iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

"Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power." ~ Allan Bloom

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

“The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

“America, said Bly, was ‘the first culture in history that has colonised itself’.… In The Revolt of the Elites, [American historian Christopher] Lasch forecast the future accurately. ‘The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties’, he wrote, ‘are best understood..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

“The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, Against The Machine

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

“Liberalism did not naturally ‘evolve’ from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the ‘sovereign individual’ from new cloth. The individual ‘as a disembodied, self-interested economic actor’, claims Deneen, ‘didn't exist in any actual state of nature,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

“Philosopher Patrick Denneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that ‘liberalism’ is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

“It is an ‘anticulture,’ because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today's way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which pre-modern, traditional societies were built..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

“The age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

“The Machine is virtually impossible to resist, not least because it is found both around us and within us. As Lewis Mumford explained, the ‘myth of the Machine’ comes from within the human heart: we carry its drive for planning, efficiency, profit, clarity, straight lines, organization,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

“All of the enclosures, the destruction of alternative lifeways, the early modern revolutions, the fanning of want, the unsettling of peoples, the journeys of the Black Ships, the myth of progress: all that leads here to the triumph of technique, to the kingdom of the Machine.” #PaulKingsnorth, ATM

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

“Ellul's technique is an attitude of mind, one which replaces spontaneous, human-scale, organic ways of living with a focus on technical, rationalised, planned and directed outcomes. Technique is not the same thing as technology. Humans have always used technologies, or at least tools;..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

“But the Machine is not simply the logical end point of certain trends within culture and history. It is not simply a collection of advanced tools, historical designs and political power games. It is that, but it is also something else...."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

“Since the 1990s—or perhaps since the 1850s—the process of Machine globalisation has been a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural or ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trades unions, national economic plans, nations themselves..

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

“The flaw in the cosmopolitan dream, now as then, is a simple failure to understand that the world is not ‘rational’, and neither are we. We are crooked timber, and we grow from the ground. Universalist projects ignore that human need for roots, and the attack on culture by commerce fuels..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

“To those who ask, ‘What can I actually do?’, he [E. F. Schumacher] said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can each of us work to put our own inner house in order..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

“So this is who we are. You don't have to be a Christian or a Buddhist to see where it has led us, and where it will lead next. Want is the acid. Capitalism is the battery. Growth is the engine. Greed is the forming energy that moves us to where we are inevitably headed. What is the brake?..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

“‘What is at stake,’ asserts [E. F.] Schumacher, ‘is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

“We are all bourgeois now, which is to say that we are all driven forward by want. We have all learned a bourgeois version of history too, in which medieval ‘feudalism’ is seen as dark and barbaric, while modern capitalism is equated with freedom and liberty..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

“I’m no Marxist, but The Communist Manifesto describes the world we are in with brilliant prescience, despite being written nearly two centuries ago. The mass consumption of the world, and the mass excretion of our culture's toxic byproducts into its waters in woods and skies,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

“The city itself ‘becomes consumable, indeed expendable: the container must change as rapidly as its content. The latter imperative undermines a main function of the city as an agent of human continuity. The living memory of the city, which once bound together generations and centuries, disappears:"

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

“This Metropolis breeds a globalized elite class who feel more at home in each others’ cities than they do in the hinterlands of their respective nations, and who promote and represent the ideology of Progress that keeps the metropolis humming..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

“The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but it treats its poor and marginalized with a contempt that the village would regard with incomprehension. As so often, this is a question of scale..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

“One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

“Once a structure of this size and complexity has been created, it must be maintained. In the case of a modern city, this means that the surrounding lands, and then the lands further afield, must be colonised to supply it and its inhabitants, their whims and desires and needs...."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

“A city is, at its heart, just such a ‘relentless collective assault’ on the way that humans have lived for 99 percent of their history; and, maybe more importantly, a collective assault on other forms of life..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

“A Machine civilization is an urban civilization, and its worldview and direction is that of the urban dwellers who build, justify and benefit from it.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 82 * Join our #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

“In 1900, around 12 percent of the world's people lived in towns and cities. By 2050, nearly 70 percent will. That's not simply a matter of where people live: it's the whole mindset of humanity changing from one which dwells in a place in which we are not the centre of attention,..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

“Somehow, though, the work must be to still the mind instead. To let go of the natural attachment to our cunning, serpentine will. We know where the path leads if we don’t; we see daily the path that magic and science will take us down...."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

“That renunciation has to be a long mental and spiritual effort: the sloughing off of a way of seeing; the refusal of the story we all grew up with and a return to an older one that lies, like the kingdom of God, both within and all around us..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

“What is the way out of this dehumanization? Sherrard is uncompromising. ‘To think and act without the constraint of any knowledge and values other than those of the modern scientific mentality’, he writes, ‘is to commit oneself to a tyranny of an unprecedented maleficence.’..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

“‘It is difficult for us to admit that far from being an advance, the whole modern scientific project may be a ghastly failure’, he [Philip Sherrard] concedes. ‘Yet there is no reason why it should not be. One has to judge things by their fruits..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

“Philip Sherrard again pinned it down when he wrote that ‘modern science presupposes a radical reshaping of our whole mental outlook. It involves a new approach to being, a new approach to nature, in short, a new philosophy’..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

“In the early modern period, today's distinction between ‘science’ (real, good, objective) and ‘magic’ (fantastical, bad, superstitious) did not really exist. Both were branches of the same effort: to understand the mysterious forces of the universe, and ultimately to control them.” ~Paul Kingsnorth

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

“There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 73 Join our #bookstudy on YouTube

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

“Before Duns Scotus, says [Brad S.] Gregory, Western Christians, like their Eastern counterparts, had regarded the God they worshiped as something entirely other: something so untraceable and mysterious that its essence could not be named or grasped..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

“Augustine and Aquinas, says Sherrard, enabled the philosophical separation of humanity from the rest of nature, and the rest of nature from the divine. God became transcendent, not immanent, and permission was thus given for humanity to analyze and dissect nature and itself." ~ #PaulKingsnorth

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

“Science, right from the beginning of the modern enterprise, was allotted the role that the Church had previously claimed for itself: the primary guide to truth, and enlightener of humanity. More than a method, it was a faith.“ ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

“An ideology built on remaking nature for human needs will inevitably include human nature in that project. Humanity can no more survive the mechanistic or scientific revolutions intact than can the forests or the oceans.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70 * #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy-YT

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

“[I]f a machine is the metaphor you use to represent other living beings, then a machine is what you will make of the world.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 69 *Join our #BookClub @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

“Our daily experience of life is of being embedded; but the mechanistic revolution told us that the world was governed by set laws which could be ‘objectively’ known, as if observed, somehow, from outside..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

“Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed. If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking—mythology, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith—might have been on to something..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

“Reason, it turned out, was not a superior alternative to intuition, emotion or instinct, but a manifestation of it. There could be no mind without the body, no unprejudiced concepts or unpolluted models of reality..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

“The eighteenth century's two revolutions—the revolution of Reason and the revolution of Technology—were supposed to walk us towards a universal paradise. Instead, we live in a time of mass extinction and cultural disintegration.” ~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 62 *Join our #bookstudy!

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

“Reason is appealing, because it implies that humans can use their faculties to order the universe, and that the universe will respond in kind..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

“Industrialism's physical clearances—the enclosures of land and the destruction of artisanship in the peasantry—were mirrored by the French tsunami in which monarchy, aristocracy, church and customs of all kinds..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

“[Kingsnorth’s to Jeff Bezos] It's always worth spending time with the unquestioned assumptions in passages like this. Here, for example, we see that our lives are ‘ever improving,’ that there is a universal ‘we’ in the ‘developed world’ that can be ‘improved’ with more ‘growing’;..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

“Like the Fen Tigers and many unnamed people who have stood up against the onward march of dehumanizing ‘progress’, general Ludd and his legions were fighting the monster from the desert, and their struggle was existential..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

“[Quote from G. K. Chesterton] Nine times out of ten, an industrial civilization of the modern capitalist type does not arise wherever else it may arise in places where there has hitherto been a distributive civilization like that of a peasantry. Capitalism is a monster that grows in deserts..."

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