Written for Reality Sandwich in January 2009, on the occasion of two Chelsea exhibitions of his father’s work. Pinchbeck’s memoir of the abstract painter Peter Pinchbeck, who left hundreds of canvases in a rent-controlled Greene Street loft and who, asked whether he would trade his style for recognition, said he would change nothing.
A Conscious Choice column from January 2009. Taking the Mayan idea, via Ian Lungold, that intention is as fundamental to navigation as position in time and space, Pinchbeck asks what intention a post-consumer society would be built on, and argues the collapse could induce either mass despair or a deliberate redesign.
A Conscious Choice column from December 2008. Pinchbeck sets out the short-term prognosis as he saw it — bailouts feeding hyperinflation, farmers cut off from credit at harvest — and argues that what people can most usefully offer one another at such a juncture is their actual presence.
A Conscious Choice column from November 2008. Pinchbeck admits to contradictory feelings as the financial system unravelled — an urge to hoard tinned food, and something close to celebration — and links the meltdown to peak oil and to Naomi Klein’s account of disaster capitalism.
Written for Reality Sandwich in October 2008 out of a late-night habit of tracking the financial system’s collapse. Pinchbeck gathers the LEAP2020 default forecast and the day’s warnings, then argues that what is missing is not diagnosis but a comprehensivist plan — Buckminster Fuller meets Machiavelli — for what holds value if the system goes down.
A Conscious Choice column from October 2008 that begins with Jefferson’s late regret that the American Revolution built no mechanism to keep insurrection alive, and moves to Rob Hopkins’s Transition Town movement and Alexis Zeigler’s Culture Change as models for rebuilding local resilience against peak oil.
A short piece for Reality Sandwich from October 2008, written after several warnings of imminent socio-economic disruption, including John Petersen’s precognitive-dream study at the Arlington Institute. Pinchbeck sets out what such a rupture might involve and argues the cooperative model will ultimately displace the competitive one.
A Conscious Choice column from September 2008, written after speaking on orbs at a Glastonbury conference. Pinchbeck stays agnostic on what they are and turns sociological instead: orbs are a postmodern phenomenon that could only appear through digital cameras and photo-sharing, and their real interest lies in what they say about group consciousness.
A Conscious Choice column from August 2008, written as progressives lost faith in the Obama campaign. Pinchbeck sets out the policies he would want — an end to GDP as the measure of a society, a Northern European mix of incentive and social protection, an exit from the military pursuit of oil.
First published on Reality Sandwich on 18 March 2008 and reprinted in Fifth Estate later that year. 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.