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Against the Machine: Manifesto
Guernica Editions, Fall 2021
400 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771836951
ISBN10: 1771836954
English
$25.00 Canada, $21.95 US
Mel Buckworth, dependable family man, loses his manufacturing job through recession. Having lost his sense of purpose his pride sidelines him as he discerns his lack of digital skills so apparent in his children's generation. He is galled by his daughter Dani's university friend, Stanley Best, who is about to achieve fame in the fields of nano technology and artificial intelligence. As Mel desperately attempts to find equilibrium he estranges his family, leaves his wife and enlists the help of a greedy grad student. Will Baker teaches Mel the skills he will need to wreak revenge on a system seemingly discarding him. As his aptitudes grow he begins to use the internet, the very thing he despised, as a weapon to inflict his reprisals. Slowly he turns terrorist to deliver his message: that humans will succumb to machines and the social system controlling them. As his acts grow more lethal, Mel knows he must make an indelible declaration. A “manifesto” to be remembered.
When they came for him he knew what would happen.
He even knows them. Gary Wilson, shift foreman and Stan Oblauski, Union Rep. They come toward him slowly. Hesitant. Doing this against their wills.
Mel Buckworth lowers the weft wire in his hand, half inch black bar. He brakes the big weaving machine. Carefully. It is big. Powerful. He shuts it down with the job half done. A long train of warp wires trail from the machine's back end like cryonic black snakes frozen in mid-slither. Sliding the weft bar, crimped and heavy in his hand, back into the machine's quiver he takes out his earplugs then removes his safety glasses.
In Against the Machine: Manifesto, Brian Van Norman interlaces some unexpected threads. Updating the story of the original Luddite, a weaver who led others in smashing the new power looms taking their jobs, Van Norman introduces us to a dysfunctional family in Waterloo, Ontario. His protagonist Mel Buckworth loses his long-time industrial job, while the "winners" seem to be those at the local university riding the new cybernetics waves of AI, the Dark Web, and big data. Van Norman portrays how Mel, a jock who still plays amateur hockey and doesn't like to overthink things, gradually turns his focus to updating the legacy of the Unabomber. You end up both caring for Mel and his fractured family, and hoping that he doesn't succeed in his "against the machine" statement. Along the way, Van Norman raises questions about the nature of work, the effects of our wired world on the human psyche, and the ways in which people both love and hurt each other. Well worth reading.
John Oughton, author of Higher Teaching
An inspired concept by author Brian Van Norman. Take his fascinating and insightful study of the Luddite movement of 19th century England: Against the Machine: Luddites and relocate the revolution to contemporary Canada in his sequel Against the Machine: Manifesto. Computers against the common man. A battle for survival.
Nancy Silcox, author
Van Norman's Manifesto is so richly dense and detailed with all of the descriptions so vivid that we are unwittingly taken outside of ourselves and magically transported to a different time and place. A complex and vibrant world of science, pizza, sex and revolution. Manifesto x-rays the broken bones of the past and aims a powerful telescope at what’s to come. If this is the work of a wonderful writer...Van Norman is definitely doing his job. Find here, in the pages of Manifesto, the struggle of man against machine against man. The past raging against the present will surely define the future. You’re invited.
David Menear, author of Swallows Playing Chicken
Reviews
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Against the Machine: Manifesto
The Book Commentary - December 31, 2021
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Against the Machine: Manifesto by Brian Van Norman
The Miramichi Reader - October 3, 2021
Books by Brian Van Norman
