Collected from Pinchbeck’s October 2010 guest blog for Powell’s Books, written around the release of Notes from the Edge Times and the documentary 2012: Time for Change. The entries cover an asthma attack that sent him to Beth Israel, a rebuttal of Neil Genzlinger’s New York Times review of the film, and the question of what a post-Enlightenment culture would look like.
Reality Sandwich published this December 2010 proposal for what Pinchbeck calls business shamanism: using the marketing and organizational techniques of corporations to build a transformational movement, extending his Evolver network. He draws on Albert Camus’s The Rebel, Chris Hedges on the death of the liberal class, and Hannah Arendt and Antonio Negri, warning that America’s coming rupture may first produce authoritarianism.
Published in Fifth Estate in 2008. Reading the Bear Stearns collapse and the subprime meltdown alongside Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse and David Harvey’s remarks at the Left Forum, Pinchbeck argues that this is not a liquidity crisis but a crisis of money itself, invoking Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts on money as the visible divinity.
A 2007 New York Times feature on the 2012 phenomenon that profiles Pinchbeck alongside the late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM and Jose Arguelles’s Harmonic Convergence. It places 2012 millenarianism in a longer American lineage of failed end dates, from William Miller’s Great Disappointment to Y2K, quoting historian Paul S. Boyer on the appeal of apocalypse.
Anu Bonobo’s email interview for Fifth Estate, October 2007. Pinchbeck rejects the New Age label, calling belief the enemy of knowledge, and presents 2012 as a hypothesis rather than a prediction: that the Classic Maya were wizard scientists who calculated a shift in World Ages. He calls for permaculture, local currencies, and a spiritual revolution renewing Emerson’s Transcendentalism.
Rolling Stone’s 2006 profile of Pinchbeck as the figurehead of a new psychedelic elite. It follows him through DMT sessions in an East Village apartment, weekends with Sting and Moby, and Burning Man, and sets his account of ayahuasca against William Burroughs’s, while noting Alex Grey and the Johns Hopkins psilocybin study.
An interview and book profile from Catalyst Magazine, 2006, conducted during a visit to Salt Lake City. It presents 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl as a work drawing on Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and Jose Arguelles, and reports Pinchbeck’s claim that Quetzalcoatl’s return is an archetype signaling a shift in the psyche rather than a literal event.
Reported for The Guardian in 2003. The piece follows ibogaine from Howard Lotsof’s 1962 discovery of its anti-addictive effect through its US criminalization to treatment clinics run by Martin Polanco in Rosarito, Mexico and Marc Emery in Vancouver, and recounts Pinchbeck’s own Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon.
Written for Artforum in 2003. The essay traces Burning Man from Larry Harvey’s 1986 effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach to a thirty-thousand-person city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and argues that its gift economy and deliberately destroyed artworks, such as David Best’s Temple of Tears, place it outside official art-world judgment.