The first newsletter of the Center for Planetary Culture, dated July 2014. Pinchbeck, its executive director, distinguishes the think tank he started with Jana Astanov from RAND, Brookings, and the Project for a New American Century, describes research toward a regenerative civilization, and cites Buckminster Fuller on utopia or oblivion and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture.
Announcing the Center for Planetary Culture, this working draft lays out a post-carbon transition plan divided into technical, social, and communication strategy. It covers bioremediation through Paul Stamets and John Todd, ecocities, alternative currencies and blockchain-based organizations, demilitarization, and liquid democracy, citing Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest.
Written in support of the Worldwide Wave of Action. Citing IPCC projections, a 30 percent rise in ocean acidity, and James Lovelock’s forecast of a human population reduced to a few hundred thousand, Pinchbeck argues that no adequate response is possible under neoliberal capitalism, and that ownership must give way to stewardship using new social technologies.
Pinchbeck describes the split between creative work and self-promotion, citing his GaiamTV talk show Mind Shift, which he was expected to sell to 1,000 new subscribers, and the years he lost marketing his own company, Evolver. He invokes Lewis Mumford on capitalism and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism as grounds for arguing that artists should not be their own marketing machines.
Built around quotations from Bataille’s On Nietzsche, Antonio Negri’s Time for Revolution, and Georg Kuhlewind’s Becoming Aware of the Logos, the piece argues that capitalism rests on domination and cannot be reformed, only superseded. Pinchbeck holds that a cooperative society must integrate humanity’s destructive tendencies as ancient Egypt and the Maya did through paired deities like Set and Tezcatlipoca.
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.