A 2011 Dazed & Confused column on what Pinchbeck calls conspiranoia: the Bavarian Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, vigilantcitizen.com’s readings of Lady Gaga and Beyonce videos, and Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara’s Dark Mission. He argues the pastime is disempowering because it negates personal responsibility, and proposes a counter-myth of prospiracy, transparent efforts to transform society.
Written as the introduction to What Comes After Money?, the 2011 Reality Sandwich anthology edited with Ken Jordan. Pinchbeck argues that debt-based currency is a designed tool rather than a natural fact, drawing on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Antonio Negri’s definition of capital as a social relation, and Pierre Clastres’s Society Against the State.
Appearing in Dazed & Confused in 2011, this column argues the financial system is collapsing because growth has exhausted both markets and resources, and that money issued into existence as debt by private bankers manufactures artificial scarcity. It backs Bernard Lietaer’s negative-interest currency and community-issued alternatives, noting that biologists find mature ecosystems develop through cooperation.
Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column asks what freedom means as climate change and species extinction accelerate. It argues that inner freedom pursued through yoga, meditation or ayahuasca shamanism is hollow unless matched by external action, and reads the Egyptian revolution against the end of the Maya great cycle on December 21, 2012 as the first note of a wider liberation.
Published in RSF Quarterly in summer 2011, the essay argues that capitalism is a transitional system and that ecological crisis amounts to an initiatory crisis for the species. Pinchbeck draws on Lewis Mumford, Rudolf Steiner, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, and cites Dean Radin and Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project on psychic phenomena.
This 2011 Dazed & Confused column recounts a trip to Colombia to meet Kogi shamans in the Sierra Nevada. The mammos, trained as children in years-long dark retreats, hold that cataclysms follow from humanity neglecting its payments to the earth, and Pinchbeck connects their view to psi research by Dean Radin and Russell Targ and to Gurdjieff’s principle of reciprocal maintenance.
A long interview for Reality Sandwich from June 2011 with William Etundi, Jr., the New York event producer behind The Danger, on his upbringing between a Methodist minister mother and a Ghanaian father, the economics of underground nightlife, and what he took from his first ayahuasca ceremony.
From Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column. It argues that the hipster is an exhausted construct whose detachment is manufactured by the media industry and serves corporate control, and traces cool from enslaved Africans and jazz musicians to Che Guevara T-shirts. Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated supplies the blob; Antonio Negri supplies the reminder that capital is only a social relation.
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.