I have news!

The creature vs machine idea will be a book

A while back I mentioned an exciting project and said that I hoped to tell you about it soon.

Well, now I can! I’ve sold a book proposal; one based on an idea that first took shape inside this newsletter. The deal was announced recently in Publishers Marketplace:

The book has sold to The Bodley Head in the UK, and Crown in the US. Both are part of Penguin Random House, and both veritable non-fiction titans that brought us such recent delights as The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, Technofeudalism, by Yanis Varoufakis, and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, among many others. There are also translation deals in place with equally brilliant publishers in the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Brazil.

It would be fair to say that I am quite excited.

Regular readers will already be familiar with the creature vs machine argument. It is that an all-encompassing cultural, social, and political clash is coming. That clash will be between those, on the one hand, who want to accelerate the technology revolution, liberate humans from all limits, and, ultimately, merge with the machines. And those, on the other, who want to halt that process of transformation, and instead lean into familiar modes of human living and being — into our creaturely and embodied selves. I’ve come to refer to these two emerging coalitions as the party of creatures and that of machines.

I’ll argue that the conflict between these two belief systems will do much to shape the years ahead. I’ll say that the framework we moderns have long used to make sense of our collective choices — that is, the conservative vs progressive framework — is no longer a coherent response to the conditions we find ourselves in. And in its place, a new primary division is emerging: that between creatures and machines.

The book takes its name from an eerily prescient statement made by the great American farmer-poet Wendell Berry. In an essay called Life is a Miracle, he said: ‘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.’

Across a writing career spanning seven decades, Berry has developed a thorough-going critique of technological modernity as we practice it. He wrote those words a full 26 years ago. I think we’re now in the early days of the conflict he foresaw.

You see it now via newly-emerging activist groups such as Stop AI. Groups such as this one are just the start; we’re going to see a febrile mass-movement pushback against AI and its economic and cultural implications:

You see it in growing alarm over the relationship that children are building with AI companions. A fierce battle over this issue is coming; it will make our anxiety about teens and social media seem a relic from a simpler time:

You hear echoes of the coming battle between creatures and machines in news that Amazon executives expect humanoids and other robots to displace more than 500,000 of their workers. Amazon’s leaders are already preparing PR strategies to deal with the anger that will ensue:

In the book, I’ll set out on a journey into this clash. I’ll show how the creature vs machine conflict will manifest politically and philosophically, but also as a mass-movement and visceral struggle; one that will scramble old social and political allegiances, uniting former enemies and splitting old friends. We’ll look at how the conflict will shape us as a collective, but also touch our personal lives and families. I’ll deepen my articulation of the split by talking to those — technologists, activists, philosophers and more — on its frontlines. I’ll excavate the submerged origins of both the creature and machine positions, exploring how the divide is born of unresolved tensions that run far into our past. And I’ll build a bold argument on how we can find a way through.

It is intended that the book will be published in 2027. This means that for the next 12 months, my life will be a lot about writing it. As it sounds, lots of work is ahead. But this is a chance to bring an idea to the world that has become, for me, an obsession.

So why tell you all this now? First, and as I said at the start, the creature vs machine idea took shape in this newsletter. It feels to me, then, that it belongs to the NWSH community — and that’s why I’m so excited to bring you this news. And second, because the journey I’m about to embark on to write this book will do much to shape things around here for the next year and beyond. It’s a journey I want to take you all on, too.

In practice, that means that here in NWSH I’ll report on the trips I take, the people — technologists, thinkers, artists and more — I speak to, and the thinking it all fuels. You’ll get early previews of the book as it emerges, and a peek behind the curtain at the research and writing that made it all happen.

There are so many dimensions of the coming clash between the creature and machine worldviews, and the stakes could not be higher. This conflict will be for the future of how we live and work. For who gets to thrive, or simply survive, in our economies. For the destiny of the nation state, and our relationship with the Earth. And, in the end, for the nature of the human being itself. Together, we’re going to explore all that.

So, lots more coming soon. It’s going to be a big adventure. And at the end of it all, we’ll have something to send out into the world.

Thanks for reading. Wishing you a great week,

David.