THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 67
lent ten-day meditation retreat in Myan-
mar. When he got back, he posted a Twit-
ter thread about his experience, including
photos of his spartan living quarters, his
mosquito bites, and biometric readings
from his Apple Watch and Oura ring.
The thread seemed to incite disdain from
just about everyone: human-rights ad-
vocates, chronic-pain sufferers, many
members of the general public. “I get
that it’s tone-deaf to do it in Myanmar,
but I think the outcry was a bit much,”
one entrepreneur told me. “Would peo-
ple have preferred if he was on a private
island somewhere doing coke?”
“It’s not enough, on its own, for tech
leaders to meditate,” Van Noppen, the
director of Mobius, told me. “What
matters is whether it leads to wiser de-
cisions and less harmful products. The
risk is that meditation can be misused
as a numbing agent—a way of making
yourself more productive at the thing
that is causing the world pain.” Van Nop-
pen has organized confidential dinners
where the guests included prominent
tech executives, meditation teachers,
and neuroscientists who study com-
passion. Last year, a team of Facebook
researchers working on well-being—
mitigating depression, tech addiction,
and the like—invited Mobius to the
company’s Menlo Park headquarters to
lead a four-hour discussion about how
“well-being” ought to be defined. The
researchers were asked to write down
their intentions—what kind of world
did they hope to bring about? “We read
those intentions out loud, and then put
those pieces of paper in the middle of
the table,” Van Noppen said. “It felt like
a very intimate space after that.”
The ethical tech movement is grow-
ing increasingly difficult to ignore. In
June, the Senate held a hearing about
“persuasive technology” online, and Har-
ris testified. “I found that it’s only been
external pressure—from government pol-
icymakers, shareholders, and media—
that has changed companies’ behavior,”
he said. Some critics deride Harris’s focus
on media—on what he calls, more broadly,
“a mass cultural shift”—as squishy or sub-
jective. To reform the financial system,
or the energy sector, you wouldn’t invent
a meme, or gather a group of executives
to journal about their feelings; you would
regulate companies, sue them, or other-
wise alter their financial incentives.
Big Tech may need regulation, but
treating it as if it were any other indus-
try underestimates the depth of the prob-
lem. Unlike many other executives, tech
executives actually believed their Uto-
pian hype. Now that their innovations
have failed to bring about Utopia, they
are experiencing a range of conflicting
emotions. Someone has to help them
translate those emotions into responsi-
ble actions. “I find a lot of Tristan’s shtick
pretty annoying,” one of Harris’s former
colleagues at Google told me. “I could
do without all the self-aggrandizement
and fanfare. And yet, having said that,
what he’s doing is super important.”
Tech executives respond to incentives,
but not all incentives are financial. “Zuck
wants money, he wants power, but more
than anything he wants to be admired,”
Tavis McGinn, who once worked at
Facebook as Zuckerberg’s personal poll-
ster, told me. “If you can affect his abil-
ity to walk into a room and command
respect, that’s a real leverage point.”
In recent weeks, Instagram users in
Canada, Australia, and five other coun-
tries started to see a new pop-up mes-
sage: “We want your followers to focus
on what you share, not how many likes
your posts get.” To achieve this, the app
would stop displaying a post’s total num-
ber of likes—just the photo, with no in-
dication of whether it was winning or
losing at virality. Tallies of likes are pre-
cisely the kind of gamification tech-
niques that social-media platforms use
to get consumers hooked. Arturo Bejar,
formerly a director of engineering at
Facebook and now a freelance consul-
tant, told me that Instagram’s willing-
ness to forgo such an addictive tool “is
a very hopeful sign. It might decrease
user engagement, or time on site, or rev-
enue, at least in the short term. But it’s
the right thing to do.”O
n my last trip to Esalen, I spent an
afternoon in the lodge with Mike
Murphy, the institute’s co-founder. A
gardener placed a bucket of dahlia bulbs
just outside the door—“Free! Take
One!”—and passersby kept exclaiming
with delight. Murphy’s wife, Dulce,
joined us, but she couldn’t stay long; she
was facilitating a five-day workshop, not
listed on Esalen’s public schedule, about
“consciousness and technology.” The
two dozen participants included a Zenmaster, a Middle East peace activist, a
TV executive, and a founder of a block-
chain company. “She spent a couple of
hours trying to explain the whole block-
chain concept,” Dulce said. “I can’t say
we all fully understood it, but we’re get-
ting there.”
As afternoon turned to evening, Mur-
phy ordered a bottle of red wine and
expounded on William James, Maslow’s
pyramid, and the state of the world.
“Given where we are, geographically
and temporally, tech is the big gorilla
in the room,” he said. “You ought to talk
to Dave Morin about that stuff.”
Morin, a recent addition to Esalen’s
board, was an early and influential em-
ployee at Apple and Facebook, and he
still refers to his former bosses as “Steve”
and “Mark.” He then founded Path, a
social network that tried to take on Face-
book and failed; he now runs Sunrise, a
startup whose mission is to cure depres-
sion. He showed up at dusk, wearing a
cowboy hat and a smart ring. “My Tesla
had to reboot three times on the high-
way,” he said, by way of apology. “Amaz-
ing piece of design, that car, but there
are still a few bugs to be worked out.”
We sat at a picnic table outside, and
Morin took a photo of the sunset with
his phone. “You can never capture it with
this,” he said. “I keep trying, though.”
He gestured northward, toward a steep
cliff and a row of ponderosa pines. “Over
that ridge, in a valley up there, a bunch
of people invented the Internet,” he said.
“Best invention we’ve ever had. And it’s
also had all these terrible consequences.
So what do you do with that?” He looked
me in the eye for long enough that
I started to wonder whether his ques-
tion had been nonrhetorical. But then
he went on, “What is the potential of a
human? What can we unlock? You know,
Steve called the computer the bicycle of
the mind. How do we get back to that?”
He pointed to his smart ring. “This is
a pretty simple piece of tech,” he said.
“And yet it gives me data on my sleep
patterns, heart rate, tells me which days
to do yoga and at which times, and now
I feel stronger and healthier than ever be-
fore in my life.” He brushed a firefly away
from his face and gazed out over the ocean.
“I think we’re figuring out how to find a
balance,” he said. “How to make these
tools our friends, not our enemies. I think
we’re gonna get back there, man.”