You might not be interested in the Amazonian plant drugs that lure spirituality-hungry techies into the care of indigenous shamans, but ayahuasca culture is of interest to the tech industry, and whether you like it or not, it affects all of us.
In X, it's an endemic problem. Many veteran trippers claim it's not life-ruining, but the horror stories continue to grow. And it's not just about the notoriously prolonged and painful experience of taking and processing the drug itself.
CEOs are no longer content to be CEOs, they want to be priests and official spiritual authorities on who, what and how we should worship.
Use of the drug often leads to the same kinds of phenomena that occurred in LSD culture generations ago: burnout, absent-mindedness, and dropout, all of which tend to seriously dampen the ambitions of, say, a startup founder or a challenger to the big tech companies' ambitions of world domination.
That was enough to get the tech media and the tech industry in agreement. Today, it's as rare as a peaceful “aya” experience. “A VC told me the other day, 'We lost some really good founders to ayahuasca, and they came back and barely cared about anything anymore,'” Bloomberg writer Ashlee Vance told me recently.
He saidMarc Andreessen, the loquacious venture capitalist, Repost Enough said, “This is true.”
Many stories could be told here about why this is the case, not the least of which is the well-worn one about the shared postwar roots of mid-20th century techno-utopias and drug-utopias, forged in the fires of conspiracy theory about Nazi science, CIA drug labs, and the sinister connections between California's emerging deep state and hippie scene.
read About Michael Hollingshead, the “Evil Austin Powers” whose popularization of acid and acid culture led to political upheaval in the English-speaking world and beyond.
But there is a deeper story behind the West's attempt to fuse technology and fantasy into a transformative singularity than a will to posthumanity. There is indeed something unique about digital technology that is quite different from what its creators believed. While the Leary generation firmly believed they could replicate their personal, inner psychedelic drug trips as external, collective computer-assisted trips, a more subtle and fascinating development is the way advanced technology has drawn people back to the more formal forms of ancient religion.
The great political, economic, social, and spiritual destabilization of the television era was the environment in which the creators of our digital world were born and raised. But the digital has its own logic that has nothing to do with the passions and fantasies of its creators. And that logic is to instill in digital natives an immense boredom and suspicion of anything that feels modern or artificial. That's why illusion and propaganda have had to turn the knob up to 11 just to move the needle even a little.
Yes, the diminishment of humanity by digital dominance has led more and more people to seek validation for their humanity by going back to the deepest resources they can find in their origins: the founding religions of their civilization. What this great trend has done to the tech industry is that many of its most successful businessmen are no longer interested in business. CEOs are no longer content to be CEOs, but want to be priests and official spiritual authorities on who, what and how we should worship.
And America has had a long history of cult leaders.
Spawning Unlike most other civilized societies, business has long been a spiritual enterprise, and spirituality has been business, so whether you turn to that “plant healing guide” or one of Silicon Valley’s many “thriving” Gnostic sects, nothing is easier than slipping yourself into the CEO-to-priest pipeline.
Sadly, none of these options have the staying power of, say, your average televangelist. Spiritual burnout awaits even those who reframe their professional burnout in attuned, shamanic terms. Such suffering refugees await the priests of America’s ancient Christian churches, many of whom have quietly cultivated and transmitted sacred traditions that seek union with God in the time-honored way: an ascetic, athletic spiritual practice of offering the mind to purify the heart, no drugs or bots required…quite the opposite, in fact.
Who better to trust for spiritually authoritative guidance on how and whether to use humanity’s most powerful tool?
