I went to bed on Thursday night the 29th of September shrugging off the approaching hurricane Helene. I live in the mountains of North Carolina, and I know hurricanes generally peter out by the time they get to the hills. My neighbor and I did think the night before that maybe one of us should go get some extra gas, just in case. We didn't.

I was not the only one who wildly miscalculated the storm. To situate the story a bit, we are in Polk County, which is where the Lake Lure dam was now famously near failure. That's up the hill from me, more into the mountains; and, as you have likely seen, up from there the devastation is still something being revealed daily. Where I am, in the lower land, the trouble was mostly with an amazing number of trees and power lines down. We got power back about a week after the storm, which seems like a marvel.

Naturally, when all normalcy breaks down, one reflects on things. The most normal thing that was gone was our connection to "the world" via the internet and cell phones, since the towers were down or very spotty; and, for some time, even smartphones could not get through to the internet. At one point, we got a text that 911 was no longer working. Saying it "went dark" is an understatement. Such things we take for granted, like the background programs running on this computer as I type. But they aren't neutral, and they are doing something to us all the time simply because they are there all the time.

Some people shrug off the weirdos who think that the broadening world of global-techno-whatever is a benign act of progress, but I think they are wrong. And the disaster of Helene was revelatory. Paul Kingsnorth has done a good job, I think, of showing how our so-called order today is the very "spirit of a machine," which he puts thus:

The ultimate project of modernity, I have come to believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.