A short post releasing the position paper Towards Regenerative Society: A Rapid Transition Plan, dated October 2014, as a downloadable PDF. The quoted opening argues that humanity has reached one of the rare junctures requiring a thorough transformation of society, culture, and consciousness, and that activating the prefrontal cortex allows a new planetary civilization to be envisioned and designed.
The first newsletter of the Center for Planetary Culture, dated July 2014. Pinchbeck, its executive director, distinguishes the think tank he started with Jana Astanov from RAND, Brookings, and the Project for a New American Century, describes research toward a regenerative civilization, and cites Buckminster Fuller on utopia or oblivion and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture.
Announcing the Center for Planetary Culture, this working draft lays out a post-carbon transition plan divided into technical, social, and communication strategy. It covers bioremediation through Paul Stamets and John Todd, ecocities, alternative currencies and blockchain-based organizations, demilitarization, and liquid democracy, citing Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest.
Written in support of the Worldwide Wave of Action. Citing IPCC projections, a 30 percent rise in ocean acidity, and James Lovelock’s forecast of a human population reduced to a few hundred thousand, Pinchbeck argues that no adequate response is possible under neoliberal capitalism, and that ownership must give way to stewardship using new social technologies.
Pinchbeck describes the split between creative work and self-promotion, citing his GaiamTV talk show Mind Shift, which he was expected to sell to 1,000 new subscribers, and the years he lost marketing his own company, Evolver. He invokes Lewis Mumford on capitalism and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism as grounds for arguing that artists should not be their own marketing machines.
Built around quotations from Bataille’s On Nietzsche, Antonio Negri’s Time for Revolution, and Georg Kuhlewind’s Becoming Aware of the Logos, the piece argues that capitalism rests on domination and cannot be reformed, only superseded. Pinchbeck holds that a cooperative society must integrate humanity’s destructive tendencies as ancient Egypt and the Maya did through paired deities like Set and Tezcatlipoca.
Dated July 19, 2015, this poem treats the Void as the unconditional ground from which everything, including God, emerges and into which it sinks back. It states that terror is a meaningless response and that surrender is already the case, with love the last tone one recognizes and madness only a stage passed through on the way to equanimity.
Couchsurfing founder Casey Fenton describes, in the Dazed & Confused Transformer column, how hacking an Icelandic university database to email 1,500 students led to a platform with five million users. Fenton explains the site’s noncommercial ethic, its conversion to a B Corporation after the government refused nonprofit status, and the rise of collaborative consumption services like TaskRabbit.