The Future Is Here and We Are Not Ready
On the labour and institutional consequences of rapid AI deployment, and the absence of any adequate governmental or corporate plan for them.
Essay and Articles
The French Chateau of Endless Pleasure
An account of a weekend at Hedoné, a European experiment in organised pleasure, and what it suggests about intimacy, ritual and consent when they are deliberately designed.
Essay and Articles
Technofeudalism and Its Discontents
On Yanis Varoufakis’s term for an order in which platform owners extract value through surveillance and captured attention rather than markets and wages, and on why the avant-garde response is to reappropriate those tools rather than retreat from them. Draws on Ben Tarnoff, Douglas Rushkoff, Jamie Wheal and Audrey Tang’s work in Taiwan.
Essay and Articles
Among the Edgelords
Reporting from Hereticon, an invitation-only gathering of technology figures and the dark-enlightenment thinkers who circulate among them, where an optimistic account of the future is premised on leaving democracy behind.
Essay and Articles
Rudolf Steiner and the Obsolescence of Materialism
An introduction to Rudolf Steiner for readers formed by scientific materialism, arguing that analytic idealism — via Bernardo Kastrup — gives a coherent framework for taking Steiner seriously again. Covers his cosmology of recurring Earth incarnations, the subtle bodies, the organs of imagination, inspiration and intuition, and the opposing forces he named Lucifer and Ahriman, with the suggestion that artificial intelligence is the Ahrimanic incarnation he foresaw.
Essay and Articles
Regenerative Revolution
Written for Purple’s Revolutions issue. Pinchbeck describes losing and regaining his conviction that collapse is avoidable, and argues that classical revolution is no longer the available form. Instead he proposes redirecting displaced labour toward regenerative work — wetland restoration, ocean aquaculture, retrofitting — funded by a basic income, alongside a shift from materialism to idealism. Draws on Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
Essay and Articles
What Is New York?
A memoir of New York across five decades — St Marks Place and Thelonious Monk, a SoHo loft when the neighbourhood was still light industry, his father’s painting and Max’s Kansas City, his mother Joyce Johnson’s editing and her year with Kerouac, the downtown clubs, Open City and Rob Bingham, and Collective Hardware as a temporary autonomous zone. Ends on the question of what the city means now that the next big thing is no longer located anywhere.
Essay and Articles
The Work of Art in the Age of Blockchains, NFTs, and Artificial Intelligence
Written during the 2022 crypto collapse. Pinchbeck separates the speculative wreckage of the NFT market from what he takes to be the durable potential of blockchain tools, and reads both against Walter Benjamin on the aura of the artwork and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture. Covers Tyler Hobbs and generative art, Ethereum’s proof-of-work problem, Beeple and Pak, the Bored Ape economy, the LaMDA sentience episode, and DAOs as a possible successor to the corporation.
Essay and Articles
Mexico’s Psychedelic Renaissance
Written from Tulum for Purple’s Mexico issue. Pinchbeck traces Mexico’s psychedelic legacy — psilocybin and the Mazatec, peyote among the Huichol and Tarahumara, Salvia divinorum, the Sonoran toad, and Castaneda’s disputed Don Juan — against the commercialisation now overtaking it, from Thiel-funded psychedelic startups to Tulum’s Bufo trade. Recounts his own DMT initiation at Palenque, a 5-MeO-DMT session in Mexico City, and Wasson’s encounter with María Sabina, and closes on Sergio Magaña’s account of the Sixth Sun and Octavio Paz on Mexican solitude.
A Journey of the Mind and Soul
Originally published on VICE US. Pinchbeck interviews Allan Badiner about his anthology Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, asking whether the two traditions conflict. Badiner recounts a grueling Sri Lankan meditation retreat, meeting the chemist Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna, and cites Huston Smith and Ken Wilber on the gap between altered states and altered traits.