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.
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.
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.
An interview in which Pinchbeck argues that relentlessly bleak climate journalism, including New York Magazine’s The Uninhabitable Earth and much of VICE’s reporting, serves corporate culture by breeding fatalism unless it is paired with solutions. He invokes Slavoj Zizek on mindfulness as the ideology of postmodern capitalism, faults Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and calls for full renewable energy within twenty years.
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.
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.
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.