THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 65
I joined Poswolsky’s playshop. A
dozen people sat in dappled sunlight,
and Poswolsky passed out blank sheets
of paper. “On one side, draw the way
you present yourself on social media,”
he said. “On the other side, draw how
you really feel.” The point was that there
was a discrepancy. “The game of Insta-
gram is to make it look like, as Kanye
said, ‘my life is dope and I do dope shit,’”
he said. “But we don’t always feel that!
Sometimes we feel lonely and scared!”
One young woman, a professional
yogini, said, “For my W, it’s kinda nec-
essary to have an Instagram presence. I
personally find it annoying—the yoga
babes doing backbends on the beach—
but it keeps people coming to the classes.”
“My W is in digital marketing,” a
man said. “On the drive down here, I
was listening to a podcast about the sur-
veillance economy, about how Google
sucked up all our data and is using it
for profit and power, and I thought, I’m
helping them do that! I don’t work at
Google, but everyone who works in my
field is a cog in that machine.”
Poswolsky mirrored these concerns,
using gentle, empathetic language. “I
understand feeling the need to be on
social media to do your work,” he said.
“I only knew about this weekend be-
cause I follow you on Facebook,” one
man said.
“Exactly,” Poswolsky said.
Anytime the discussion veered toward
politics, someone would change the sub-
ject. Once, Poswolsky mentioned Don-
ald Trump, and several people visibly
winced. “Dude, I thought this was a safe
space!” one of them said, only slightly
joking. Throughout the weekend, sys-
temic 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. Remain-
ing 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 W-talk.
“What’s coming up for me, think-
ing about all these big forces we’re up
against, is a sense of anxiety and help-
lessness, like I felt before I quit Insta,”
one man said. “I came here to be en-
couraged 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 ‘Fuck you!’ to our inner critic.”
When that was done, everyone took turns
standing in the middle of a circle, receiv-
ing praise from the group. (“You are fierce.”
“Loyal.” “A force of nature.”) This exer-
cise brought several people to tears.A
t the end of Digital Detox, shortly
before I drove to the nearest In-N-
Out parking lot to catch up on my e-mail,
I spent a few minutes with some of the
facilitators and participants. We sat out-
side, on a wooden bench overlooking a
hallucinogenically gorgeous landscape.
At one point, a school of whales started
breaching in the water. “You’re all see-
ing this, too, right?” someone said.
“I can’t fix all of Instagram just by
deleting my account,” Scott, a nature
photographer, said. “The people at the
top still have to make the right deci-
sions. But if those people had an expe-
rience like this, in this place? That would
make it a hell of a lot more likely.”
“Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg
at one of these?” Poswolsky said. “Stand-
ing in the middle of a praise circle, re-
ally opening himself to whatever feel-
ings 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.”As it turns out, some of the most
powerful people in tech have had sim-
ilar experiences. On the first October
weekend of 2016, Tristan Harris and Ben
Tauber facilitated a workshop at Esalen
that was not announced to the public.
“A small group of technology leaders
and thought leaders will set out for the
weekend to begin a conversation on a
new kind of technology design, a design
that puts awareness and maximizing
each user’s human potential at the fore-
front,” read an invitation, since deleted,
on the site of the Return, an Esalen-affili-
ated group that conducts “experiments
in modern community.” “You have been
hand selected for both your interest in
the topic and your unique ability to in-
fluence entire markets.” At the bottom
of the invitation was a list of planned
activities, which included “salon-based
conversations,” “cliff side hot springs,”
“roaring fires,” and “Big Sur Magic.”
After the weekend, another page, also
since deleted, described the participants
by occupation: co-founders of Google,
Slack, and Tinder, “members of the early
Apple executive team,” and a “Facebook
executive”—not Zuckerberg or Sheryl
Sandberg but someone on the compa-
ny’s next-highest rung of leadership.
Tauber and Harris implored me, in
a series of tense phone calls, not to men-
tion the retreat, which had been con-
vened with an expectation of confiden-
tiality. But several other attendees were“Well, this is awkward.”