The Secret History and Unwritten Future of Psychedelics and Technology

An excerpt from this week's Team Human conversation

Here’s an excerpt from a panel I was on a couple of weeks ago about technology and psychedelics, with Team Human friends Dr. Julie Holland, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Ken Jordan, editorial director of Lucid News, which this panel was meant to support and promote. 

Lucid News is an interesting journal about the state of psychedelics, consciousness technologies, and the future of wellness. It’s one of the only places I know of doing genuinely responsible psychedelic journalism. And this matters — as we discuss on the panel — because there’s a pretty intense competition going on for who is going to establish the “set and setting” for the psychedelic future. 

They let me name the panel, so I called it, The Secret History and Unwritten Future of Psychedelics and Technology, hoping we could get into both the psychedelic origins of the internet, as well as the way that tech bros now want to monopolize psychedelics as an industry. What can the burgeoning psychedelics industry learn from the mistakes of the internet?

We held the discussion at The Athanaeum - a psychedelic library and co-working space (bet you never heard that construction before) — in front of about a hundred really sweet people. 

This was a good one, and I hope you like it. Remember, you can hear the whole thing by clicking on the link!

Ken Jordan:
We're going to talk about psychedelics and computers to kick the panel off. First, I'm going to ask each of you the same question: what could the tech industry learn from psychedelics? Or, in your opinion, what should it learn?

Julie Holland:
Balance. Honoring dark, mysterious, yin energy, instead of being quite so yang heavy, I think would be good for all of us.

Douglas Rushkoff:
The computer industry wouldn't be here without psychedelics. My early books documented how all of these companies needed to hire deadheads and acid-takers in order to be able to imagine and hallucinate virtual realities into existence. They were the only ones who weren't afraid. Either you hired a psychedelics person or you found a child. Everybody else couldn't do it.

What the tech industry can learn from psychedelics, or at least from psychedelic culture, is that the “set and setting” with which you deploy and manifest a technology is going to determine how it works. The current set and setting for the internet is surveillance, control, and exponential growth. We've been living on that particular psychedelic substrate for 35 years. No wonder we're having such a bad trip.

Paul Miller:
I love the sense that psychedelics comes from the Greek term, psyche, which is essentially a Greek muse. Eerily enough, the notion of “better living through chemistry” was a mantra from DuPont Corporation, which I always chuckle about.

To dovetail on what you were just talking about, the attention economy has now displaced the production of physical goods, at pretty much every level. Trillions of dollars based on the machinery of perception. This year we’re having the most amount of elections in human history. I believe 50 to 60 countries are having elections worldwide. Most of that's going to be influenced by influence campaigns. Using misinformation, AI, all sorts of stuff. The politics of perception, that politics literally, as we think of, say for example, Donald Trump, I like to call him president as malware.

In the same way you think about the Greek word psyche, psychedelics eerily comes from this notion of being able to visualize different modalities of perception. So, the Silicon Valley ethos of move fast and break things needs a remix.

Ken Jordan

My thirty-second take on that is discovering, or rediscovering, the importance of being in your body. For me, psychedelics are very much an embodied experience and we're living in a culture that seems to be moving farther away from having that sense of physical connection..

Julie Holland:
Now, I don’t want to change my answer but I thought of another one. Playfulness. Play. Creativity comes from pushing the boundaries a little bit. One could be in a more creative, playful state if one took the right things.

Ken Jordan:
Let's explore that. There's a lot of psychedelic action happening right now in Silicon Valley. It's hard to tell exactly where that's all going and how people are actually moving that into their experience as engineers and how they end up using it in the digital realm that is being developed. Doug, how could they maybe use it differently or better?

Rushkoff:
I want to go back to the concept of play. Which is that. The Silicon Valley tech bro mindset is addicted to the utilitarian application of things. So if they're gonna look at psychedelics, they're going to say, “Well, what's the utility value of this psychedelic?”

Because they even look at humans this way. They think, “How can I increase Julie's utility value to the economy by drugging her with psychedelics?” rather than what I believe we got out of psychedelics, which was that “Oh, life is about play!”

Dogs don't chase each other to practice for the hunt. Dogs hunt and eat so they have energy to play and chase each other. There's a book called Homo Ludens by a Dutch thinker named Huizinga, where he makes the argument that play is the essential human activity. That's the thing I would want to tell tech bros. It's not about the application. It's about our more divine, sacred purpose, if you will.

Paul Miller:
I want to riff on that from the viewpoint of anti-play. Eerily enough, in late capitalism, most people are just living to pay their bills. It has been fascinating to see with this economy that's been disinterred since the pandemic, one could argue that there's been a radical shift of consolidation of wealth. So most people lost certain economic agency over the last couple of years. Then, a small percentage of people have consolidated and gained wealth at an incredible amount of transfer.

There's a term called cultural capital, which a couple of French philosophers came up with, to try to guage new approaches to generating value. So when you're talking about utility, when you're thinking about production, Marx had this infamous phrase, which sounds very psychedelic, which is “all that’s solid melts into air after a certain amount of economic activity.”

Here we are, where this idea of the internet itself has transformed to what Marshall McLuhan would have called the global brain. But the molecules that drive that, for me at least, are everything from fossil fuel to plastics, to other things that are highly toxic, and we need to rethink our relationship to nature as it's been displaced by capital.

If you go to the very first paintings ever made, people went into a cave where there was darkness. Why would they go into a cave and put their hands on a wall and leave a silhouette that we would see tens of thousands of years later? Probably because they were on a substance. There's a lot of theories about the origins of both psychedelics and creativity. The oldest cave paintings, a lot of people are realizing, there was a psychoactive involvement in ritual and time. Just sayin.

Ken Jordan:
So how do we bring play in an active way into the psychedelic experience of folks who are working on technology if they're not currently getting that message from the significant psychedelic work that they're doing. Maybe work is not quite the right word, but you know. Certainly the Burning Man culture is a big part of silicon valley, right?

Julie Holland:
I remember everyone was talking about microdosing a while back and, all of a sudden, all I heard about microdosing was that Silicon Valley is using it not for creativity, but for productivity.

And I think that’s what Doug is getting at: It can't be all about productivity and capitalism. And you were talking about unrestricted growth, which in medicine, unrestricted growth is cancer. So we don't like unrestricted growth where I live, and somebody needs to explain that very basic idea that after growth is pruning. You pull back and see what's important, what matters, and then it's stronger and it'll finally fruit. But if you keep growing and it gets bushier and bushier, it's not gonna fruit.

Rushkoff:
Yeah, but these guys will take the notion of pruning very literally. It's like the guy who pushed the button in the Avengers movie. Just prune humanity.

To hear the rest of this one-hour conversation, click the link below!