The counterculture is no longer against
We have repeatedly dealt with the importance of the counterculture in the training of young entrepreneurs and technologists who have transformed the fertile strip of land between San Francisco and San José into Silicon Valley, that is, into the heart of world technology and innovation.
In the early XNUMXs, while the strength of the counterculture was waning and the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, its protagonists wondered how to continue changing the world and themselves, Steve Jobs, who was the son of that way of thinking, had ideas already clear.
He thought he could change it through products placed in everyone's hands, that is through a business based on innovation, marketing and Zen. A business with a revolutionary vision. There is therefore a strong relationship between counterculture and, let's say, business, embodied by the co-founder of Apple. His angelic associate, the other Steve (Wozniack), was also deep in the counterculture pool. More than character and vision, the two Steves were held together by this common mental and cultural matrix.
And so over the years, falling in love broke out, as in the best romances, between the two rival visions, that of the hippies and that of the Yuppies. Even the, let's say, more nonconformist and disruptive aspects of the counterculture, such as the idea of expanding the experience with drugs and gaining self-awareness with meditation taken from distant cultures, have percolated into the business world and into corporate America itself which in the time of the hippies was dominated by the military-industrial complex. Nothing more reactionary and repulsive for young long-haired people.
So it happens that half a century after the summer of love, marijuana is big business and mindfulness has become a routine in the workplace and in the top positions of big companies. Nat Segnit, journalist, author and playwright, explains, in the magazine "The Economist", the way in which the counterculture has penetrated the heart of capitalism. Below we propose some reflections of him interlaced with ours.
The infiltration
The counterculture of the XNUMXs — hippies, love parties, psychedelic drugs, meditation — has infiltrated corporate America. Google, Apple, Facebook, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and General Motors all offer mindfulness programs, a broad term for a set of Eastern-derived practices designed to help focus and develop self-awareness.
Staff at Cisco Systems Headquarters in San Jose can attend the LifeConnections Health Center, a place dedicated to developing the "four pillars" of wellness — body, mind, spirit and heart. Cisco's senior integrated health manager for global benefits, Katelyn Johnson, is responsible for spreading the ideal of the "corporate athlete"—to be ingrained in the bodies and minds of employees.
At Aetna, a giant health insurance company, more than a quarter of its 50.000-strong workforce has attended at least one of its in-house mindfulness classes. According to the company, each participant's weekly productivity increased by an average of 62 minutes. The payoff in value to the company is around $3000 per employee each year.
Alongside open-plan offices, ping-pong tables, and casual dress codes, mindfulness in the workplace is an idea that caught on in Silicon Valley and subsequently conquered the entire world. What was once the preserve of specialized retreat centers is now mainstream.
The crucial figure of Steward Brand
The July/August 1971 issue of "Rolling Stone" dedicated to Stuart Brand.
If you want to understand how a movement intent on undermining corporate America ended up at its heart, a good place to start is the story of Stewart Brand. Photographer and former Army paratrooper, Brand was a forerunner of everything that is happening.
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (published in Italian by Mondadori) — is the 1968 book by Tom Wolfe that documents the bus journey across America by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and his Merry Pranksters . Brand, part of the group, is described in the book as shirtless with an Indian beaded necklace on his bare skin and a white butcher's bib with the Swedish King's medals on it. Quite eccentric.
Brand has been a key figure in many things. Primarily he is the link between the counterculture and the tech world. On December 9, 1968 in San Francisco, Brand stood alongside Douglas Engelbart, the founder of the Augmentation Research Center, during the "mother of all presentations." At this event Engelbart spoke of the computer as a "processor of symbols and a tool for increasing human intelligence." He also presented, for the first time, the mouse, a hypermedia system and a videoconferencing system.
Brand was also a forerunner of modern environmentalism. In the XNUMXs he promoted a campaign to push NASA to publish and make public the photos of the Earth taken
from space. An act of great awareness of the environmental fragility of the planet. A sensibility that he had acquired from his studies of the native populations of America.
The Whole Earth Catalogue
The cover of the autumn issue of the "Whole Earth Catalog" created by Brand, a sort of bible of his generation. The catalog on the cover always had a picture of the earth taken from space by NASA spacecraft.
Finally, Brand was a key figure in the “back to the land” movement. His rejection of America dominated by the military-industrial complex and his struggle for a simple, agrarian, non-hierarchical communalism practiced in equal communities are legendary. In 1968 he published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog", a sort of Google ante litteram, in reality it was a magazine-catalogue for correspondence without low-cost advertising.
In the first issue, there were articles on building Japanese tensile frame houses, guides to mushroom growing and beekeeping, and fact sheets on everything from meditation cushions and deerskin moccasins to the Hewlett 9100A computer. -Packard.
Each of the 63 pages of the Catalog was a mosaic of texts, graphs, tables, photographs. Underlying it was a basic concept: if put in the right hands and practiced in the right way, technology could free humanity from want. In 2005, Steve Jobs, who revered Brand, described the catalog to Stanford freshmen as "one of the Bibles of my generation."
The Homebrew Computer Club
Whole Earth's offices were in Menlo Park, where the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of young enthusiasts of home electronics, also met. The founders of the club have recognized in the "Whole Earth Catalog" the inspirer of their hacker spirit as well as the practice of free exchange of ideas, information and experiences.
It was at a Homebrew meeting in 1976 that shy and awkward Steve Wozniak felt bold enough to unveil his prototype Apple I computer. The club was an open forum, a little techno-utopia that he shared with his peers in culture hippie an egalitarian belief in sharing and accessibility. Free from any bureaucracy or hierarchy, the long-haired libertarians of Menlo Park could pursue their dreams and their utopias of change.
In reality, the kinship between the counterculture and contemporary corporate culture is less bizarre than it appears at first sight. The community ideal of Stewart Brand and his associates has led directly to the informality and thinning of hierarchies that characterize the way Silicon Valley — and many large corporations — are organized.
The extraordinary location of the Elsen Institute in Big Sur, California, on California's National Route 1, the coast road that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles. The institute was the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement, a movement that sought to enhance personality, self-awareness and self-actualization regardless of religions, but from which practices derived.
Easlen's Retreat
In any case, the counterculture has always been a middle-class phenomenon. Abraham Maslow in his theory of the hierarchy of needs suggested that self-actualization is possible only when some basic requirements such as "food, water, warmth and rest" have been met.
As a result, it was young white college graduates benefiting from the postwar economic boom who had the leisure time to indulge in the counterculture's psychedelia and soul art. And these young people had their places to be.
About these places, Wolfe writes in Acid Test:
“Psychedelics' favorite places, like the Esalen Institute and Retreat Center in California — which also appears in the Mad Man finale — were places where more educated middle-class adults retreated in the summer, trying to escape the routine and move their lower abdomen a little.'
Meditation has been part of the Esalen program since its origins. When, in the XNUMXs, Dick Price, one of the co-founders, began to familiarize himself with vipassana — an ancient Buddhist meditation technique that helps one see things in depth and become aware of oneself and the here and now — it was still serving in the US Air Force.
Vipassana is, in fact, the form of spiritual practice that provided the foundation for modern mindfulness.
The vipassana movement
Meanwhile, on the east coast, other alternatives developed the knowledge of Buddhist practices they had acquired from traveling to Burma, India and Thailand. They applied it in their activities, giving birth to what became known as the "vipassana movement".
The movement was born out of an effort to adapt traditional Buddhist practice to the tastes and mindsets of Americans. The effort was to minimize the more explicitly devotional components of the practice, such as the singing of the suttas, to bring out the meditative element as preponderant.
Biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn went further. In 1965, while doing his doctorate in molecular biology at MIT, Kabat-Zinn attended a lecture on meditation given by an American-born teacher of Zen Buddhism.
Over the next decade, these teachings intrigued him more and more. He started asking questions like this:
If meditation brings greater awareness of one's body and mind, what effect might it have on seemingly incurable conditions such as chronic pain and depression?
The birth of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Kabat-Zinn's challenge was to create a bridge between the two cultures. In the academic circles in which he worked, proposing religious answers to medical problems would only arouse sarcasm and irritation. His solution was therefore simple and consequential: he completely removed the religious part from the practice.
In 1979 he presented a technique of mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), which combined elements of hatha yoga with Buddhist mindfulness meditation, but stripped them of their spiritual trappings.
It was a decisive step in the normalization of these esoteric practices. Relieved of its religious baggage, mindfulness became a suitable subject for scientific study. Since then, hundreds of independent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of MBSR and related techniques in
reduce the levels of visual-spatial processing. It is also decisive in reducing the weight of wandering thoughts that can lead to depression and poor concentration.
Nirvana could wait: mindfulness was now academically respectable, it had become a sort of panacea for the materialist. MBSR and related treatment approaches are now offered in healthcare systems around the world.
In 2004 Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the body that provides guidance on all new NHS medicines and treatments, approved mindfulness-based cognitive therapy as a treatment for people at risk of depressive relapse.
Corporations discover mindfulness
It wasn't long before big companies began to see the true value of mindfulness. In 2007 Chade-Meng Tan, software engineer and Google employee #107, co-founded “Search Inside Yourself,” a mindfulness training program designed to help fellow Googlers improve their focus and coping with work-related stress.
Over the course of two and a half days, or seven less intense weeks, employees were trained in attention, self-awareness and empathy, using techniques derived from mindfulness and organizational psychology. The result was a crash course in emotional intelligence for a workforce of technologists and engineers who are typically prone to social embarrassment and nervous breakdowns.
The program has since been transformed into an independent non-profit organization, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. The institute promotes mindfulness in businesses and other non-profit organizations around the world.
Carolina Lasso is director of marketing at the SIYLI offices in San Francisco. For her, mindfulness has a precise meaning. It is not so much a means of escaping from a pressurized work environment as an aid to staying there more effectively.
"Mindfulness serves as a foundation for developing other skills: emotional intelligence, compassionate leadership, and many other things."
Who benefits from corporate mindfulness?
The reason for the corporate interest in mindfulness is quite clear. Mindfulness practice offers a relatively inexpensive way to reduce stress and anxiety in the workplace by increasing staff trust and attachment to the organization, as well as productivity.
Critics of this approach would argue that the advantage of mindfulness lies in its work of quieting people's interiority. A job that keeps employees calm and more inclined to accept the often unreasonable requests for time and energy to devote to the work itself.
In both cases the practice has spread, first in the technology sector and then in other branches. A 2017 study by the National Business Group on Health, a Washington DC-based nonprofit organization, found that one-third of all American businesses offer mindfulness or training courses, and another quarter are considering to introduce them.
Cisco's Katelyn Johnson explains:
“Silicon Valley is an opportunity-rich but intense environment. It's extremely hectic. We need aids like meditation to help us survive. But not only for this. If you are unable to fully unfold your potential, it is rather difficult to be able to innovate, to conceive and continue to move at the required rate».
Cisco's big challenge, he says, is:
“Be there. There are huge distractions, updates, emails, iMessages — the attentional overload inputs that impact your work every day. Mindfulness eliminates disorder and forces us to deal with the here and now, to be there».
The question of drugs
In the late 1962s drug use among hippies and in retreat places like Esalen was so intense that worries of losing control began to circulate, even among the hippies themselves. Psychedelia and spiritual practice have a long common history. Esalen's first catalog of activities, published in September XNUMX, included a workshop on drug-induced mystique.
Dick Price, one of the founders, was a fan of acids and an advocate of their use in the path of mystical experience. The problem exploded with the mass arrival of hippies in the so-called summer of love in 1967. Marijuana, mescaline and LSD were taken in large quantities and without any therapeutic supervision.
Today the institute is a quieter place. Psychedelia, understood as a technique of dilation of perception, has another respectability; in early 2019 Esalen hosted a workshop on psychedelia as a driver of consciousness expansion and personal and social change.
Many of the participants in this workshop are long-term micro users of LSD, psilocybin and cannabis. The institute's official drug policy is clear. Illegal drugs are strictly prohibited. And in fact in the institute they are not used and cannot be found.
Openness to drugs
This open attitude towards certain hallucinogenic substances is part of a larger trend. California legalized the recreational use of cannabis in November 2016; licensed sales began in January 2018.
Weed's entry into the legal market has caused a shift in drug culture, at least for the (usually) non-addictive hallucinogens, such as LSD and cannabis: from rebellion to accountability, from peddling on the street to distribution in dispensaries and marketing in shops specializing in the sale of cannabis.
In San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, once the center of the radical gay community, is the flagship store of the Apothecarium, a chain of four upscale cannabis stores. The aesthetic is that of an Apple Store: sober open space, grays and blues as the dominant colours, display cases in black and white damask, glass bongs as design objects and a "cannabis library". These new outlets for a particular use of leisure are in strong competition to outdo each other in attracting customers.
A market worth 90 billion
Fifteen blocks east of the Apothecarium in the Mission District are the maverick offices of Pax Lab, where "the cannabis space," according to CEO Bharat Vasan, converges with mobile technology.
Pax's flagship product is Era, a sleek, lightweight ballpoint pen designed to be used with detachable pods of cannabis concentrate. This is the equivalent of a Nespresso machine. The app that accompanies the device allows you to control the dosage and vaporization temperature from your smartphone.
“Temperature matters a lot in our space,” says Vasan, who sold his previous startup, a fitness-wearables company called Basis, to Intel for $100 million. He explains it better:
“It concentrates the volatility at different temperatures. It's just like with wine: the glass really matters. Different temperatures give different sensations».
His goal is to create a "super-polished experience" to match that of Apple or Tesla, to capture a slice of a market that Vasan estimates at $90 billion "over the next five years." Ultimately, he says, the mission of the Pax Lab is:
«Establishing cannabis as a force for good». This concept too is a legacy of the counterculture and its protagonists: the hippies, or rather the Hippie Spas.
