Emma Goldberg
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Well, I think some tech CEOs have a lot of really kind of... egotistical or hierarchical ideas of how society should be organized.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
There's a combination of beliefs that are centered on this sort of mystical experiences aligned with technocratic goals of optimizing, you know, your experience or your ability to do labor, whether it's through psychedelics or genetic modification or biohacking or neural link AI, or the reemergence of the eugenics movement. Like, uh, I have a quote from, um, Serge Faget, he started Mirror AI.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
He had a quote saying that he was getting into biohacking as a means to, quote, help make us immortal post-human gods that cast off the limits of our biology and spread across the universe. Really kind of new age stuff. Sam Altman, you know, he recently talked about psychedelics as, quote, one of the most transformative things in his life.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Sam Altman also invested in a libertarian city-state project called Praxis Nation.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
That line, heroic action, contemplation, is taken from the Italian fascist author, Julius Evola. Their slogan on their website is, reclaim the West. About as fascist as you can get. And so I think this rhetoric shares a lot of overlaps with the discourse around psychedelics in Silicon Valley as something that's providing this kind of vitalist, masculine, transcendent contemplation.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Yeah. For me, I think people have the agency to do whatever things they would like to and go about them as they do outside of a legalistic view. But I think, as we've mentioned, I'm worried that as these become more common and more commonplace, people are going to be engaging with them only in a very commercialized and consumable form.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
You're going to see a lot of kind of integration with data harvesting apps. You have lots of startups that are promoting at-home psychedelic therapy with an app. you're going to see some startups keep all of that data and sell it to marketers.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
And so it is a way of integrating psychedelics with all the other forms of data capitalism and platform capitalism that are already across the Silicon Valley industry.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
It's interesting. We have this image of CEOs trying to self-optimize. You know, there's that term biohacking that goes around a lot. But also a lot of these billionaires have some kind of bizarre ideas sometimes that, you know, like people like Brian Johnson, they're really obsessed with immortality.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
You have people like Patrick Friedman sharing books about Eastern religion, about cultivating true essence to become an immortal and attain godhood was a tweet he posted. There's a lot of this very new agey, vague stuff mixed in with all of this really high tech science stuff. There's a lot in what both of you said right there.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Yeah, in fact, you know, it's not even just the same place. A lot of it is even the same people.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
There's a great book on this by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture that's all about the group that came around the entrepreneur Stuart Brand and how he kind of bridged this gap between starting from the kind of back to the land hippie collectives to big technology developmental groups using a lot of this stuff as kind of a
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Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
ideology around which you can kind of create this perfect libertarian society that some CEOs are obsessed with.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Something within my research on the tech industry and kind of tech culture that really worries me is this obsession with these big existential questions, having the tech industry being the ones to solve big existential questions. There was a lot of discourse around psychedelics will make people more in tune with the environment. And so we could have a more eco-conscious society.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
Psychedelics will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. That was one thing that came out in news articles. But, you know, psychedelics can't do all this. In fact, you know, I would think that. As we've been talking about, the very heights of Silicon Valley's power, some CEOs are already doing psychedelics. If they were going to fix society, it would have already been done.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
I think it goes along with recent stuff like you heard Sergey Brin say that his tech workers should be working 60-hour weeks in a way that's kind of disturbing. That a lot of the tech industry and a lot of startup culture that's evolved around there is really set on kind of cultivating this family image that we're all in this together every part of our lives.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
This has to be dedicated to this company. This is how startups get off the ground. There's a lot of this rhetoric going around.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
There's a good book on this subject called Work Prey Code, specifically about how all of this religion, whether traditional or Eastern or esoteric or whatever, get lumped into tech industry stuff is because it's designed to cultivate this sense of closeness, this kind of bonds with your worker families that you're constantly focusing on bringing, you know, capital to your company.
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Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
For me, I think it's commercialization of other cultures. If we look at Ayahuasca specifically, actual indigenous cultures in Western Amazonia and Iquitos, Peru are very, very diverse. There's no one concept of what shamanism is. There's no one practice.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
And yet the version that's kind of being sold to a lot of wealthy American tourists is a specific, very commercialized, you know, business appropriate aesthetic of what an existential experience is supposed to be like. That's really had a lot of other parts of it shaved down and commercialized fit that.
It's Been a Minute
Why tech bros worship psychedelics (and think you should too)
And so you end up with a lot of indigenous communities that don't really have a lot of resources anymore. and are kind of being morphed and reshaped by American tourist interests.