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.
In this Dazed & Confused interview, cancer researcher and acupuncturist Dr. Sung Baek, head of the Korean Taoist Donghane clan, reads the end of the Mayan Long Count as the start of a new era rather than an ending. He predicts that mutated germs, radiation from the Japanese disaster and natural disasters will sharply reduce the population during what Taoists call the Dragon period.
For Dazed & Confused, an interview with former CIA and Marine Corps intelligence officer Robert Steele about The Open Source Everything Manifesto, published by Evolver Editions in 2012. Steele argues that intelligence drawn from eight open information families outperforms secret agencies, citing General Tony Zinni’s claim that the $80 billion US secret community supplied four percent of his needs, and invokes Buckminster Fuller’s ephemeralism.
Author Antonio Lopez discusses The Media Ecosystem, published by Evolver Editions, in this Dazed & Confused interview. Lopez argues that data clouds and gadgets are materially destructive, that Fox News, Disney, Comcast and Apple perpetuate unsustainable growth, and that grassroots media, from the early-80s LA punk scene to the Arab Spring and Occupy, model the cultural change required.
A Dazed & Confused interview with Sergio Magana, a Mexican healer trained in the Nahuatl lineage and author of 2012-2021: The Dawn of the Sixth Sun. Magana says the Fifth Sun ended in 1991 and the Sixth Sun, a Sun of Darkness, arrives in 2021, requiring mastery of the dream state and the nagual. He ties the shift to the work of Jung and Freud.
Pinchbeck interviews David Sauvage, co-founder of Occupy.com, for Dazed & Confused. Sauvage argues that Occupy is only a temporary name for a global awakening that began with a Tunisian self-immolation, and that alternative media have a moral obligation to abandon superficiality. He says leading Exxon Mobil or Bank of America should carry public shame.
An interview for Dazed & Confused with Richard Hoagland, the former CBS News consultant who claims the Cydonia formation on Mars is an artificial face and whose book Dark Mission alleges NASA was founded by Freemasons and Operation Paperclip scientists. Hoagland predicts the ruling elite will use 2012 to disclose microbial life on Mars, and reads crop circles as a decades-long education program.
Dazed & Confused interview with futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, author of Birth 2012 and Beyond and subject of Neale Donald Walsch’s The Mother of Invention. Hubbard draws on Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, describes a coming species mutation and a shift from procreation to co-creation she calls supra-sex, and outlines Day One, her global activation set for December 22, 2012.
Written for the Transformer column in Dazed & Confused. An interview with John Allen, co-founder of Biosphere 2 and founder of the Institute of Ecotechnics, who recounts buying Synergia Ranch in New Mexico in 1972 and the closed-system experiment of 1991 to 1993. Allen defines the technosphere, cybersphere and ethnosphere, arguing a rising ethnosphere can end the megamachine’s war on the biosphere.
From the Transformer column in Dazed & Confused. Profiles the raw and living foods movement through David Wolfe, the self-described renegade nutritionist behind Naked Chocolate, Superfoods and Eating for Beauty, who argues that cooking destroys enzymes and vitamins. Wolfe promotes raw cacao, maca, chlorella, goji berries and spirulina as routes to vitality and connection to source.