errick Jensen and George Draffan’s Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control challenges the ubiquitous notion that “civilization” is good and natural; technology is, at worst, neutral; and technological progress is not only good, but also the ultimate answer to all of our worldly dilemmas. The basic premise of the book is that industrialized civilization is necessarily unsustainable as it leads to a machine-like society whose success is measured by its ability to efficiently turn the natural world into commodities. I, you, and everyone else serve only as replaceable components of the American machine set up to serve an elite few. Technology allows the state to better control its populous through surveillance, and thus the machine runs more smoothly.

Sure, iPods are pretty cool, but what about mind-control, or tiny radio wave emitting microchips in every consumer product in the world (to reduce theft, of course), or Domestic Control Hover Drones (actual name, courtesy of the DOD)—small hovering remote-controlled robots equipped with thermal imaging cameras, state-of-the-art microphones that can pick out specific conversations from a distance? Jensen and Draffan tell creepy tales of these and other technological advancements that government funded scientists are currently developing explicitly for domestic surveillance purposes. Sometimes during Welcome to the Machine I felt like I was reading a well-written science fiction novel, only to come to the terrifying realization that it is all real.

Welcome to the Machine is a scathing critique of our entire way of life—our way of thinking about the world and our role as inhabitants of this planet. The authors often contrast our supposedly civilized lifestyle with “primitive” cultures that lead truly sustainable existences before they were, for the most part, destroyed by or assimilated into the insatiable style of civilization in which most of us now take part. This book is well written, interesting, and achieves its ideological goals; it is profoundly unsettling and it exposes the reader to what is likely an entirely new perspective.