Silicon Valley's Crisis of Conscience
Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience
In the lobby, I chatted with Tom Coates, a co-founder of an A.I. startup. These days, he said, before he tells a stranger that he works in tech, “I generally try to say some version of ‘I wasn’t one of the bad guys!’ ” He added, “That should be printed on our nametags: name, job title, which side of history you’re on.”For all the talk of Esalen becoming a beacon of moral guidance for the tech élite, the institute’s public schedule looks much as it did in the seventies. There are workshops on a variety of esoteric subjects (“Know Thy Selves: Past Lives,” “Wild Eros in a Fragmented World,” “SoulCollage”). After the piece about Esalen ran in the Times, a new C.E.O. was installed in Tauber’s place, and Esalen’s leadership tried to reassure its Aquarian customer base that their beloved sanctuary would not be overrun by tech bros. The institute’s promotional photos feature a lot of gray ponytails and very few Silicon Valley luminaries. “With the most pathbreaking stuff, you’re never gonna see it on the Web site,” one Esalen insider told me. “A lot of what they’re doing you’ll only hear about years later, in history books.”There’s some precedent for this. In 1980, Mike Murphy and his wife, Dulce, established the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program. They facilitated meetings between American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, and between agents of the C.I.A. and the K.G.B. Most of these meetings were conducted in secret; many involved nature walks and cross-cultural soaks in the hot springs. (A Newsweek headline, in 1983, referred to “Esalen’s Hot-Tub Diplomacy.”) In 1989, Boris Yeltsin, who had recently resigned from the Politburo, visited the United States on a nine-day trip sponsored by Esalen. He met with President George H. W. Bush, toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and stopped at a run-of-the-mill supermarket on the outskirts of Houston, where the abundant display of pudding pops affected him so strongly—“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice! Not even Mr. Gorbachev!”—that he vowed to dismantle Bolshevism once and for all. “Esalen played its own part in the collapse of Soviet Communism,” Jeffrey Kripal, a professor at Rice University, wrote in his 2007 book, “Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.” If hot-tub diplomacy could help thaw the Cold War, surely it can help diminish human downgrading.Earlier this year, I scanned Esalen’s course offerings. My past lives and my wild eros seemed like things that I could explore on my own time. Instead, I enrolled in a weekend-long workshop called “Digital Detox: Unplug and Reimagine Your Life.” The facilitators were Allie Stark, Brooke Dean, and Adam (Smiley) Poswolsky—all public speakers or life coaches or some combination thereof, all in their thirties. They were happy to let me tag along but asked me to stay undercover “just to maintain the container of that space.” They would e-mail the fifty participants ahead of time to explain that there would be a journalist in their midst, and then, at the end of the weekend, they’d invite me to reveal my identity. I made a halfhearted attempt at subterfuge, packing a few items of clothing that were not black or gray and taking care not to bring along any New Yorker-branded tote bags. When I walked into the Friday-night opening session, I looked down and noticed that I was carrying a WNYC tote bag instead. “So I guess you’re the journalist,” a woman next to me said, with a beneficent smile.We sat in a circle in a large dome-shaped tent. Outside was the ocean, invisible but shockingly loud. Dean led a five-minute meditation. “Feeling your body in this space,” she said. When it was over, she asked, “O.K., how many of you spent half that time wondering whether that’s the sound of the ocean or some kind of digital white-noise machine?” I raised my hand.Poswolsky proposed a few ground rules for the weekend. “But let’s call them ‘agreements,’ ” he said. “ ‘Rules’ sounds so boring.” He uncapped a marker and stood next to an easel pad. “When we talk about building a healthier relationship with our phones, we often talk about it in negatives—no screens after 10 P.M., that sort of thing,” he said. “When we say no to digital technology, what are we saying yes to?”“Openness.”“Vulnerability.”“Being courageous.”“Being vulnerageous.”“Vulnerageous!” Poswolsky said. “I love that!”The main rule (sorry, agreement) was, of course, a phone ban. This was relatively easy to adhere to, because Esalen is so remote that it’s impossible to get cell reception. The facilitators also imposed some conversational content moderation: we were asked to avoid “W-talk,” “W” being short for “work.” “When you meet someone, let’s not start with ‘What do you do?’ ” Dean said. “Maybe start with ‘What makes you feel most alive?’ ” Real names were discouraged. People adopted nicknames for the weekend: Down, Penultimate, Emo Biscotti. (In 2016, Tristan Harris attended a Digital Detox event, as reported in The Atlantic. During a conversation about digital sabbaticals, Harris protested, “For me, this is W-talk.”)We returned to the lodge for dinner—college-co-op-style pad Thai, an artisanal peanut-butter-and-jelly station, and a condiment table featuring several varieties of nutritional yeast. After dinner, most of the group proceeded toward the hot tubs. I did, too, navigating by following the sulfur smell. The tubs had been billed as “clothing optional,” but I was the only person who’d even bothered to bring a bathing suit, much less put one on.The next morning, back in the dome tent, the facilitators debriefed us on our first few hours of phonelessness: “Anyone having any withdrawal symptoms?” They’d brought along a few co-facilitators to lead workshops—“except we call them playshops,” Stark said. Zev would organize a face-painting playshop. Ian would lead a hike to a waterfall. Ramesh Srinivasan, a U.C.L.A. professor, introduced himself: “My research is focussed on how technology impacts the world.”“No W-talk!”“Well, this is awkward.”Cartoon by Tim Hamilton“Oh, right,” he said. “My workshop will be on—”“Playshop!”“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be talking about how a lot of the power of technology has been distributed unequally, and how marginalized communities are trying to develop innovative responses to that. But I’ll try to keep it playful.”I joined Poswolsky’s playshop. A dozen people sat in dappled sunlight, and Poswolsky passed out blank sheets of paper. “On one side, draw the way you present yourself on social media,” he said. “On the other side, draw how you really feel.” The point was that there was a discrepancy. “The game of Instagram is to make it look like, as Kanye said, ‘my life is dope and I do dope shit,’ ” he said. “But we don’t always feel that! Sometimes we feel lonely and scared!”One young woman, a professional yogini, said, “For my W, it’s kinda necessary to have an Instagram presence. I personally find it annoying—the yoga babes doing backbends on the beach—but it keeps people coming to the classes.”“My W is in digital marketing,” a man said. “On the drive down here, I was listening to a podcast about the surveillance economy, about how Google sucked up all our data and is using it for profit and power, and I thought, I’m helping them do that! I don’t work at Google, but everyone who works in my field is a cog in that machine.”Poswolsky mirrored these concerns, using gentle, empathetic language. “I understand feeling the need to be on social media to do your work,” he said.“I only knew about this weekend because I follow you on Facebook,” one man said.“Exactly,” Poswolsky said.Anytime the discussion veered toward politics, someone would change the subject. Once, Poswolsky mentioned Donald Trump, and several people visibly winced. “Dude, I thought this was a safe space!” one of them said, only slightly joking. Throughout the weekend, systemic analysis was discouraged in favor of self-care. Many participants reported that news notifications on their phones made them feel panicked or overwhelmed; their response, in almost every case, had been to stop reading the news. Remaining engaged in public life, and trying to change it, is the work of true democratic citizenship. At Digital Detox, discussing this work was just another kind of W-talk.