Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker has a bit of fun with the Esalen Institute in a report for the Aug. 26 issue, posted online as “Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience.” Marantz reports on a widely perceived problem in 21st-century America: how well the leaders of Big Tech companies recognize the social harm in their innovations, and whether they intend to decrease that harm.
Marantz does not flat-out mock Esalen or what happens there, but instead quotes keynote speakers who favor jargon and therapy-speak. The amusing remarks begin by the end of the first paragraph:
“This isn’t a place,” a staffer told me while rolling a joint on a piece of rough-hewn garden furniture. “It’s a diaspora, a guiding light out of our collective darkness, an arrow pointing us toward the best way to be fully human.”
To be clear, it is also a place: twenty-seven acres of Big Sur coastline, laid out lengthwise between California Route 1 and the Pacific, a dazzling three-hour drive south of San Francisco. Its full name is the Esalen Institute—a tax-exempt nonprofit, founded in 1962.
Still, Marantz devotes most of his 6,600 words to reporting the background of what troubles some of tech’s innovators, and how they are trying to limit the damage of social media.
Much of the report centers on Tristan Harris, a former project manager at Google who worked on Gmail:
“My hope was that there would be an overriding conversation about intent: ‘How should we make sure we’re ethical about exercising this control over people’s brains?’ Instead, it was ‘How can we make this more engaging?’ ” The previous summer, Harris had gone to Burning Man, where he practiced vulnerable communication, eye-gazing, and Russian martial arts. Returning to his normal life, he experienced a crisis of conscience. “I’d been living with a narrower view of reality than I had previously understood,” he said. He considered leaving Google. Instead, he channelled his doubts into a slide deck that went viral. “I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted,” it read. “We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.” The latter sentence was spread across three slides and superimposed on a stock photo of a man holding the world in his hands.
What began with the slide deck became a movement called Time Well Spent, and is now the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology:
Time Well Spent morphed into the Center for Humane Technology, and Harris started grasping for a new meme that was equal to the scope of the crisis. “In the seventies, you had people talking about pollution, other people talking about acid rain,” Harris said. “It didn’t become a climate movement until there was holistic language to show how it all fit together.” Today, he continued, “there’s this cacophony of grievances about tech—polarization, outrageification, FOMO, narcissism—but we have to show how it’s all actually one big thing.”
The humor kicks into overdrive when Marantz attends a Big Tech gathering at Esalen:
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.” …
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 [work talk].
“What’s coming up for me, thinking about all these big forces we’re up against, is a sense of anxiety and helplessness, like I felt before I quit Insta,” one man said. “I came here to be encouraged and to feel whole, but this is starting to be a bit of a bummer.”
“O.K., let’s change it up,” Poswolsky said. “On the count of three, we’re all gonna shout ‘[Expletive]’ to our inner critic.” When that was done, everyone took turns standing in the middle of a circle, receiving praise from the group. (“You are fierce.” “Loyal.” “A force of nature.”) This exercise brought several people to tears.
… “Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg at one of these?” Poswolsky said. “Standing in the middle of a praise circle, really opening himself to whatever feelings came up?”
“ ‘Mark, you’re fine just the way you are,’ ” Scott said.
“You wouldn’t see it right away,” Poswolsky said. “But I think it would literally save lives.”
Marantz begins his piece by suggesting a test for people’s knowledge of Esalen: “There are two kinds of people: those who know nothing about Esalen and those who purport to know everything about it. To find out which kind of person you’re talking to, simply utter the three syllables (stress on the first, slant-rhyme with ‘mescaline’) and wait. In response, you’ll get either an uncomprehending stare or an effusion of tall tales.”
I have no experience with Esalen, unless one counts the downstream phenomenon of liberal Christians telling untuous stories about what we should learn from flocks of Canada geese, or citing the 100th Monkey legend as if it were holy writ.
Nevertheless, I am cheered by a sign of even a slight cultural change like this:
In recent weeks, Instagram users in Canada, Australia, and five other countries started to see a new pop-up message: “We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get.” To achieve this, the app would stop displaying a post’s total number of likes—just the photo, with no indication of whether it was winning or losing at virality. Tallies of likes are precisely the kind of gamification techniques that social-media platforms use to get consumers hooked. Arturo Bejar, formerly a director of engineering at Facebook and now a freelance consultant, told me that Instagram’s willingness to forgo such an addictive tool “is a very hopeful sign. It might decrease user engagement, or time on site, or revenue, at least in the short term. But it’s the right thing to do.”
If we have Esalen to thank for this, I extend my warmest gratitude.