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From “Breaking Open the Head”, “Quetzalcoatl Returns”, “How Soon is Now?”, “Conspiranoia”, and “When plants dream”, I’ve been following the footsteps of Daniel Pinchbeck for over a decade now. I appreciate his radical honesty, speaking truth to power, slaughtering holy cows, and bridging many different areas of exploration.
Sometimes, your writing seems like advocating doomsday scenarios – and albeit many of the signs point in the wrong direction, I want to distill in our conversation today what gives you hope.
Before that, let’s start with giving the listeners an overview of your body of work.
Easiest is to run through your oeuvre, the books, and articles you have written. I want to know what made you write these pieces, as well as how they shaped your reality forward.
Please sketch from a meta-perspective how you see your body of work evolving from “Breaking Open the Head”, “Quetzalcoatl Returns”, “How Soon is Now?”, “Conspiranoia”, “When plants dream”. What were the crucial, pivotal points that moved you from one paradigm to the other? How do your personal experiences link to your body of work? What’s the quintessence from your own work? What body of work are you currently working on? How do you describe analytic idealism? Do we have our own collective Dharma beyond the technological drive? What gives you the most hope? I know you reference yourself more on the pessimistic side but nevertheless, what are signs of hope? We can at least envision our technologies to reconfigure societies. Also, we need social technologies to organize societies. Personally, I don’t think we can solve any of our challenges within the paradigm of neoliberalism – especially large autocracies using the technologies for large-scale surveillance.
Work with Alistair
If this conversation sparked something — a question, a recognition, an edge you're sitting with — that's often where the real work begins.
