering if you’ve ever taken a long sabbatical from screens, and if so, what did you notice?

PK: I’m trying to do it all the time, but it’s difficult.

It is hard.

PK: It is hard, but I have. I took a year off. After I wrote this book, “Savage Gods,” which was kind of a midlife crisis book about writing, whether it was actually a good thing or not, I took a year off writing. I didn’t write anything and I didn’t look at screens too much. I mean, at the moment, I try to take several days a week off looking at screens. And what I discovered when I do it, for any length of time, is that my brain changes, actually. My brain changes. My brain goes back to the state it was in when I was a child. I can remember what it was like to just read books and experience the world. And I was always a booky child; I was always in books. So, you know, okay, a book is also a form of technology which takes you to an artificial world. Absolutely. But there’s a big difference between looking at that and looking at the scrolling screen. And time off screens just makes you calmer. Just makes you calmer. It allows you to focus. There’s a ton of science. We’ve probably all heard it about how time spent on screens shattered the attention spans of people, especially young people. I find that the more time I can take off, the calmer and more focused I’ll become, but I also find that there’s a kind of little addicted person in the back of my mind going, “Oh, you better get back home because you might be missing something. And you need to write something otherwise you’ll have no readers and then you’ll starve to death. And you need to read the news in case something big happens.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there’s always this little voice that’s always there trying to suck you back in. It’s very interesting to watch that. And I just remember what the world was like before it. I’m old enough to have lived half of my life before the internet and the other half after. And if I had a big red button I could press to turn it off I would press it. But so there’s, again, that’s the line. How do you negotiate your time off screens and the time you need to spend on them and what kind of time do you spend on them? Everybody, we all have to do that to some degree. But I do find if it’s been long enough — I mean, my fantasy is to have a whole year off screen, but I can’t. But I would love to. And there’s a book in that. But anyway.

Q: I’ve got a question for you. Hearing this talk and the kind of doomer perspective that you bring with AI. I think a lot of us in the room, it certainly resonates. I’m curious why, you know, we’ve had a lot of talks today about AI and sort of the good that can be done with AI. Why is AI not just another technology, right? You mentioned your eyeglasses and the technology you’re using. You’re using the Internet to disseminate information. Why isn’t AI just another tech that needs to be navigated to use it for good and avoid the aspects that are for evil?

PK: Well, my glasses aren’t connected to the Internet. That’s the simple answer. I mean look, AI is just the next stage of what the Internet has done altogether already. So it’s not as if the web itself is inherently benign and AI is very bad or something like that. It just takes it into a whole new artificial dimension. And the problem with it is that it’s artificial because of the name, right? It’s not intelligent, but it is artificial. The Internet is a big thing that can do a lot of different stuff. But the minute you start to get yourself sucked into that technological web, as I said earlier, you’re being taken in a different direction. You know, Marshall McLuhan, the great critic of media, he said, “The notion that technology is neutral is the non-stance of the technological idiot”. So he liked to be very frank about these things. Technology is never neutral. It’s created to do a certain thing. Digital technology takes you into a certain way of seeing, into a certain world, which we almost don’t notice because we’ve all been captured by it. We’re all on our screens. We always think in a certain way. We’ll all have our spreadsheet-brain, this, that and the other. So AI will allow us just to go further and further down that path. And it will, as I said earlier, remove our humanity from the equation. So even if AI is not an intelligent super being or Satan at work or something like that, even if it is just maths, as people were saying earlier, it’s maths that takes us into a very particular relationship with reality. So what relationship do we want to have to reality, which is touching the grass and all that stuff? Right? Do we want to touch the grass? Or do we want to get AI to do us a picture of someone touching the grass by just putting a prompt in? Or do we want to paint somebody touching the grass using paint? I mean, think about this. What’s the fundamental difference between picking up some oil paints or some pencils and painting a picture of, say, Paul McNeil, or putting a prompt into Grok or whatever that says “paint me a picture of Paul McNeil”. You get a picture in both cases. Maybe the AI picture would be better in technical terms than something I could do, but it’s creatively dead. It’s a radically different relationship with the product at the end point. And as Leighton was saying, it takes the actual human creativity out of the picture. So even on the internet as it is pre-AI, there’s a lot of space for human creativity. I mean, I write essays on the internet. People publish their art on the internet. They sell their art on the internet. They advertise gatherings like this on the internet. There’s lots of potential to do human-scale stuff through the web. And of course, as you were also saying, the early web pioneer guys saw the internet as being this way of connecting lots of human-scale things. It wasn’t supposed to be a giant corporate monstrosity. But that’s what it’s become. It’s a profiteering corporate thing that will destroy jobs on a very practical level, but also suck the creativity out of it. So, you know what? What do you want to do? What do you want to see? Do you want efficiency or do you want creativity? That’s how it looks to me anyway.

AF: I’m wondering what you think. I don’t know if you have any opinions about our new American Pope. Not only American, but from Chicago’s South Side. Sox fan! But he’s also bringing back — I have this concept of revival, of bringing forth something from the past. And then I also am curious, like, when you first came to the Wagon Box, you hadn’t been in America for a couple of decades, and you kind of thought of it as like, you know, McDonald’s and globalization and, you know, this kind of like lefty sentiment of America as hegemon. So I’m asking this whole question though the lens of, you know, “Paul Kingsnorth does America”. What are your thoughts? What role do we have here? I mean, maybe via the Pope or maybe just in general?

PK: That’s a very Catholic question. Well, look, I thought Donald Trump was going to be the Pope because I saw an AI picture. And I was so convinced that I thought, “My God, not that as well.” Surely this can’t be happening. But it turned out that the AI picture was incorrect. I don’t know. I don’t have any opinions about the American Pope. He seemed quite an interesting character, actually. It’s very fascinating to have an American Pope. And it’s going to be quite interesting to see what he comes up with and what he challenges. Yeah, it’s a bit of out of left field, that, wasn’t it? What I said when I first came to the Wagon Box, actually, was that there were lots of different Americas, and I’m just a visiting Englishman. But the whole hegemonic American empire, McDonald’s and corporate power, is very real. And it’s kind of colonized the world. But beneath that is a much more interesting, much older, maybe more, I don’t know, Jeffersonian-American kind of story, which I always really like. My first book was called One No Many Yeses, and it was a travelogue. all about anti-globalization movements around the world. And one chapter was devoted to anti-corporate activists in America who were doing that Jeffersonian thing. Now, this being 2003, they were all on the left, right? Because the right had nothing to do with that stuff; it was too busy worshipping the Iraq war and Monsanto. Everything seems to have flipped rather a lot now. And so now there’s a bunch of conservative guys sitting around and talking about how we all need to be Jeffersonian. So that’s the older American tradition, and that’s great, and that’s really interesting. And I’ve always been very interested in it. And it’s still going along, and each country has its own version of this older tradition of actual human scale vernacular stuff, which has been slathered over by this corporate crap for the last X number of years. But that is sustainable as a system. That’s why it’s falling down. So that’s why it’s actually very good to have human scale gatherings of people talking about how to do different things. So that would be my answer to that.

Q: Thank you so much for being here, Paul. Such a pleasure to see you here in Wyoming of all places. You’ve observed that civilization isn’t maybe going to end in the future; Christian civilization already ended. Maybe it’s been dead for a couple of centuries, in fact, and we’ve been living in the ruins for a while. I think I agree. I’m very interested, though, in what are the conditions in which culture can be renewed or reborn. Like, what is actually culture? I think you gestured toward the idea that it depends on a sacred story. But what possibility is there in America when we live in radically pluralistic conditions and it’s very hard to have a concentration of people devoted to the same story that has any strength. I think for my own story, I’ve recommitted to Mormonism because it’s a tribe of a particular history, and at least in Utah, a place. But I’m curious what hope is there for the rest of us in America? What is culture and how to renew it?

PK: I don’t know that you all need to have one story. I mean, in one sense you do. But I mean, why does America have to be one thing in which everyone agrees on something? That’s plainly not going to happen. I mean, I come from Ireland. I was in Montana a couple of days ago, which is five times as big as Ireland and it has a fifth of the population or something. And that’s just one state. Europeans cannot get our heads around how big this place is. There’s a great joke about the difference between Europeans and Americans, by the way. Americans think 100 years is a long time, and Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance. I always tell that joke in America, sorry. But it’s good. It’s true. You’re not going to have one culture here. You don’t have to have one. You don’t need to have that. But if you were a Christian, say, it always seems to me — I’ve tried to think about this a lot myself since I became a Christian. There is one story. There is one God. But it has many different cultural manifestations to that story. I mean, even in the Orthodox Church. All the Orthodox Churches are different national churches. They have different ethnic and cultural flavor. They have a different language, perhaps. They have different saints that they’re interested in. They have their national days celebrated in the church. But it’s still the same church. It’s still the same God. So there’s the broader story. Every culture has to be orientated towards God. Otherwise, it just dies away. If you think God is real, that just has to be the opposite. It may be orientated in slightly different ways. Otherwise, you’re going towards homogenization again. So if there’s a story, the story is you have to try to live as God wants you to live. And that may manifest itself culturally in different places. That’s right. Christianity has so many different flavors around the world. And you can still be following the truth from a different angle, with a different flavor, with a different cultural story behind it. The worst thing about the globalization process has been the homogenization of culture. This attempt to create this bland, uniform, corporate, borderless blob in which we’re all the same. And it’s not going to work because we’re not all the same. Because places are different. People are different. History is different. And that doesn’t have to be a thing that divides us so that we hate each other. It’s a thing we can actually be celebrating. So yeah, diversity is our strength. In a good way.

In the interest of schedule, I’m going to have Jackson be the last question for now. But if you didn’t get called on, I’ll make sure I’ll corner Paul in the bar and make him talk to you.

PK: Okay. Thank you very much. You have to buy me a drink if you want to ask me a question.

Q: So, okay, so my wife and I have a pet theory we’ve been developing over dinner. And you’ve spoken to polarization and deciding where you stand on different issues. And I’m curious what you think of the possibility of a global schism where there’s a political realignment and half the world supports AI and half the world does not. And whether that’s likely and if it is, whether that would be good or not.

I think half the world not supporting AI would be extraordinary given the direction of travel at the moment. But there is a schism, yeah, there’s already a schism. The quote that I opened my book Against the Machine with, I think, is from Wendell Berry who says, — he wrote this in one of his essays decades ago — he said, “You can see a future in which the choice we have to make is whether we want to live as machines or whether we want to live as creatures.”. And Wendell Berry’s always been several decades ahead of the crowd and that’s the choice you have, I think. So I very much doubt whether half the world would say no to AI. I don’t know, who knows? But lots of people in the world are already thinking about how to live outside, — where to draw their lines. I mean, there’s a lot of that discussion here. So, I don’t know, but I could definitely see a future in which there is a technological schism. Again, I sort of explore that fiction in my book Alexandria. That’s really what that’s about. What happens if a small group of people, or maybe a larger group of people, decides they’re not going to be uploaded to the cloud, they’re not going to go with this future, they’re going to retain their humanity at some level. I don’t know if anyone’s seen the Dune films that came out that are based on the novels that were written, I think, in the 50s or the 60s. And Dune is very interesting because this isn’t tackled in the films, but what happened in Dune, and the reason there’s limited form of technology in Dune, is that there was something called a Butlerian Jihad against technology in the past that has set up this world. And this is named after an English author, Samuel Butler, who wrote a book called Erehwon, the title of which is the word “nowhere” spelt backwards. And this is written in about the 1860s, right? So, it’s another one of these Machine books that predicts all this happening. And in Erehwon, the people could see that machines are going to become intelligent and destroy them, and so they make a choice to randomly choose a year after which they will destroy all technology that has been created after that time, and they won’t move beyond it. So, they choose like 1850 or something. And they smash up all the machines created after 1850 and they stop there. It’s a good thing to discuss over a few drinks, by the way, what would be the year you would choose if you were going to do this? So, in June, there had been a Butlerian Jihad against technology. They destroyed all the tech that was taking them to all the intelligent machines because machines began taking over, and so they have tech, but they have to take it at the level they choose. It’s kind of like Amish in space, is what it is, right? And kudos to the Amish, I’d like to know a lot more about them, but they had a very intelligent attitude towards technology, by the way. So, yeah, I think there will be that division, and people will have to make that choice.

All right, guys, we’re about at 7:40, so we are up to dinner time. So, I do believe, let’s have one more round of applause, please.

PK: I’m going to say one thing. I’m going to do the commercial break. We do the anti-AI commercial break. One of the things I’ve been doing, other than trying to work up my Writers Against AI campaign, is that my wife, Nav, and I, who is here tonight, are setting up a tiny little human-scale publishing house, which is called Hermit Crab Press, and it produces little artisan books. At the moment, it’s just doing a few of my books that I don’t want to publish with big publishers. But we’re putting it out there. We haven’t even done it yet. There are no books published. There’s nothing for sale, nothing advertised. But we have printed our first book, which is a little collection of my poems, and I did bring a few of them in here. So, if you’d like one, you can come and get one here. If you want to buy a book, come and buy a book. Just, that’s a slight commercial break, but it’s — I don’t know. What do we do if we actually want to create at a human scale? I’m a writer, so that’s the sort of thing I do, but everybody here has the question, I think, same question, moving over them. So, you can accept or reject the question, but it’s the thing I would want to take away from this whole gathering, is that question. Do I draw a line? If I do draw a line, what is it? And given who I am in my life and the things that I do, what do I do? Where do I take it? How do I use my skills in a way that kind of keeps things human, right? Make America human again. Here we are, at the mic drop moment.

Please do not drop it. They are fragile.

Thank you, Paul. Thanks for waiting. We do have dinner, we should be momentarily ready.