It's 7:30pm on a chilly April night in San Francisco. The Battery, a members-only club in North Beach that serves Silicon Valley's ruling elite, hums with grey-bearded founders, pink-cheeked CEOs, serial startup kids and their venture-capitalist quarry. A herd of young men in fleece indulge in $1,400 (£1,080) whisky, then make their way to the roof deck, watched over by the bar's nautical décor: paintings of 19th-century steam ships and carved wooden figureheads. Though the club bans smartphone use after 6pm and forbids voice calls to "protect the relaxed atmosphere", a few stork-legged women float through, clutching their iPhones like little prayer books, texting and not-looking walking. The overall vibe is buzzy and self-affirming.
One flight up, in the club's library, two men pace a small stage. They cradle microphones TEDx-style, enlightening 200 or so people perched on velour ballroom chairs, tumblers in hand. "Most of us are living in a highly distracted, over-stressed, ego-driven experience," says Jamie Wheal. Angular, with landscaped eyebrows and a methodic vocal cadence, Wheal lays out the central burden of our time: "No one built an off switch," he says. To self-soothe, "We rock Ambien on a nightly basis." We binge-watch Netflix, drink three whiskies a night and "jack off" to YouPorn 24/7. We swipe Grindr, join Headspace, and Fitbit away our anxiety in a desperate bid to keep up. "Everyone," he says sympathetically, "is trying to alter their consciousness."
Read more: How scientists are manipulating the mind with VR
The crowd is equal parts loose and rapt, some there to enjoy the show, others to listen for a new direction forward. "So one of the things to realise," says Wheal, as a chart titled "Altered States Economy" projects behind him, with the figure $4 trillion (£3.1tn) at its centre, "is A, massive market. B, largely unintentional, this is hiding in plain sight."
In other words, getting out of our own heads, tweaking the diodes on our emotions and consciousness, is a "Four-trillion-dollar opportunity for the entrepreneurial-minded". It is testament to an urgent need, but a fraught one. "How do we make this positive and not destructive, distracting and addictive?" he adds. "Can we help steer people toward their better angels and our collective nature in our search for these things?"
Silicon Valley has always sought to mix engineering with enlightenment. After it hacked our desktops, our phones and then our attention spans, it sought to hack our corporeal selves. First came peak performance (smarter, faster, stronger) then mindfulness (chillax, brah). Today, the new frontier is consciousness hacking. Its goals are varied, its practitioners virtuously divided and its definitions fluid.
Its first wave came tumbling at us as biofeedback, meditation apps and micro-dosing. It crashed in the surf of sensory deprivation and DIY transcranial direct-current stimulation - sending small voltages across the skull with electrodes and a controller - to boost focus and reduce depression. It was driven, and still is, by a decade-old revolution in neurobiology and brain imaging that lets us look under the hood at mental states, figure out where they come from and how to get more of them using new tech.
That led to our next wave: pulling the neural triggers that can produce the same kind of enlightenment that lifelong meditators experience. Want an out-of-body experience? We have virtual-reality simulations for that. Want to be smarter and happier? You can learn to quiet your pre-frontal cortex - that inner critic - and access more of your brain's attention-focusing norepinephrine.
Wheal's gambit is this last bit. Along with Steven Kotler - the thin man with the grey Caesar cut next to him on stage - he is the co-founder of the Flow Genome Project. With it, they map flow states, using open-source input from athletes, artists, academics and others. And they will tell you how to achieve it via training videos, newsletters and interactive apps - all for an initiation fee of $697, then $97 per year.
Both men are at The Battery tonight to promote and sell copies their new book, Stealing Fire, one of a dozen they've written (individually) on peak performance. But unlike the others, this one is a user manual for hacking everyday nirvana. Much of it is based on the ancient Greek notion, and reports, of ecstasis (yes, ecstasy). That literally means to stand outside yourself, usually in a trance experience with God.
Their book is packed with neuroscience and imaging research that definitively locates ecstatic states in the human brain, along with nods to data on how to get there. None of it is more unusual - or more understated - than the three-page section on a former MIT roboticist who popularised the term "enlightenment engineering". And though he has no app or video to sell, he turns out to be at the centre of evangelising for consciousness hacking.
The morning after the Battery talk, I wake up in a $10 million mansion in the green, undulating canyons of San Carlos, 40 minutes south of the city. Outside the front door, at the bottom of a steep drive lined with cars, including a graffitied van, someone has parked a Tesla Roadster. Inside, mandalas and flip-flops cover the wood floors. Tacks hold Indian tapestries to the living-room walls. Junked hard-drive towers and monitors narrow the hallways. And the open-plan kitchen, as big as a yacht, bears signs directing you to the natural tea shelf and the composting bin.
Mikey Siegel pads into the kitchen wearing loose black jeans and rubber flip-flops. His angular head, which teeters atop his thin 178cm frame, is crowned by unruly black hair. A 35-year-old former MIT roboticist, Siegel founded the Consciousness Hacking MeetUp group in San Francisco in 2013. It has since spread worldwide and now claims 15,000 members in 30 communities. He also helped found the Transformative Technology Conference. It's a mixer for technologists, futurists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists trying to turn consciousness hacking into a multi-billion-dollar business on a par with the fitness industry.
Siegel is a sweet, nerdy guy. When he speaks, he sounds like a cross between a precocious college undergrad who just awoke to pot and Plato and a genius engineer with a gift for research recall. He and six others rent this co-hack house from a venture-capitalist friend who has decamped to another home closer to the Bay Area.
"This is not woo-woo stuff," says Siegel, leading me out to a stone patio lined with lilac and overlooking an impossibly green canyon. Like many people proselytising consciousness hacking, Siegel knows how squishy it sounds to those outside the valley or beyond the research labs. He's quick to tick off a list of key Harvard and Stanford brain-scanning studies done on meditating Buddhist monks, showing increased neuroplasticity (a capacity to change) and deep, active neural correlates. "These are 30,000-hour meditators," says Siegel. "Their brains are profoundly different. Their experience of reality is profoundly different. They're not just a little bit happier." Taking a seat and drinking a smoothie, he says, breathlessly, "What does that mean if you can create the technology that makes that accessible to everyone? That's like, I don't know. It could alter all of humanity."
Siegel is the high priest of the movement. "I think I drink the Kool-Aid a little too much," he tells me at one point, to which a friend replies, "You become the Kool-Aid." His MeetUp group, which has 4,000 members, tackles topics such as quantifying bliss, dissolving the boundaries between self and other, and hack dating: connecting with confidence. On Project Nights, startup founders pitch their prototypes. One night it included the LucidCatcher, a sleep band that stimulates your brain with small electrical pulses, supposedly letting you control your dreams. So you could, say, be riding a dragon, talking to a long-dead parent or having sex with a famous celebrity.
Though Siegel is hosting a sold-out MeetUp for 120 people tonight - $10 per ticket or $100 for an annual membership - he's as relaxed as a California surfer. "A lot of logistics get taken care of by other people these days," he says.
Siegel grew up in "a nice Jewish family" in Southern California. He earned a degree in computer engineering, then landed at Nasa's Ames Research Center, working on robotics. In 2006, he moved east to the MIT Media Lab and studied with social roboticist Cynthia Breazeal. While there, he worked under a research grant for Audi, focusing on persuasive robotics - figuring out how to give a car a social interface that would help it influence driver behaviour," he says, "in a way that felt good."
Then, in 2011, he moved to a now infamous startup called Theranos. Siegel, who is verbose on most topics, is vague about what he did there. But it's possible that in such a new company, where titles and responsibilities overlap, it really is hard for him to pin down. "I don't want to say I was like a rogue," he says, "but I did everything. I did a lot of prototyping, designing, building and testing things," and reporting directly to its now embattled founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. In typical venture-backed fashion, he also earned a ridiculous pay cheque.
He shared a house in San Francisco with friends, threw huge parties and hosted weekend-long concerts. "I was living the dream," he says. "And I felt like shit. I felt empty. I had the most privileged wake-up call, where you get all the things you think are going to make you happy, and they don't make you happy."
Prior to his time at Theranos, he had stayed on a Virginia ashram and had trekked to India to meditate. "It was like 'poof'," he says, blinking hard and then looking at me deeply. "I saw the pinnacle of spiritual attainment and I thought, 'That does not need to be religious. That can be scientific.' And I wanted to create the technology to get there."
With about $60,000 saved - and the safety net of a trust fund should he fail - Siegel set out. He wrote to eight potential academic advisers. "Nobody had any fucking idea what I was talking about," he says. Then he found Gino Yu, an associate professor and director of digital entertainment and game development at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Yu investigates what philosophers and scientists have long called the consciousness "problem" - the murky relationship between mind and body. He uses interactive media, like video games and VR, and new tools such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to trace realms of perception, experience and the mind's inner workings in real time.
Within an hour of talking to Yu, Siegel had an invitation to visit. A week later he was on a plane. Once there, Siegel met a group of acolytes who had gathered around Yu. Among them was Jeffery Martin, a Harvard psychology graduate who had bounced around jobs and had reinvented himself in this new space. With Martin's help, Siegel gorged himself on neuroscience literature and learned about emerging neurotechnology tools. "I spent a full year catching up, getting the complete download," says Siegel.
Brain full, Siegel and Martin filled a whiteboard with ideas for consumer products. At the time, brain hackers had started using transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDCS), attaching nine-volt batteries to electrodes on their foreheads to mildly shock their brains to increase focus and improve memory. Siegel and Martin thought they could induce meditative states this way. When Martin strapped it on, he says, "I had the most mystical experience of my life." Their plan was to produce a device and create crowdsourced protocols - voltage, placement of electrodes, time of day - that would trigger enlightenment.
That plan, and others, fell apart. But one stuck. First, they came up with a name for their movement: consciousness hacking. "Because it was avant-garde and eye-catching," Martin tells me. The pair envisioned a three-prong approach to foster their vision. It included an academic lab where they could study enlightenment and incubate the tech around it; a conference to connect hackers, biofeedback enthusiasts, and venture capitalists; and building out a larger cultural community.
After returning to the US, they launched their first Consciousness Hacking MeetUp, in 2013, in Siegel's hometown of Santa Cruz. A year later they held their first conference, at Sofia University in Palo Alto, under the broad and inclusive term Transformative Technology. Soon after, Siegel quit the conference arm, splitting the brands in two, with Martin and a third partner taking over the more industry-facing conference side and Siegel taking charge of the globally expanding MeetUp scene.
A lot of what I do is just being a schmoozer," says Siegel. "I'm passionate. A lot of it is connecting people with millions of other people, fertilising the space, creating a community, hosting events, speaking, travelling, that kind of stuff. Dealing with tonnes of emails."
We're driving down a canyon in Siegel's black Ford Expedition, which is littered with iPhone cables and snack wrappers. In addition to organising MeetUps, he advises wearable-tech and bio-sensing startups on their market strategies, tweaking their algorithms and connecting them with software engineers and investors. One company, Sensi, uses an iPhone's accelerometer and artificial intelligence to analyse movement, determine your mood and guide you to emotional optimisation.
"A lot of people are sitting at their desks year after year after year and saying, 'What, more?'" says Josh Whiton, who is outdoor-yoga lithe, tanned and incredibly erudite. "Their garage is full of stuff and they don't want any more for Christmas. So this is a resurgence for extraordinary experiences and consciousness and mind expansion."
Whiton is highly aware of his privilege and careful to point it out. In 2004, while a student at North Carolina State University in Durham, he began building TransLoc, a transit-tech company that tracks buses in real time. It's the official app for 300 municipal, university and corporate agencies. But feeling spiritually bereft by the work of a CEO, Whiton left several years ago to start an urban farm in Raleigh, take writing courses, trade cryptocurrencies, and, as stated on his LinkedIn page, become a consciousness explorer.
When we first met at the co-hack mansion, he and Siegel hugged warmly, with Whiton letting out a long "Mmmmm". Siegel said to me, "This guy is the secret sauce." He's also a reliable contributor to the co-hack house's rent and he invests in startups.
"Back in the 60s," Whiton goes on, as Siegel drives toward the blue of the bay, "you had a lot of broke hippies living in their parents' basements with this general 'Fight the man, I don't want to sit at a desk and wear a tie rebellion.' To me, this is the 60s again, but with a new credibility." Today, instead of broke hippies, you get people like Whiton and Siegel who are entrepreneurs and have had success. "So here I am with time and privilege and credibility," says Whiton, who lunches with Elon Musk, counts Tony Robbins as a friend and still couch surfs. "I can go around and ask the same questions hippies do. But when I have my adventures, I'm meeting not just hippies and shamans, but venture capitalists, engineers and stock traders. That's special."
When I express doubt that technology, and technologists, who have created our over-stressed, socially anxious, always digitally-on selves can now create the off-button solution - through the same sort of tech - Siegel says, "That's legitimate."
"Tech can support our humanity and our true nature," says Whiton, who, I realise, is not spending this ride tapping at a phone, but is fully engaged. "It just can't be tech products in the service of distracting you from your emotions, distracting you from your problems, which has been a major thrust of the economy. Sure, you're mildly depressed. But we've got a pill for you. Sure, you don't like your home life, but we've got happy hour for you. So much of the economy works on repression and distraction. But we're seeing a shift. We have the engineering knowledge to create the tools to get us back in touch with our humanity and to regulate our emotions."
That consumers are desperate to relax and de-stress is clear. We're buying tens of millions of pounds' worth of biofeedback headsets and meditation apps to get there. The next engineering challenge is teaching tech to detect things about the human experience that matter to humans. People such as Martin believe that as artificial intelligence improves, we'll return each day to a smart home that, using facial recognition and other sensors, will know how we feel as soon as we walk through the door. Our home will provide us with the sounds, lights, smells, food and words that a loved one might provide. We'll carry biomarkers that detect our real-time cortisol levels (indicating stress) and headsets that guide us to a calmer state.
Tech giants such as Google, Apple and Adobe, concerned about the work-life balance of their workers, already provide mindfulness training and talks for their employees. Some even distribute biofeedback headsets like the Muse. And Martin's Trans Tech conference is promoting consumer gadgets that are scalable (meaning they can be found on the walls of Best Buy) and could one day be reimbursable by insurance companies.
"Flow and empathy are about to have their mainstream moment," Siegel says, as he pulls into a flower- and vine-covered shopping centre where we'll eat breakfast at a place called Café Bliss. "How many other altered states can we achieve? There are a hundred more out there. Are people ready for that? People are ready."
And not just for ego-driven self improvement, Whiton argues, but for communal coherence. Siegel himself has designed a system called HeartSync, which he first deployed at Burning Man a few years ago. It links 24 people via EEG headsets to a computer hub. Using audio cues over speakers, it lets the group sync its collective heartbeat and breathing. "So say you decided to have a board meeting and you hook everyone up to a headband and a heart-rate sensor to get into state of coherence," says Whiton. "You get people out of their ego states and into a group state, thinking as one. And what kind of meeting would we have after that?"
By early evening Siegel, dressed in loose-fitting guru pants, is sitting at the head of a folding table, flanked by plastic-wrapped tubs of cheeses and cold cuts. Volunteers peel the plastic and set the goodies on nearby café tables. Each month, Siegel holds his MeetUps here at Eco-Systm, a co-working space just outside the city's financial district. The place has an artsy startup vibe.
Tonight's talk features Julia Moss-bridge, a Northwestern University neuroscientist. She studies how our conscious and unconscious minds perceive and process time. Her talk, "Designing an AI to Love", will explore whether we can create an artificial intelligence that loves, unconditionally, with the welfare of humanity at its heart.
The MeetUp is sold out. As people drift in and nibble on the meats and chocolate-covered strawberries, Siegel drifts among them, exchanging lingering hugs and introducing people he knows to other people he knows. Among them, a married couple designing therapeutic VR experiences; the head of a Burning Man camp from Ohio, in town for the group's global leadership conference; and a smattering of young tech workers, including two women who develop user experiences for a healthcare company and had recently seen an AI talk at South by Southwest. When a young Korean woman says she recently left her marketing job at a tech company because she wants to feel fulfilled, one of Siegel's organisers pounces. "So you're in transition?" she says, cutting the woman off. The woman says she guesses so. But Siegel's volunteer cuts her short again. "Would you be interested in a transitioning workshop?" asks the volunteer, turning to Siegel and nodding eagerly.
Read more: Who built Silicon Valley? Blame the hippies
Siegel mostly earns money from his consulting, giving TED-style talks at conferences and teaching a class on meditation and technology at Stanford. MeetUp members fund its talks, but Siegel's team is keen to expand its offerings and revenue.
To start the meeting, Siegel asks three questions: how many people have a meditation or spiritual practice? How many work in science or tech? How many want to leave their jobs for something more meaningful? Each time, three quarters of the hands go up. Satisfied, Siegel says, "We are creating a community of practice and purpose, spiritual innovation and insight." Behind me, a young UX developer thumbing her iPhone says, "Wow, insight." Siegel wraps up, saying, 'We're eternally conflicted and in a lot of pain. If you think that's less than 50 per cent bullshit, you should join us." Cost: $10 a month, $100 a year.
When Mossbridge takes the mic, she is wearing a tie-dye hoodie with a heart in the centre. She runs through the archetypes we have of AI robots. They'll be obedient children, "like slaves that do what we say", she says, "saving us from danger". On a screen, she shows a clip of the robot in Interstellar carrying Anne Hathaway to safety. "Or they'll be evil tyrants that overtake us and tell us what to do." Something Mossbridge says we secretly desire. Or we can program them to help us achieve our greatest potential. Just as human beings are not the smartest operating systems, we are not the most benevolent. We may need to build an AI more compassionate than we are - to save us from ourselves, to shift consciousness toward enlightenment. In that way we don't have to just hope, afterward, the machine we built is nice. During the Q&A, a man stands and asks, "What's the purpose?" Mossbridge says, "I imagine a world where each person is paired with a loving AI that teaches us to love better."
After the meeting, an older couple (with old-school grocery industry money) give Siegel a cheque for $200,000 to fund his MeetUps and explore AI and consciousness. The Burning Man guy, whose camp offers energy work and eye-contact jams, talks blockchains with the young UX developers. Siegel, smiling beatifically, nods his way through the crowd. Unlike the scene at The Battery, with its Adobe marketing execs and Facebook product launchers, this one seems full of people who don't want what Silicon Valley is offering, but believe technology will free them from anxieties that technology has created.
There's talk of online AIs offering bespoke psychotherapy, tailoring modalities for each of our ills, with none of the baggage that human therapists carry (even though those AIs will need to be programmed by actual humans). There's chatter about brain stimulators that will one day tickle our neuron networks so they dump on happiness chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin.
Advances in virtual reality might teach us, and some studies suggest they can, to become more altruistic. But, like a knife, it could cut the other way. "You could just say, 'Who needs a planet?'" Whiton posits to me one day, "'I got this many pixels.'"
The brain itself might prove the ultimate battleground. Studies show that our grey matter might contain its own dimethyltryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen that can induce a mystical high. Like all hallucinogens, it has the potential to radically shift your experiences and transform your personality in a single trip. What happens when we create the enlightenment button, using tech to trigger a cascade of hallucinogens? Does the government regulate that like an illegal drug?
That's the sort of big question - how much consciousness shifting can we take? - that Whiton and Siegel can debate endlessly, like turned-on college grads. How much will others allow, before - like previous mind-expanding experiments - it all goes to hell and someone with top-down control shuts it down?
"You've got all this mindfulness stuff happening in big companies, but how much mindfulness are they really ready for?" Whiton pondered earlier at Café Bliss. "Do they just want their workers at their desks stress free? Because what Mike and I have found is if you meditate too long, you decide your job is not for you. I'm not sure companies want you to be self-actualised to the point where you realise, 'This isn't working in a really kind of soulless way. I got it. I'm out.'"
"It's a very real possibility," Siegel replied, sitting crossed-legged and leaning over his tea. "Like, what's the dosage, right? Where people are just like, 'Well, fuck this.'"
Kevin Gray wrote about Kobalt Music Group in issue 05.15
This article was originally published by WIRED UK