willing to discuss it. “Apart from a few
nature walks and trust exercises, it wasn’t
the most woo-woo thing,” one of them
said. “We talked about our hopes and
dreams and what we aspired to be when
we were children. We journaled. No aya-
huasca or Illuminati rituals or anything.”
“It accelerated a lot of questions I’d
been asking myself but not necessarily
prioritizing,” a co-founder of a popular
mobile app said. “I didn’t spend a lot of
time in the hot tub—I got more out of
just talking to everyone, honestly and
openly, without us being distracted by
our phones.” Like most mobile compa-
nies, his measures how much time its
users spend on the app; the implicit as-
sumption was that this metric should be
maximized. “Afterward, I started think-
ing, Maybe our goal should actually be
less time on the app,” he said. “Maybe
the best way to serve our customers is to
get them off the phone, building rela-
tionships in the world.” This realization
didn’t become corporate policy overnight.
“It’s never easy to reverse course, espe-
cially when it’s a decision with financial
implications,” he said. “But it’s also the
case that no C.E.O. wants to go to sleep
at night thinking, I built something that
is causing massive psychological harm.”
At the time of the retreat, Facebook’s
mission was “to make the world more
open and connected,” the assumption
being that this would naturally yield ben-
eficial outcomes. But it was becoming
harder to believe that assumption in light
of recent phenomena—for example, the
campaign of Donald Trump, who was
then losing in most national polls but
winning in most metrics of social-me-
dia engagement. “We had a really frank
conversation about where the industry
may have taken wrong turns, and how,
given enough time, we could course-cor-
rect,” one attendee told me. Eight months
later, Zuckerberg announced that Face-
book was changing its mission. “It’s not
enough to simply connect the world,” he
said. “We must also work to bring the
world closer together.”A
few hours after the talk at SFJAZZ,
a select group of attendees was in-
vited to a private dinner at Taohaus, a
former town house that is now an event
venue. The guests trickled into the par-
lor, gazing out the window at the re-
ceding evening light. Harris stepped to
the front of the room and clinked a
wineglass. “Unlike climate change, it
only takes about a thousand people to
reverse human downgrading,” he said.
“In this room, right now, are many of
those people.”
At dinner, Harris was beset by con-
structive criticism. “Saw the presenta-
tion,” Scott Forstall, an early Apple em-ployee who was once considered Steve
Jobs’s heir apparent, said. “You didn’t re-
ally say what you’re gonna do. What’s
the next step?”
“I value that feedback,” Harris said.
In another room, about a dozen peo-
ple entangled themselves in what they
called an amoeba hug. (“It’s a San Fran-
cisco thing,” Guillaume Chaslot, a for-
mer YouTube engineer turned whis-
tle-blower, explained, standing outside
the amoeba.) Taohaus is also billed as
a co-living space and a “creative sanc-
tuary.” Two of the partygoers were not
invited guests but permanent residents,
a distinction they made visible by roam-
ing around barefoot. One of them, a
long-haired young man, wore wooden
amulets around his neck, which clinked
together like wind chimes as he walked.
Several guests, wineglasses in hand, fol-
lowed him downstairs to “the work-
shop”—a recording studio and “de-
sign-thinking lab.”
“So who lives here?” Caterina Fake,
a co-founder of Flickr, asked him.
“Mmm,” he said. “That’s a deep ques-
tion. You could say we’re all people who
are interested in exploring community
and in compounding our capacity as
creatives. You could join a company, you
could co-live, but what does it mean to
combine these vectors?”
He sat behind a drum kit, switched
on some recording equipment, and
started to sing:Don’t downgrade
Gotta make a new world
Create a new way to be
With technology.Earlier this year, Harris was inter-
viewed by Kara Swisher, the gadfly jour-
nalist and frenemy of the tech industry,
who asked him to explain what C.H.T.
did. “Some of the work is in public,”
Harris said. “But a lot of the work’s be-
hind the scenes.” He was unstinting in
his criticism of various tech C.E.O.s—
Zuckerberg; Susan Wojcicki, of You-
Tube—but more circumspect when it
came to Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twit-
ter. “That makes sense, because Tristan
spends a lot of time with Jack behind
the scenes,” a tech insider who knows
them both told me. “Tristan sees it as a
long-term project, trying to coax Jack
away from the dark side.”
“I know that an acquittal is important to you, and I think I get that.” Late last year, Dorsey went on a si-