60 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
A REPORTERAT LARGE
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Big Tech searches for its soul.BY ANDREW MARANTZ
T
here 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 “mesca-
line”) and wait. In response, you’ll get
either an uncomprehending stare or an
effusion of tall tales. Have you heard the
one about the poet and the astrophys-
icist who met in the Esalen hot springs
and eloped the next week? How about
the accountant who visited for the week-
end, cured his depression with a single
dose of ketamine, and became a Zen
monk? The secret full-moon dance
parties? The billionaire-C.E.O. sight-
ings? “This isn’t a place,” a staffer told
me while rolling a joint on a piece of
rough-hewn garden furniture. “It’s a di-
aspora, a guiding light out of our col-
lective 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.
All visitors must announce themselves
at the gatehouse, where a staffer wear-
ing performance fleece is likely to dis-
pense a Northern Californian bundle
of mixed messages: Namaste, the light
within me bows to the light within you,
let me confirm that we’ve received your
credit-card deposit and then I’ll point you
to your cabin and/or Tesla Supercharger.
There’s a redwood dining hall, ap-
pointed in the ascetic-chic style; there
are pine groves and an organic vegeta-
ble farm; there are yoga studios and
massage tables and a wrought-iron fire
pit; there’s a warren of hot tubs fed by
sulfurous underground springs, so when
the wind shifts in a northerly direction,
the ambient aroma of lavender and
patchouli sometimes takes on a mid-
dle note of rotten eggs.
The iconic image of Esalen is of its
central lawn, as brilliant as an emer-
ald, ringed by oceanside cliffs. This is
where, in the sixties, Aldous Huxley
and Timothy Leary facilitated sessions
of “drug-induced mysticism”; where the
psychotherapist Fritz Perls led “Gestalt
workshops,” often involving crying and
primal screams; where Joni Mitchell sang
“Get Together” and Ravi Shankar gave
George Harrison a sitar lesson. Esalen’s
co-founders, Dick Price and Michael
Murphy, were Stanford grads turned spir-
itual seekers. (Both came from families
of means; Esalen was built on land that
was owned by Murphy’s grandmother.)
They described their venture as “a labo-
ratory for new thought”—an indepen-
dent think tank for the counterculture.
Even later, as much of the country acqui-
esced to the greed-is-good eighties and
the end-of-history nineties, Esalen clung
to its exceptionalist vibe. The world was
awry, and Esalen wanted to help bring
it into alignment. “Our whole intention
was, and still is, to allow people to get
out of their inherited orthodoxies and
into the business of discovering truth,”
Murphy, who is eighty-eight, told me
recently. “That could be an individual’s
psychological truth, or a timeless spir-
itual truth, or the ethical truth of how
we ought to behave in society.”
Still, some orthodoxies went largely
unquestioned. Esalenites, for all their
comfort with sex and drugs and ecstatic
encounters with the divine, were less
comfortable talking about politics or
money, or the politics of money—that
is, about their fraught relationship with
capitalism. In practice, the institute
largely functioned as a retreat center for
the wealthy. A weekend of room and
board now costs four hundred and
twenty dollars, and that’s if you’ve
brought your own sleeping bag; the
higher-end accommodations cost aroundthree thousand dollars. (There are also
scholarships, and a work-study pro-
gram.) Another iconic image of Esalen
is a fictional one: the final scene of “Mad
Men.” Don Draper sits, cross-legged
and ill at ease, on the Esalen lawn. He
closes his eyes, relaxes, and smiles. Has
he achieved satori? Not even close. He
has used his mental clarity to think up
a new way to sell sugar water.
There are many upscale New Age
retreat centers (Kripalu, in Massachu-
setts; Feathered Pipe Ranch, in Mon-
tana) where stressed-out executives can
spend restorative weekends before re-
turning to work with looser hip flexors
and a clearer conscience. But Esalen is
just outside Silicon Valley, so the exec-
utives who visit it have come from the
likes of Intel and Xerox PARC—and,
more recently, from Apple and Google
and Twitter. Esalen’s board of trustees
has included an early Facebook em-
ployee, a Google alumnus, and a former
Airbnb executive. Presumably, had there
been such conspicuous overlap between
a countercultural think tank and cap-
tains of any other industry—fast food,
say, or clean coal—there would have
been an outcry, or at least some pointed
questions. But Big Tech was supposed
to be different. It was supposed to make
the world a better place.
Then came Brexit, the 2016 election,
and the Great Tech Backlash. “Donald
Trump Won Because of Facebook,” a
headline in New York declared. A law
professor at Stanford published a paper
that asked, “Can Democracy Survive
the Internet?” Suddenly, a board with
several Silicon Valley executives didn’t
seem entirely unlike a board with sev-
eral Atlantic City casino bosses. Even
after it became apparent that Facebook
posts were fuelling the Rohingya geno-
cide in Myanmar, the company dith-
ered for months before taking decisive
action. Clearly, all was not in alignment.
Esalen seemed perfectly positioned