Conversations

Jude Currivan, a cosmologist with an Oxford physics degree and author of The Cosmic Hologram and The Story of Gaia, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. She presents a case that the universe is constituted by meaningful in-formation rather than random data, projected holographically onto a two-dimensional boundary and pixelated at the Planck scale, citing the holographic principle associated with black hole thermodynamics and Leonard Susskind, and a 2017 analysis of the cosmic microwave background at the University of Southampton. She traces the same fractal and power-law patterning through earthquakes, human conflicts, internet hubs, galaxies and city growth, and points to a 2018 entanglement experiment linking laboratory photons with starlight and quasar light as evidence of universal nonlocality. She also responds directly to Bernardo Kastrup.

Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and now director of Metalabel, talks with Daniel Pinchbeck about how creative people can build economic structures that do not run on profit maximization. Strickler traces his path from a farm in southwest Virginia to music criticism at The Village Voice, Spin and Pitchfork, citing Harry Smith and Smithsonian Folkways as formative, and recalls the unease he and Perry Chen felt about crossing from art into business in 2005. He sets out the argument of his book This Could Be Our Future, that most organizations are built to select whichever option makes the most money, and that artists are equipped to decide by other values. Pinchbeck asks whether entrepreneurs have inherited the cultural authority once held by musicians and artists. Strickler closes on Walter Benjamin and the loss of aura.

Paul Levy, author of several books on wetiko, the mind-virus named by indigenous peoples, discusses the biography behind that work with Pinchbeck. Levy, based in Portland, declines the label of therapist even though many of his clients are analysts and psychiatrists. He describes a father he characterizes as a psychopath, years of intensive meditation and psychedelic practice after moving to the Bay Area, and a 1981 awakening in meditation in which he perceived reality as a collective dream, which led to repeated psychiatric hospitalization and a bipolar diagnosis he refused. He credits Tibetan Buddhist teachers, dreamwork, shamanism, alchemy and Jung with his recovery. His first book, on George W. Bush, already contained the wetiko idea. The conversation ends on quantum physics.

A conversation with Neil Theise, a diagnostic pathologist specializing in liver pathology and author of Notes on Complexity, a short book introducing complexity theory to general readers. Theise describes the book’s thirty-year gestation: his research on adult stem cell plasticity, showing bone marrow stem cells migrate through the body and contribute to other organs, which unexpectedly figured in George W. Bush’s address on stem cells; and a funded recorded dialogue with the artist Jane Prophet, who told him that his description of cell behavior matched how complexity scientists talk about slime molds and ant colonies. That led to modeling stem cells as complex systems, and to a talk he first tried out at the Village Zendo in New York. He wrote the book at his agent’s urging, on the model of Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

Pinchbeck talks with Jared Yates Sexton, the political writer whose books include American Rule and The Midnight Kingdom, which traces lines of power and religious and nationalist mythology through Western civilization to the present. Sexton describes growing up in a poor rural Indiana town inside an extremist Christian culture laced with white nationalism and conspiracy theory, and how covering Trump rallies in 2016 as a fiction writer turned him into a full-time chronicler of right-wing authoritarianism and Christian nationalism. Much of what is visible here concerns the Democrats rather than the right: Sexton argues the party abandoned labor after the 1970s and became Reaganism with a human face. Later he argues consumer capitalism runs on a shame structure inherited from Christian ideas of sin.

Artist and theorist Warren Neidich, known for text-based neon sculptures and as founder of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, discusses the fourth edition of his Glossary of Cognitive Activism with Pinchbeck. Neidich explains that the glossary began in 2015 as a guide for visitors to a Berlin exhibition on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz that included his Statisticon and Pizzagate neons, and has since become a work in its own right, revised as its vocabulary ages: terms tied to the 2016 election such as fake news and meme magic have given way to algorithmic governance and algorithmic bias. He traces cognitive capitalism to Italian post-operaismo thinkers including Antonio Negri, Franco Berardi, Silvia Federici, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, and to Yann Moulier-Boutang’s book of that name. Pinchbeck raises Google mapping and the hippocampus.

Pinchbeck talks with Jem Bendell, the sustainability scholar whose 2018 Deep Adaptation paper argued that climate-driven societal collapse should be treated as likely, about his subsequent book Breaking Together. Bendell describes writing it while living with his father, who was dying of cancer, and explains why he spent years reluctant to press the argument publicly after the paper went viral. He says the evidence indicates the breakdown of modern industrial consumer societies has already begun, that both mainstream and populist alternative media keep the subject taboo, and that suppressed anxiety about it feeds the nostalgia politics visible worldwide, from Make America Great Again to Take Back Control. Pinchbeck raises unseasonable late-October heat in New York, the Israel-Gaza war, and Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Bendell released the book as a free download.

Mark Stahlman, a former Wall Street technology strategist who took America Online public and founded the Center for the Study of Digital Life in 2015, describes the center’s method as net assessment — the diagnostic step that Andy Marshall’s Pentagon Office of Net Assessment placed before strategy and policy — combined with Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. He argues the digital paradigm has made earlier frameworks obsolete, including integralism, complexity science and the work of Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Gebser and Ken Wilber, none of whom addressed AI or robotics. In their place he proposes faculty psychology, grounded in Aristotle’s De Anima, against cognitive psychology. He outlines the center’s projects: the journal Dianoetikon, Trivium University, the consultancy Exogenous, a Dia-Logos initiative aimed at religious organizations, and a geopolitical newsletter. Pinchbeck pushes back on the dismissal of Steiner and Jung.

Thomas Roberts, emeritus professor at Northern Illinois University and author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind and Mindapps, describes teaching what he believes was among the first university courses devoted to psychedelics and the long stretch during which almost no colleagues followed. He recounts encountering the subject as a doctoral student in Willis Harman’s human potential course at Stanford in the late 1960s, when married graduate students described experiences that did not fit his assumptions about drug users. Roberts lays out his multistate theory, which treats psychedelics as one instance of a broader class he calls mind apps or psychotechnologies, alongside hypnosis, breathing practices, yoga, martial arts and brain stimulation. He and Pinchbeck discuss the current expansion of psychedelic interest and Roberts’s writing archive.

Carolyn Elliott, author of Existential Kink, talks with Pinchbeck about where her method came from. The two trace their acquaintance to Pinchbeck’s Evolver network and Reality Sandwich magazine and an Evolver conference in 2012. Elliott describes getting involved around 2013 with OneTaste and its practice of orgasmic meditation, led by Nicole Daedone, which she treats as both a real teaching and a nefarious organization. From it she took the idea that people accept only a narrow band of sensation and reject everything outside it, and that the band can be deliberately widened. She extends the logic of BDSM containers to a person’s relationship with their own circumstances. The closing turns to fear of death as the mechanism of social control.