Video Essays

Pinchbeck argues that the most useful text for thinking about artificial general intelligence is not by a futurist but by Oscar Wilde: his 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Wilde imagined machinery absorbing monotonous labor so that everyone, not only a minority with inherited wealth and leisure, could develop their individuality, and treated cultivated leisure rather than work as the proper end of human life. Pinchbeck sets this against statements by Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic that AGI is two to four years away, to be followed by AI-augmented robotics displacing manual labor. He restates Wilde’s fork between industrial tyranny and a society that converts private property into public wealth, and proposes redirecting freed labor toward ecological repair, permaculture and renewable energy.

In a solo commentary, Pinchbeck argues that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is serving as a prototype for authoritarian governance in the United States. Speaking as a secular Jew raised in New York, he sets Jewish participation in the labor movement, Selma, the anti-apartheid campaign and the antiwar movements, invoking Abraham Joshua Heschel and Hannah Arendt, against what he calls a perversion of that inheritance. He contends the American far right, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 treat Israel as a working model of a militarized ethnostate built on walls, mass surveillance and criminalized dissent. He cites the State Department’s Catch and Revoke program, which uses artificial intelligence to screen student visa holders’ social media, and Palantir’s role in Israeli targeting, arguing that Gaza is a laboratory for tools that will be turned on Americans.

A panel on underground psychedelic healing held at The Psychedelic Assembly, a membership-supported psychedelic library and community space in New York, moderated by Pinchbeck. Panelists include Ian Pai, a musician who has guided ceremonies for about sixteen years after training in a lineage he traces to Peru; Anna Yusim, a psychiatrist on the Yale faculty who is building a mental health and spirituality center bridging the medical school and the divinity school and who wrote Fulfilled; and a facilitator behind the Underground Mama channel who formed a de facto community during the pandemic. The discussion covers best practices outside the legal system, the open-ended and relational character of integration, and how facilitators demonstrate safety. Pinchbeck recalls that when Breaking Open the Head appeared in 2002 few in New York discussed psychedelics at all.

A live event in New York rather than a studio conversation, hosted by Pinchbeck and framed as an unrehearsed descent into collective dread. Pinchbeck introduces Bob Eisenberg, who proposed the evening and argues that this generation, or its children, will likely witness the demise of humanity, that wildfires, floods and contaminated water are worsening measurably, and that the culture’s reflexive hopefulness should give way to what he calls overt pessimism. Eisenberg invokes Marx’s theory of crisis, underconsumption and overproduction, to describe profit concentrating upward; Pinchbeck notes that anyone with a retirement account is implicated. An original plan to work through the existential risks one by one, including nuclear war and AI, was abandoned. Musical performances open and close the evening.

An early solo broadcast in which Pinchbeck responds to “Print Less but Transfer More,” the Foreign Affairs article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan arguing that central banks should hand cash directly to households, targeted at the bottom 80 percent of earners, instead of relying on asset purchases and interest rate adjustments. Pinchbeck treats the proposal as a sign that the monetary system is a design artifact open to redesign rather than a natural fact, and reviews alternatives he has worked on as an editor and filmmaker: Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, the Evolver anthology What Comes After Money?, Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money, Japan’s fureai kippu eldercare credits, Thomas Greco’s mutual credit and local exchange systems, and John Boik’s community currency modeling. He ends on Bitcoin and distributed autonomous organizations.