The Creature in the Machine (Essay)

This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on January 23rd, 2026 titled “The Creature in the Machine.”

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Earlier this month, my original human knee was replaced with a titanium one (plus a little cobalt). So technically I’m now a cyborg. For a long time, I’ve metaphorically called modern Western humans cyborgs because our lives already run on external stimuli: external muscles from our tech, external minds from our phones and – increasingly – AI, and everything else in our lives that’s gone digital. The knee surgery just made this more true for me in a literal, embodied sense.

Recovery is going well so far, and I’d like to offer some brief wide-boundary reflections from the opiate-induced recovery (although I only took them for 2.5 days) and spaciousness of the last seven days.

Reconnecting With the Physical

After surgery, my most immediate reflection of all was, “Oh my gosh I have a body.” That was a big one. As I mentioned in Frankly #118 on The Things We Take for Granted, I think we take our bodies for granted…and I will no longer do that.

On day three of post-surgery, I got out of bed, stood up, and felt a lightning strike of pain in my leg that hyper-focused my attention to my physical body. I realized that there are so many people I personally know that very much live ‘inside their minds.’ This recovery has been a very powerful reminder for me to reside in my body first, and that the mind is an extrapolation of the body.

So I have much appreciation for this now less-than-100-percent Homo sapiens body.

Linking Tolkien and Kingsnorth

The other reflection I’d like to share is the spaciousness that this week has provided me. I’ve had no calls scheduled for the first time in five years – normally, even when I’m on vacation, I typically have calls scheduled! So, I did something that I haven’t done in 25 years – I read two books this week. I’m not finished with both, but I’ve read most of them.

The first book was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, specifically The Fellowship of the Ring (in large print because it was a returned gift from my father who I bought it for). The other book was Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I had already wanted to read (or re-read) these two books, but I didn’t even realize how linked they would be – in spirit and in wide-boundary implications.

Paul, who is a poet and co-founded the Dark Mountain Project (along with former TGS guest Dougald Hine), is such a beautiful writer, and I hope all of you can read this (in my opinion, very important) book. He writes about “the machine” as a civilizational force that turns creatures into components and does a historic overview of the other philosophers and thinkers that are observing humanity’s Superorganism-like qualities at scale, not just at the level of individual people.

The book dovetails a lot with my own work on the Economic Superorganism and talks about the energy, material, and financial realities of this machine, although Paul also dives further into the spiritual side of this story.

His work revolves around this quote from Wendell Berry: “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.”

This is firing off lots of connections for me, as sometime soon I’ll be interviewing Iain McGilchrist for the third time, who’s famous for his analysis of the left and right hemispheres (his first and second episodes on this topic are both a must watch). I really do think there’s a left-brain meme or virus that has taken over our species and turned us, in aggregate, into a machine.

As someone who wrote academic papers on the energy and complexity of the modern Superorganism, I was unaware of how far back this thinking went, including people like Lewis Mumford. Getting to hear about some of this history in Paul’s book was a treat.

Onto The Lord of the Rings, which I first read when I was 15, and I read again when I was around 28 years old after a big breakup. It’s weird to re-read it now after the movies have come out, because when I’m reading the lines, I imagine Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, and Liv Tyler in my mind saying the characters’ words. I don’t like that. I like the untrodden snow of the virtual world in our minds imagining what these people might look like. But other than the visual narration in my mind, I got a lot out of it and enjoyed it now that I’m older.

These two books seem to run in parallel to each other because they’re both about how the spirit of humanity – or “Hobbitness” – is in contrast to our larger systemic backdrop. Both of them are centered on the battle between life and power, even if it’s not explicitly the way I frame it on this platform. Now, in early 2026, we see power manifesting in so many ways – especially with AI and the quest for more electricity to power it. These books added a new layer of reflection to all that, so it was good to read them and put them in conversation with our current reality.

Modern Medicine Magic

Over my decades of studying our systemic reality, my oldest thesis has been that fossil energy combined with technology, at a massive global scale, is virtually indistinguishable from magic – and this week I got to experience that at a very personal level. Through knee surgery and the subsequent titanium replacement, I got a glimpse of what this might look like when the spell of technology is applied to one’s own body.

But sitting in the Star Trek Enterprise-like operating room surrounded by all the machinery and nine sterile, blue-clothed people was a reminder that this “magic” comes with an invoice. Not only in the sense of my insurance company and co-pay, but also in the sense of mines, supply chains, a whole lot of invisible reliability, and undoubtedly a ton of waste in its wake. Despite all that, it’s pretty freaking amazing stuff.

I am one week out from surgery and can walk slowly without a cane or a walker. I have a lot of work ahead of me to recover, but I’m also highly motivated to do so – especially as I’m signing up for bike races this summer. Barring my dogs jumping on me or something going wrong, I’m feeling good on the road to recovery.

There’s a wide-boundary version of modern technology that is genuinely beautiful. I critique technology a lot alongside the Superorganism and the cul-de-sac that our culture is headed towards. But there’s also goodness underneath it, because this technology and the tools associated with it could be subordinated to care.

We could use this complexity to protect the vulnerable and the Web of Life. The problem is that the same system that can rebuild a broken or arthritic knee can also rebuild an entire society around competition, distraction, dependence, and ecocide.

It was not lost on me lying in the hospital recovery room that I’m a creature within the machine, and I benefited hugely from the machine in this case. But if you believe in the themes of this channel – and if you’re watching this you probably do – then in a wider-boundary sense there will be goodness coming from the machine. In my tiny example, I will be more effective at my work, because I’ll be able to get the 90 minutes of physical exercise I need everyday to function properly. For whatever reason, my brain just can’t seem to fire at the level required without that. Now, I’ll be able to bike this summer, which will allow me to better think all the thoughts and work all the long hours.

So alongside the criticism, think of all the good things that the machine is supporting, including the things you’re doing inside the machine. We can analyze and deconstruct it, but it’s also shining a light on the path forward and making it possible to do the hard, necessary, and important work to get to a place where we have more goodness by default. Because we are going to need goodness.

Cultural Fragmentation

I would be remiss or feel some shame if I didn’t at least bring up that the hospital where I had surgery was near the epicenter of the ICE controversy going on in Minneapolis (Note: this was recorded/written before the shooting of Alex Pretti). The current situation is an apt microcosm for our broader cultural and institutional fragmentation. People across the country are watching the exact same footage, reading the exact same headlines, and are arriving at radically different conclusions about what’s happening and what it means. I don’t sense that this divergence is only political or ideological – it reflects the deeper fractures in how legitimacy, information, authority, and trust are interpreted in our global machine, which is under incredible stress at the moment.

Unfortunately, I’ve been mostly away from the news while healing from my surgery, which has simultaneously been a gift. But the thing that shouted loudly to me immediately, even with a cursory look at the headlines of this situation, is that as we move into more energy-credit complexity and governance speed bumps in the coming decade, the gradient between federal power and state/local responses is steepening…and is unlikely to flatten out.

History suggests that when systems are stressed, power ultimately consolidates somewhere. Where is power going to consolidate in the United States? What does our future look like if authority remains primarily centralized at the federal level? What does it look like if power devolves to states and localities?

If that’s the scenario, there’s an uncomfortable follow-up question begging to be asked: What is the unifying story that keeps 50 very different states aligned toward shared goals, institutions, defense systems, and financial systems and structures in a post-peak-carbon world?

I’ve long thought that bioregionalism could be one possible answer – or at least one worth serious consideration. I expect this sounds fringe today, but given the direction of the constraints unfolding in our world and the story that I’ve been researching and sharing for years, I don’t think it’s going to continue to be so fringe.

Creature Commitments

Moving to the core reason why I chose to create a Frankly in the midst of my rehabilitation.

I am a creature (now technically part cyborg) that is living inside of the machine that is the global economic Superorganism. I think my job is to actively and purposefully remain a creature in Wendell Berry’s sense, even as I benefit from the machine.

Those of you who have watched my presentations over the years know that one of the recommendations I often give is to distinguish between conditional and unconditional goals. Conditional goals are things that might be disrupted if something external to your control happens in, for example, Venezuela, Davos, Greenland, or the global financial or political system. Unconditional goals are things you control yourself – no matter what happens in the broader world. They’re something that you are responsible for and have agency over.

So, with clarity and resolve, I’m going to set a few creature commitments for the next phase of my life. Some of them are pretty basic things that I’m already doing but would like to be more committed to: walking outside every day, spending time in nature, and looking at fewer screens in the evening. Seeking out more physical boredom might be a good one too.

In addition to these things, I’m committing to lifting weights three days a week going forward – because other than biking 150 miles a week most of the year, digging potatoes, and chopping and stacking firewood, I’ve never lifted weights in my life. There’s probably been 20 times where I start for a week or two and then give up. But this is becoming more important to me, as many people have said that at my age, weightlifting is essential to maintain strength, flexibility, and metabolism. I know I will be better, the work will be better, and everything I influence will be better if I follow through on this.

I’m actually nervous about saying this to an audience because if you make a commitment to yourself, it’s much lower stakes than if you make it to a few other people (or thousands of people) who might hold you accountable. But that also makes it more likely to happen. I can preemptively imagine the shame when I meet people at some meeting way out in August and they say, “Nate I remember that Frankly back in January – dude, you still look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!”

So, I’m drawing a line in the sand – because of the knee surgery I’ve decided I want my default state to be inhabiting my body, not trying to escape it.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll close here with a famous quote, which in my opinion has a wide-boundary sense. These words feel like a gift of goodness, with a time delay, from the much smaller and less global Superorganism of the 1940s, when J.R.R. Tolkien was writing The Fellowship of the Ring:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

And Gandalf answers in the only way that Gandalf can, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I suspect 2026 will be a year when decades might happen within weeks, and I have an enormous amount of content and perspective planned. I’m committed to bearing witness to what’s unfolding, sense-making, and – at least softly – helping people directionally intervene where they can through the turbulent times ahead.

Soon I’m going to be getting deep into scenarios, planning, and shortfall risk. The core goalpost for the organization’s work this year is going to be expanding the networks and interventions for the more-than-human predicament.

To my fellow creatures inside the machine: I hope you can also find a few practices that make it harder for the machine to mechanize practices – that return you to your body, to your local place, and to your people. Remember that even inside a system that often treats us like components, we are not components.

Perhaps that was Tolkien’s deepest gift and why his movies and books are still so popular today. The true resistance to Mordor and Sauron wasn’t strength, military, or technology. It was the preservation of the Shire and the spirits of the stubborn, nondescript, soft-spoken commitments to ordinary life by Hobbits. The true resistance came from within the kind of hearts that a machine could never manufacture. That’s Iain McGilchrist’s message as well: that we have a sort of left-brain virus in our species that has tilted us toward becoming a machine.

I know there are many others out there who recognize the importance of being a creature – not a machine – and I’m happy to be sharing time on this spinning blue-green Earth with those of you paying attention to this story.

I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for reading.

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