No, I still haven’t read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine — it feels like a book I am “supposed to have read by now,” a feeling which always activates my contrarian impulse to keep on not having read it (“what do you mean, you never went to a single high school football game?") — but, that crucial disclaimer aside, I shared Brad East’s slightly head-scratching reaction to Wyatt Graham’s review. If I have, albeit from some distance, adequately understood Kingsnorth’s project to develop my own tangential critique, the Machine is not technology simpliciter. The Machine is the realm of human life and culture that, shall we say, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon. In our day (and in days gone by), its hallmark is the love of money. This realm is no doubt daily increasing. And of course it is expressed in increasingly powerful technologies that are structured (more or less explicitly) according to the love of money, because money and mechanism have certain essential features and affordances in common. Indeed, as our technologies are increasingly restructured according to the love of money, the more the whole realm of technology becomes Machine.

So the question of whether technology as such can, if received with thanksgiving, be sanctified misses the point — because the point is (Kingsnorth’s less careful statements aside) not about technology as such. It is about the love of money. By definition, the love of money cannot be sanctified. It must be repented and mortified. Of course, there are good desires and ends which money can be made to serve, but that is the thing about money: it is itself an un-thing, only a medium of exchange, a sort of raw power made manipulable by being dis-embodied. It has no goodness of its own, because it is not a creature. It is only to be received with thanksgiving insofar as it serves those good ends and desires. The love of money is, in a strict sense, an impossibility. Love reaches out toward a real Other, and there is no Other to be encountered in money. There is only the emptiness of one’s own self, unfilled with any real presence of Another, incurvatus in se, awaiting seven devils to take up their un-residence. The love of money is a literally demonic parody of real love that degrades and destroys our ability to love anything or anyone else — God’s good creatures, our glorious neighbors, God Himself.

To be a Christian is not to sanctify the Machine. To be a Christian is to reject the Machine’s whole operating logic. At our baptisms, we are asked: “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, and every spiritual force of wickedness that rebels against God?” Technology tout court does not fall under this rubric. But technology that teaches us the love of money, that instills the habit of reductive exchange, that invites us (even if just a little bit, as a treat!) to serve two masters? On this point, we must all become raw ascetics — or hazard our souls.