Reality Sandwich published this December 2010 proposal for what Pinchbeck calls business shamanism: using the marketing and organizational techniques of corporations to build a transformational movement, extending his Evolver network. He draws on Albert Camus’s The Rebel, Chris Hedges on the death of the liberal class, and Hannah Arendt and Antonio Negri, warning that America’s coming rupture may first produce authoritarianism.
Collected from Pinchbeck’s October 2010 guest blog for Powell’s Books, written around the release of Notes from the Edge Times and the documentary 2012: Time for Change. The entries cover an asthma attack that sent him to Beth Israel, a rebuttal of Neil Genzlinger’s New York Times review of the film, and the question of what a post-Enlightenment culture would look like.
A September 2010 Reality Sandwich memoir tracing the origins of Evolver: a failed first company in Venice, California, Ken Jordan’s Augmented Social Network paper for PlaNetwork, and the 2007 founding of Reality Sandwich. Pinchbeck also recounts his magazine years at Open City with Thomas Beller and Rob Bingham, whose heroin overdose pushed him away from literary culture.
Reading the Deepwater Horizon disaster as the unfolding of indigenous prophecy, this June 2010 Reality Sandwich piece relays D. K. Matai’s scenario in which a methane bubble beneath the Gulf ruptures the seabed. Pinchbeck attacks BP’s use of the dispersant Corexit and CEO Tony Hayward’s conduct, quoting Chris Hedges’s essay BP and the Little Eichmanns.
Written for Reality Sandwich in May 2010, the essay draws on the self-distribution campaign for 2012: Time for Change with director Joao Amorim and Mangusta Films to argue that independent film is becoming a process rather than a product, citing Peter Gabriel’s subscription model. Pinchbeck faults Facebook’s architecture for blocking deeper discourse and calls for networks designed to raise collective intelligence.
Written for Reality Sandwich in December 2009, two nights after a white spiral appeared over Norway. Pinchbeck sets out why the failed-missile explanation seemed to him inadequate, notes the timing against Obama’s Nobel speech in Oslo and the Copenhagen conference, and ends with the Vatican’s own conference on extraterrestrial life.
Written for Reality Sandwich in December 2009, after Roland Emmerich’s 2012 turned the date into a disaster spectacle and, as the New York Times observed, put a version of Pinchbeck on screen played by Woody Harrelson. He describes being folded into the film’s publicity while arguing against everything it proposed.
An interview conducted for Reality Sandwich in November 2009 with the director Tao Ruspoli, whose first feature, FIX, drew on his brother’s addiction and the ten-day ultimatum a judge gave him. Ruspoli discusses the LAFCO collective and what filmmaking becomes when the media economy is coming apart.
A short Reality Sandwich piece from August 2009 on Drunvalo Melchizedek’s video series presenting Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez and the Maya council of elders on 2012. Pinchbeck is candid about finding Melchizedek’s earlier book of dubious value, and equally candid that these videos left him unsure what to make of them.
A Conscious Choice column from April 2009, written as Thomas Friedman conceded that the postwar growth model was finished. Pinchbeck reads the crash as a permanent paradigm shift rather than a fixable interruption, and describes building Evolver as something closer to a social utility than a business.