Conversations

A conversation with Brett Scott, an economic anthropologist and former derivatives broker whose book Cloud Money: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for Our Wallets argues that big tech and big finance are fusing and squeezing out physical cash. Scott describes an upwards anthropology that studies powerful institutions rather than remote communities, an impulse that took him into over-the-counter swaps and inflation and property derivatives during the financial crisis, work he treated as immersive and gonzo rather than academic. He explains derivatives as large-scale contractual bets and traces his path from the 2013 activist handbook The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance through years of reporting on alternative currencies. Pinchbeck raises Catherine Austin Fitts and her warnings about centralized digital currency. The exchange ends on physicality and slowness as things worth reclaiming, with cacao beans invoked as a classical Maya currency.

Pinchbeck introduces Building Our Regenerative Future, a month-long online course launching in June 2020, alongside the writer Rory Spowers and the documentary maker Bruce Parry, known for living among Indigenous communities for the BBC series Tribe. They lay out eight sessions covering food, health, community, economics, culture and consciousness, with archived recordings, reading lists, optional workshops and a certificate. Spowers frames the underlying argument: the extractive economy is linear while living systems are cyclical, so the way back is to build systems that are regenerative by design. Pinchbeck describes three aims, knowledge, action and connection, the last meant to create a network of people pursuing the same shift. Parry discusses what community and solidarity mean under the conditions the pandemic has exposed and the need for a shared narrative.

A short early conversation between Pinchbeck and a guest he addresses as Sarah Beth, who describes years spent studying abduction testimony and alleged government contact with extraterrestrials. She lays out a three-tier model of government in which elected officials are figureheads, a second tier runs black operations and currency, and a third tier deals directly with extraterrestrials on terms that make conventional categories of good and evil hard to apply. Pinchbeck pushes on the imagination’s role, invoking William Blake’s claim that imagination is human existence itself rather than a mental state, and asks whether human imagining participates in constructing these entities. The talk moves through lunar anomalies, the reported biology of the grays, and Guy McPherson’s methane-driven near-term extinction thesis.

A short early segment from Pinchbeck’s series The Pinch, in conversation with a friend identified only as Sarabeth, on the design of modern society. She argues that domes suit human beings while boxes do not, observing that seats of power such as the White House and the Vatican sit under domes while everyone else is stacked in cubes, and says that living in a dome gives her more fluid access to her own mind. Taking up Buckminster Fuller’s position that human problems are design problems, she proposes an Imaginarium combining art-making, experiment and exhibition in one space, mandatory green roofs on sound buildings, and schools that hold permaculture and gardening design competitions instead of endless testing. She also sketches a circular town plan with dwellings that open directly outdoors.

A live conversation, recorded before December 2012, between Pinchbeck and Reggie Watts, the musician and comedian known for improvised looped vocal performance. Pinchbeck asks what role the Mayan calendar end-date plays in Watts’s cosmology. Watts calls it spiritual Y2K, says he plans to sit it out on a friend’s farm rather than in a grid-dependent city, and reads the date as an opportunity for a shift in consciousness rather than a catastrophe. Pinchbeck summarizes John Major Jenkins’s galactic alignment thesis, in which the winter solstice sun arrives at the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way, read in Mayan cosmology as a meeting of great mother and first father, while conceding no known mechanism for terrestrial effect. Watts describes reality as an operating system organized around conflict, and takes musical improvisation as his model for collective consciousness.

Pinchbeck talks with Benjamin Knight, a New Zealand-based co-founder of Loomio, the open-source platform for collective decision-making and collaborative governance. Knight describes how the project came out of Occupy, where in-person general assemblies proved constrained by having to gather everyone in one place, a condition that selected for the loudest voices and produced what he calls informal dictatorships. He cites the essay on the tyranny of structurelessness on how unacknowledged power structures emerge in movements that reject formal structure. The tool, then in late-stage beta with roughly fifty thousand users, had spread beyond activists to local governments, parent-teacher associations, permaculture projects and community currency groups. Knight points to Podemos in Spain as evidence of appetite for decentralized decision-making. Pinchbeck jokes throughout about New Zealand as a lifeboat nation for wealthy foreigners.