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"Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity" by Paul Kingsnorth attempts to get at the root of it. (I'm partway through the audiobook.) Kingsnorth suggests that behind Man's increasing alienation from nature and himself is a system, a technological-cultural matrix. Cultured in capitalism over centuries and fueled by money, always money, it is colonizing our own culture, reducing humans to inputs, and leaving people spiritually barren.

From a review last fall, "The Machine, he writes, is the sum of the forces 'controlled by and for technology' that have, since the inception of modernity, been 'uprooting us from nature, culture and God.' " We have raised innovation to a secular faith, "a religious vision for an irreligious society."

Kingsnorth resists categorization. "Some of Kingsnorth's explanations align with Trumpism and the American Christian right," reviewer Alexander Nazaryan notes. And yet he argues that left and right are both being subsumed by the Machine. A Machine in the latter stages of cultural collapse.

"I'm hopeful about the fact that the Machine can't last," he said. "I don't think it is spiritually or ecologically or culturally sustainable."

Over at Anand Giridharadas's The Ink (subscription required), they've begun a series with an overlapping subject, only focused on contemporary issues of power. Downstream of the Epstein class, "millions simply sense that something is amiss, wonder how decisions are made, and grow alienated from the system. Life feels hard, but it's even harder to see upstream through the fog and understand why." The Epstein files provide clues to what's happening, Giridharadas writes in the introduction. "But access does not equal understanding" the underlying operating system. And the network.

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