Video Essays

Pinchbeck examines the twenty-two-point manifesto Palantir posted on X, which Yanis Varoufakis called an AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence and which distills Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic. The document claims Silicon Valley owes the country an affirmative obligation to help defend it, that hard power this century rests on software, and that some cultures are vital while others are dysfunctional and regressive. Pinchbeck sets this beside Curtis Yarvin’s joke about processing the underclass into biodiesel, Peter Thiel’s closed-door lectures defining the Antichrist as any global authority that would limit AI or tax billionaires, and Thiel’s writing on women’s suffrage. He notes the National Defense Authorization Act’s amendment automatically registering men aged eighteen to twenty-six for Selective Service, and argues the right’s new masculinity is a synthesis rather than a restoration.

Pinchbeck argues that Elon Musk’s conduct, including the dismantling of USAID and his adoption of Gad Saad’s notion of suicidal empathy, is better described by older traditions as demonic possession than by psychology. He builds the case on William Irwin Thompson’s essay on the Ramayana in Coming Into Being, which holds that esoterically naive use of drugs and technology erodes the membrane between the psychic and physical planes and admits beings from the intermediate realm of Kamaloka. He cites the 2022 Nobel Prize work of Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger against naive physicalism, Peter Berger’s concept of plausibility structures, and reports of malevolent entity encounters under extended-state DMT protocols.

A solo essay in which Pinchbeck reviews the career of the New Age author David Wilcock following his suicide at 53, and rejects the conspiracy theories circulating in the alternative media world Wilcock helped build, including claims that he was assassinated. Pinchbeck notes the death days earlier of Wynn Free, co-author of the book asserting that Wilcock was the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce. He catalogues Wilcock’s claims about giants on an exploded super-Earth, the moon as a hollowed-out spacecraft, and a staged Jonestown, and traces the drift from New Age mysticism through the secret space program to QAnon and support for Trump. He draws on David G. Robertson of the Open University on epistemic capital and epistemic seclusion, and blames gatekeepers including Penguin, Gaia and the History Channel.

This piece presents a dramatized reading of the Apocryphon of John, the Gnostic text also known as the Secret Book of John, rather than a commentary on it. The narrative opens with John, son of Zebedee, challenged at the temple by a Pharisee named Arimanius, withdrawing to a mountainous place and receiving a vision of a figure that shifts between child, old man and youth and identifies itself as father, mother and son. The text then unfolds a cosmology of the unknowable One, the emanation of Barbelo, the transgression of Sophia, the birth of the ignorant creator Yaldabaoth, the fashioning and awakening of Adam, the luminous Epinoia, and Providence’s three descents into the prison of matter.

Pinchbeck argues that the Christie’s auction of Jim Irsay’s collection, in which Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll sold for more than twelve million dollars to the musician Zach Bryan, marks the final conversion of countercultural artifacts into luxury assets, and that the conditions which produced such a counterculture no longer exist. He draws on his mother Joyce Johnson’s memoir Minor Characters and her relationship with Kerouac to describe a bohemian order in which artistic poverty carried value. He argues that hypercommercial media now consumes subcultures before they can form, that transgressive energy has migrated to the alt-right, and that oligarchs including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, along with Palantir’s Alex Karp, are actively pursuing social disruption.

Pinchbeck argues that apocalypse means unveiling rather than annihilation, and that the present moment, marked by the Epstein files, the funding of ICE detention centers and the concentration of wealth in a few hands, is a collective initiation in which suppressed material is forced into consciousness. He connects Hopi and Mayan prophecy and the work of Jose Arguelles and Terence McKenna, which he treated in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to Edward Edinger’s Jungian reading in The Archetype of the Apocalypse and Christopher Bache’s LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Working from Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, he contends that effective resistance requires a metaphysical basis.

The video pairs a short film with an exposition of Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher who died in 2020, directed the Institut de recherche et d’innovation at the Centre Pompidou and founded Ars Industrialis. Pinchbeck presents Stiegler’s claim that technology is not a tool but a constitutive condition of human memory and consciousness, and that every technics is a pharmakon, poison and cure, a term taken from Plato and Derrida. He explains primary, secondary and tertiary retention, the double epochal redoubling whose second beat now fails to arrive, generalized proletarianization, systemic stupidity, Georges Canguilhem’s infidelity of the milieu, and the passage from Entropocene to Neganthropocene.

Pinchbeck argues that Trump is visibly decompensating, citing clinicians who work with dementia patients and who estimate two to four months before his behavior forces removal under the 25th Amendment or he dies, and that the danger of this endgame lies in the psychology of malignant narcissism. He notes that the term was developed to account for Adolf Hitler, and takes Hitler’s orders to destroy Berlin and poison its land in the final days as the precedent for a leader who cannot imagine a future without himself, raising the risk of a deliberate slide toward nuclear war. He closes by proposing that proximity to annihilation can also break inherited structures, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as the trigger for the 1960s counterculture.

Pinchbeck argues that Allie Beth Stuckey’s book Toxic Empathy inverts the teaching of the Gospels by recoding compassion as sin and withdrawal of care as spiritual strength. He reads this through Herbert Marcuse’s concept of surplus repression from Eros and Civilization, contending that people who have learned to amputate their own desires demand the same self-mutilation from others. Prompted by the Supreme Court permitting suspension of SNAP benefits to 47 million people, he sets Stuckey against Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, and the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff. He also draws on Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and on the imperial economics behind migration.

Pinchbeck responds passage by passage to a video by Nick Freitas, the former Green Beret and Virginia Republican congressional candidate turned right-wing media host, in which Freitas argues that coexistence with leftism is no longer possible following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Pinchbeck’s objections are mainly to the framing: that “the left” is treated as a single entity, that no glorification of political violence is evident among the figures he takes as mainstream, and that the accused killer’s ideology has not been established. He notes that Freitas casts domestic politics in counterinsurgency terms drawn from his military background. Pinchbeck states his own position as a leftism bound up with mysticism, esotericism, analytic idealism and an esoteric Christianity influenced by Rudolf Steiner.