Creatures and Machines

Earlier this month the English writer Paul Kingsnorth launched a new campaign. He calls it Writers Against AI, and it asks authors to make three pledges:

(i) Never to use AI in their work

(ii) Never to knowingly support other writers who do, and...

(iii) To take a public stand against the creep of machine-generated words into the literary world.

As many of you will know, Kingsnorth is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and is one of the leading voices among those who are — to put it mildly — sceptical about AI specifically, and about technological modernity more broadly. Early in his career Kingsnorth wrote mainly on environmental issues. But during the pandemic, he began a series of essays on technology and its implications for us that gained huge traction, and a large online following. He later collected those essays into a book that was published in 2025 under the name Against the Machine.

In those essays, he argues that to live in the 21st-century technological modernity is to inhabit a ‘metastasising machine which is closing in around you’ and one that grants you ‘less control, less agency, less humanity than ever before’. The defining function of this system, he says, ‘is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity.'

In other words, says Kingsnorth, technology is taking us to a Very Dark Place. Kingsnorth converted to the Orthodox Romanian Church a few years ago. Sometimes, he seems to link technology directly to Satan.

The new campaign against AI has struck a nerve; just see the comments section on the essay that announces it. My opinion on the three pledges is probably best described as mixed. I'm certainly not keen on the idea of asking AI to do my writing for me. But I think it can be a valuable research tool and sparring partner.

My deepest interest in this campaign, though, lies elsewhere. It seems to be that it is one tiny fragment of a far broader phenomenon; one that is emerging into the world now, and that is, these days, at the centre of much of my thinking. It's a phenomenon that will reshape our politics, our culture, and even our closest relationships in the years ahead.

That phenomenon is the coming clash between two great coalitions. Specifically, between those who want to accelerate the technology revolution now unfolding around us, liberate we humans from all limits, and ultimately merge with our machines. And those who utterly reject that vision of our shared future, and who want to lean into our embodied selves, our ancient relationship with the natural world, and familiar human ways of living and being.

In a 1999 essay called Life is a Miracle, the great American farmer-poet Wendell Berry foresaw all this. He wrote: 'It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.'

Via those words, I've come to call the two grand coalitions that are emerging now the coalition of creatures and that of machines. The coming battle between them will take the form of an all-encompassing clash: cultural, social, and eventually political. It will litigate a set of ever-more urgent questions. Accelerate or decelerate? New limits or no limits? Human or post-human? And it will do so much to shape the years ahead.

Kingsnorth and his fellow writers against AI are, of course, creatures. But the creature coalition extends far beyond the literary world. Look around, and you can see it manifesting everywhere. In the rise of screen-free parenting movements and so-called organic childhoods. In the activists at Stop AI, who promise massive acts of civil disobedience against frontier AI labs. In the degrowth communities of the US and Europe, where people are turning their backs on technological modernity and reaching for what they believe to be more authentic forms of human life.

Meanwhile, on the opposing side, the machines are marshalling. Effective accelerationists in Silicon Valley argue for full-speed advancement towards superintelligence and the solved world they believe it will bring. The Network State movement dreams of blockchain-based sovereign communities that transcend the nation state. Biohackers and longevity researchers push at the limits of the human body itself. And across the last few years, figures at the heart of the machine coalition — most prominently Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — have pushed their ideology deep into the corridors of political power.

These manifestations may seem wildly disparate. But at their heart lies a unified truth: an ongoing technology revolution is now the central shaping fact of our collective lives, and we are developing radically opposing views on our proper relationship with it. Those opposing views will not map neatly onto the old divisions — conservative vs progressive, left vs right — that we're used to. Instead, they will scramble old allegiances and forge strange new ones, as the creature and machine ideologies draw the real battle lines of the decades ahead.

I've become so obsessed by all this that I'm writing a book about it. It will be called Creature vs Machine, and it's currently taking shape via a series of Word documents and lots of frantic typing. It's planned for 2027. But I'll be sharing far more on the ideas at its heart here at Full Moon this year, including in a deep dive essay.

From where I'm standing, then, Kingsnorth's campaign is a signal. One among many. On the horizon, a storm is gathering. It has huge implications for all of us: knowledge workers, creatives, leaders, humans. Get ready for the downpour. And start to examine your own sympathies. In the clash that lies ahead, will you find yourself standing with the creatures, or the machines?