Brief Thoughts on Starting to Read Kingsnorth and Rosa in Tandem

Wed, 06 May 2026 11:55:26 -0400

I haven’t been posting much lately, as I’ve been traveling and am now in Chicago helping my stepson.

A few brief thoughts. I’m reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine in conjunction with Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World" – many interesting echoes between the two books, and there are many others that probably should be added to the stew. [1] I’ve been a bit reluctant until now to wade into Against the Machine, as I found Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project 2009 manifesto so extremely bleak that I’ve kept my distance. Obviously, Kingsnorth has been through many changes in his ideas over the course of almost two decades, but there is still a sort of sub-terranean rumble of despair that I find disturbing. Nevertheless, Kingsnorth references many of the writers that have been foundational for me – Schumacher, for instance – so I suspect his writing will be worthwhile.

While I have lived in cities many times – New York City twice, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Asheville – my preference is for small towns, so many of Kingsnorth’s touchstones resonate. I don’t know whether either Kingsnorth of Rosa have any connection with anarchism – I think Kingsnorth mentions David Graeber (I’m nowhere near completing Against the Machine yet) – but I have anarchistic, localistic, human scale tendencies. Anarchism makes us think that maybe the way things are set up might not be as “natural” as they are made out to be, and that, as David Graeber put it, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,” which threatens to upset the applecart of our daily life.

I think Rosa’s concept of resonance provides a possible prescription in relation to Kingsnorth’s diagnosis of what ails us as a society, and so I intend to work my way backward from The Uncontrollability of the World to Resonance and finally Social Acceleration. Much of Rosa’s and Kingsnorth’s ideas seem to dovetail with many of the anti-technology, anti-social-media tendencies that I share with many people here on MB and elsewhere. Kingsnorth and Rosa both seem to give great importance to the power of story, which, as a theater historian and theorist, I am finding inspirational and stimulating.

David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchistic Anthropology, writes that anarchism is “a project, which sets out to begin creating the institutions of a new society ‘within the shell of the old,’ to expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination but always, while doing so, proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.” Or, as Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” My books Building a Sustainabe Theater and DIY Theater MFA are my attempts to describe what this might look like for theater.

[1] - For instance:

Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows
The Need for Roots by Simone Weil
*Art and Technics (*and maybe The Myth of the Machine or his books about the City) by Lewis Mumford
The Republic of Love by Martha Nussbaum
Anything by David Graeber

Words, Words, Words on Wond'ring Aloud

Brief Thoughts on Starting to Read Kingsnorth and Rosa in Tandem