The genius aesthetic that rules the tech industry relies again and again on this purely gestural kind of courage, on hyping everyday things into grand acts of nonconformism and even resistance. You repeat what people around you are saying anyway and get to call yourself a freethinker. You invest other people’s money to make use of other people’s labor, and you get to call yourself a risk-taker. You tell your coworkers that they really shouldn’t be your coworkers, then you go on Tucker Carlson and talk about persecution. And with this sort of courage, which consists only of gestures of courage, comes a communication that likewise just goes through the motions. If this chapter was about what a certain genius aesthetic sees as courage and independence, then the next will be about the disappointment that occupies the gap between the aestheticized simulacrum and the genuine article.
.4.Communication
“From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes,” Aldous Huxley wrote in 1954. “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.” Huxley strove to overcome this condition, to attain greater empathy, to resonate with others on a more profound level. To know the inner states of others through more than mere inference, through analogy with one’s own self. He sought it through Vedanta, through meditation, through LSD, and—as in the episode described below—through mescaline.
In most cases, however, Huxley came away disappointed. When he gulped down a cup of water with 0.4 grams of mescaline, he says in The Doors of Perception (1954), “I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me … into the kind of inner world described by Blake,” that he would be able to see the world through the eyes of the mystics, of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mescaline, it turned out, was not the way to make that happen. But by a circuitous route, Huxley’s vision of a mind-meld accomplished by new technologies and subtended by a rejection of Western understandings of the mind was transmitted to the tech industry.
In 1960, a Stanford graduate named Dick Price attended a Huxley lecture titled “Human Potentialities.” In 1962, along with another Stanford graduate, Michael Murphy, and with the support of various Northern California intellectuals, including Frederic Spiegelberg (a scholar of Eastern religions at Stanford), the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and Fritz Perls (most famous for the idea of Gestalt therapy), Price opened the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, along the California coast. Huxley soon began giving lectures and seminars at Esalen, as did luminaries such as R. Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, Linus Pauling, and Joseph Campbell. Esalen became known as a center for the human potential movement, one of the longest-lasting institutions of New Age spiritualism.
In recent years, Esalen has come under the sway of Silicon Valley—its current CEO came from the Wikimedia Foundation, and the institute offers courses in “Designing the Life We Want” taught by Silicon Valley consultants. But this isn’t the first time the meditating hippies of the central coast and the Bay Area techies have met. It’s just that for a long time, the influence went primarily the other way. During Esalen’s first, most vibrant decade, academics across America were working on ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. The first message sent via a wide area network, in 1969, went between a lab at the Stanford Research Institute and one at UCLA. As the American historian Peter N. Miller points out, Stanford’s d.school, which focuses on product design and has helped define the tech industry’s approach to gadgets, user experience, and the creative process, was shaped by people with Esalen connections.
And while meditation and yogic practices were the institute’s primary foci, technology was part of the bargain from the start. What else, after all, were 0.4 grams of mescaline dissolved in tap water if not a technology for throwing open the doors of perception? You can get a sense for just how much tech savvy, and how much faith in technology, the human potential movement had, from a story related by the historian (and Esalen board member) Jeffrey Kripal: In 1982, the Russian-American Center (TRAC) at Esalen undertook an experiment in citizen diplomacy. Steve Wozniak, of Apple fame, helped them establish the first satellite communications between the Soviet Union and the United States, allowing citizens, rather than governments, to communicate directly. The first event, Kripal points out, was pretty telling in the way it combined counterculture with then-cutting-edge tech: a set of concerts in a “Satellite Rock-and-Roll Fest.”
But if Huxley’s stratospheric hopes for his mescaline experience traveled from Esalen and other countercultural institutions to the garages and office parks between Redwood City and Mountain View, Huxley’s sense of disappointment traveled along with them. The counterculture furnished techies with a bold intuition of what was possible in communication—and a prefabricated sense of letdown when actual human communication once again fell short of the experiences imagined as you reached for the glass of water with mescaline in it.
And the thing is, we know both of these feelings only too well. On the one hand, there’s the incredible sense of potential when we’re suddenly connected to a much wider world in ways that even twenty years ago would have seemed hopelessly futuristic. And on the other hand, there’s the feeling that
