62 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
to help. In 2017, the institute’s C.E.O.
was Ben Tauber, a thirty-four-year-old
former project manager at Google.
“There’s a dawning consciousness
emerging in Silicon Valley as people
recognize that their conventional suc-
cess isn’t necessarily making the world
a better place,” he told the Times. “The
C.E.O.s, inside they’re hurting. They
can’t sleep at night.” If the tech tycoons
were already going to Es-
alen for ethical and spiri-
tual guidance, then perhaps
Esalen could guide them
toward a less rapacious
business model. “How do
we scale our impact as an
organization?” Tauber con-
tinued. “We do it through
impacting the influencers.”
There was skepticism,
to put it mildly. (“They
should teach that yoga pose where Face-
book and Google execs can yank their
heads out of you-know-where,” a com-
ment on the Times piece read.) And yet
few denied that “impacting the influenc-
ers” might be a step in the right direc-
tion. For a long time, the prevailing
posture of the Silicon Valley élite was
smugness bordering on hubris. Now the
emotional repertoire is expanding to in-
clude shame—or, at least, the appearance
of shame. “They can’t decide whether
they ought to feel like pariahs or vic-
tims, and they’re looking for places where
they can work this stuff out,” a well-con-
nected Silicon Valley organizer told me.
“Not their boardrooms, where everyone
tells them what they want to hear, and
not in public, where everyone yells at
them. A third place.”
Esalen is one such place. Another is
1440 Multiversity, a sleek campus in
Santa Cruz County—the boutique hotel
to Esalen’s summer camp. Spirit Rock,
a meditation center in Marin County,
recently held a gathering to discuss
“technology as an existential threat to
mindfulness.” There are invitation-only
dinners, private cuddle parties, confer-
ences called Responsible Tech and Wis-
dom 2.0. “There’s a lot of debate about
what to call it,” Paula Goldman, who
runs a new department at the software
company Salesforce called the Office of
Ethical and Humane Use, said. “Ethi-
cal tech? Responsible tech?” If the name
is one source of confusion, the substance
is another. Is it a movement, or the stir-
rings of what might become a move-
ment? Is it evidence of canny P.R., or
of deep introspection?
“A few people around the Bay are
starting to wake up,” Tauber, who now
works as an executive coach, told me re-
cently. “They’re acknowledging where
things have gone wrong, and their role in
that, and they’re trying to get their peers
to do the same.” Many of
the conversations, Tauber
acknowledged, would not
play well in Peoria. “It
can get kind of out there,”
he said. “There are folks
exploring mindfulness,
bodywork, psychedelics.
Personal growth can take
many forms. But ultimately
if a handful of people have
this much power—if they
can, simply by making more ethical de-
cisions, cause billions of users to be less
addicted and isolated and confused and
miserable—then, isn’t that worth a shot?”N
ear the end of a placid April morn-
ing in San Francisco, a nonprofit
called the Center for Humane Technol-
ogy convened more than three hundred
people in a midsized amphitheatre
named SFJAZZ—co-founders of Pin-
terest and Craigslist and Apple, vice-
presidents at Google and Facebook, sev-
eral prominent venture capitalists, and
many people whose job titles were “story-
teller” or “human-experience engineer.”
One attendee was Aden Van Noppen,
who carried a notebook with a decal that
read, “Move Purposefully and Fix
Things.” She worked on tech policy in
Barack Obama’s White House, then did
a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School,
and now runs Mobius, a Bay Area or-
ganization dedicated to “putting our
well-being at the center of technology.”
“The Valley right now is like a patient
who’s just received a grave diagnosis,”
she said. “There’s a type of person who
reacts to that by staying in deflect-and-
deny mode—‘How do we prevent any-
one from knowing we’re sick?’ Then,
there’s the type who wants to treat the
symptoms, quickly and superficially, in
the hope that the illness just goes away
on its own. And there’s a third group,
that wants to find a cure.” The audience
at SFJAZZ comprised the third group—the concerned citizens of Silicon Valley.
Before the presentation, Van Nop-
pen hosted a breakfast for a few mem-
bers of the audience, including Justin
Rosenstein, a former Facebook em-
ployee and a co-inventor of the Like
button, and Chris Messina, a former
Google employee and the inventor of
the hashtag. Messina wore a polo shirt,
revealing a tattoo on each arm: a hashtag
on the right, a Burning Man logo on
the left. “It’s not nearly widespread
enough yet,” he said, of the industry’s
capacity for self-critique. “But even to
get a group of people together like this
and publicly acknowledge the depth of
the problem? That would have been
impossible a few years ago.”
“A few months ago,” Rosenstein said.
They put on laminated nametags and
made their way to their seats. A string
trio took the stage, playing a selection
of pop hits that traced an emotional arc
from grunge-era ennui (“Bitter Sweet
Symphony”) to hopeful ambivalence
(“Wonderwall”) to soaring idealism
(“Imagine”). Behind the musicians was
an enormous screen displaying a series
of alarming statistics (“1.6 billion swipes
per day on Tinder alone”) and inspir-
ing, possibly apocryphal, quotations (Al-
bert Einstein: “The human spirit must
prevail over technology”).
A meditation teacher walked onstage,
closed her eyes, and began a gerund-
based incantation. “Taking a deep breath
in and out,” she said. “Appreciating this
chance to be alive.” Next came Tristan
Harris, C.H.T.’s executive director, wear-
ing a chambray button-down, gray jeans,
and a cordless microphone. “This is a civ-
ilizational moment in a way that I’m not
sure we’re all reckoning with,” he said.
Harris believes that, just as the environ-
mental crisis was wrought by extractive
energy companies, so has an attentional
crisis been wrought by extractive tech-
nology companies. If Al Gore, in “An
Inconvenient Truth,” was the harbinger
of the former crisis, then Harris seems
poised to become the harbinger of the
latter one, and in more or less the same
way: by pacing across a stage dispens-
ing easily digestible phrases about the
urgency of the moment.
In 2013, Harris was a project manager
at Google, working on Gmail. “Here is
this product that a billion people use,” he
said. “My hope was that there would be