Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
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.
Written as the introduction to What Comes After Money?, the 2011 Reality Sandwich anthology edited with Ken Jordan. Pinchbeck argues that debt-based currency is a designed tool rather than a natural fact, drawing on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Antonio Negri’s definition of capital as a social relation, and Pierre Clastres’s Society Against the State.
Appearing in Dazed & Confused in 2011, this column argues the financial system is collapsing because growth has exhausted both markets and resources, and that money issued into existence as debt by private bankers manufactures artificial scarcity. It backs Bernard Lietaer’s negative-interest currency and community-issued alternatives, noting that biologists find mature ecosystems develop through cooperation.
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.
A Conscious Choice column from April 2009, written as Thomas Friedman conceded that the postwar growth model was finished. Pinchbeck reads the crash as a permanent paradigm shift rather than a fixable interruption, and describes building Evolver as something closer to a social utility than a business.
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.