TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic
and AI hype as inequality engines
Journal of Psychedelic
Studies
DOI:
10.1556/2054.2023.00292
© 2023 The Author(s)
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
PAPER
p
Corresponding author. Gilman Hall 4,
3400 N Charles Street, Baltimore, MD
21218. Tel.: (410) 516 7545.
E-mail: ndevenot@jhu.edu
NEŞE DEVENOT1,2p
1
University Writing Program, Johns Hopkins University, United States
2
Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, The Ohio State University, United States
Received: July 1, 2023 • Revised manuscript received: August 2, 2023 • Accepted: August 3, 2023
ABSTRACT
Background and Aims: While many scholars have called attention to similarities between the earlier SSRI
hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications, the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with
utopian and esoteric aspirations that have no parallel in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other
antidepressants. This utopian discourse provides insight into the ways that global tech elites are
instrumentalizing both psychedelics and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools in a broader world-building
project that justifies increasing material inequality. If realized, this project would undermine the use of
both tools for prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes. Methods: My argument develops through
rhetorical analysis of the ways that industry leaders envision the future of medicalized psychedelics in their
public communications. I draw on examples from media interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and press releases
to underscore the persuasive strategies and ideological commitments that are driving the movement to
transform psychedelics into pharmaceutical medications. Results: Counterfactual efforts to improve mental
health by increasing inequality are widespread in the psychedelics industry. These efforts have been pro-
pelled by an elitist worldview that is widely-held in Silicon Valley. The backbone of this worldview is the
TESCREAL bundle of ideologies, which describes an interrelated cluster of belief systems: transhumanism,
Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism. Conclusions:
This article demonstrates that TESCREALism is a driving force in major segments of the psychedelic
pharmaceutical industry, where it is influencing the design of extractive systems that directly contradict the
field’s world-healing aspirations. These findings contribute to a developing subfield of critical psychedelic
studies, which interrogates the political and economic implications of psychedelic medicalization.
KEYWORDS
psychedelics, artificial intelligence, medicalization, neoliberalism, transhumanism, longtermism
INTRODUCTION
Researchers have called attention to the ways that the hype promoting psychedelics as miracle
cures replicates preceding claims about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants in prior
decades. As the drug historian David Herzberg articulated in conversation with UC Berkeley’s
The Microdose:
There’s been an enormous amount of money invested in psychedelics as people hope that they
can be the real Prozac in the same way that Prozac hoped it would be the real Valium and Valium
would be the real barbiturates, which would be the real morphine. There’s a long history of
hoping that maybe this time, it’s not so complicated; maybe there is a simple switch to change
people without having to change any [other] aspect of their [lives]. (Hu, 2023a)
Although corporate actors assert that psychedelics will succeed where other mental health
treatments failed due to their unique mechanisms of action (see Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022,
pp. 486–488), the project of psychedelic medicalization is following the same playbook as the
earlier rollout of antidepressant pharmaceuticals. While the underlying etiology of mental illness
might have shifted from a model of chemical imbalance to restricted features in the brain’s energy
landscape (Carhart-Harris et al., 2023), commentators are positioning psychedelics as yet another
individualized, brain-based solution to complex social problems with roots in material inequality.
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2 Journal of Psychedelic Studies
By treating individual symptoms rather than calling for societal
reorganization, the medicalization of psychedelics is repeating
the same neoliberal, for-profit approach to healthcare that
contributed to the poor outcomes of Prozac and other SSRIs
(Davies, 2022; Ioannidis, 2008; Kemp, Lickel, & Deacon, 2014).
As a result, there is every indication that the transplantation
of this approach into the novel context of psychedelic medicine
will lead to similarly disappointing outcomes.
Although neoliberalism arose as a theory of political-eco-
nomic practices that sought to “liberat[e] individual entrepre-
neurial freedoms” through “strong property rights, free
markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2), the global
ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism since the 1970s came to
influence the “common sense” way that people view the world
and themselves. Since its values are often internalized as natural
and inevitable, neoliberalism drives people to seek out continual
self-improvement in the name of personal responsibility, under
immense pressure to persevere and succeed as individuals in
isolation from broader community support (Gearin & Devenot,
2021, pp. 926–927). Despite evidence against the quality of care
provided by the neoliberal approach to individualized, for-
profit healthcare, this model has persisted—in part—because it
aligns with the interests of the powerful, creating market op-
portunities within which wealth can be extracted from the
masses and funneled to the top.
While others have noted similarities between the earlier
SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications,1
the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and
magico-religious aspirations that have no parallel in the
discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. I argue
that this utopian discourse provides insight into the ways that
global financial and tech elites are instrumentalizing psyche-
delics as one tool in a broader world-building project that
justifies increasing material inequality. This elite project re-
veals how medicalized psychedelics can potentially undermine
the very prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes that the
field’s funders insist psychedelics will promote. To understand
the envisioned role of psychedelics within this elite project,
this paper analyzes a different parallel hype, revealing corre-
spondences between the psychedelic industry hype and the
concurrent hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI),
including the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power
ChatGPT.2 The presence of these parallels is understandable
when one considers their underlying affinities, like two
blooms from one plant: the same Silicon Valley and venture
capital forces are investing enormous amounts of capital to
develop both as cultivars in their own image, selecting for
desired traits that further the existing socioeconomic order.
1
Scholars in the psychedelic humanities and social sciences have articulated
how the project of psychedelic medicalization has embraced the same brain-
based approach to conceptualizing distress as previous pharmacological
interventions, to the extent that the promise of psychedelic medicine risks
amounting to “old wine in a new bottle” (Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022;
Gearin & Devenot, 2021; Noorani, 2019; Plesa & Petranker, 2022).
2
For a discussion of ChatGPT’s role in fueling the current generative AI
“hype cycle,” see Marx, 2023.
My argument develops through rhetorical analysis of the
ways that industry leaders envision the future of medicalized
psychedelics in their public communications. I draw on ex-
amples from media interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and
press releases to underscore the persuasive strategies and
ideological commitments that are driving the movement to
transform psychedelics into pharmaceutical medications.
These communications reveal the pervasiveness of beliefs
that circumvent the actual barriers to human and more-
than-human flourishing on this planet. I begin by examining
how the pharmaceutical field of psychedelic medicine has
been informed by teleological and spiritual perspectives that
contradict the interdisciplinary evidence base regarding the
causes of trauma. With the influx of capital investments into
this field, these spiritual beliefs have synergized with elitist
theories of change and innovation, which position the well-
being of elites as inherently more important than the mate-
rial needs of the masses. Together, these strains set the
groundwork for the co-optation of psychedelic discourse by
longtermist transhumanists, who envision roles for psyche-
delic pharmaceuticals within a heroic, evolutionary project
that depends on widening inequality to succeed.
This methodology and its findings contribute to a
developing subfield of critical psychedelic studies that in-
terrogates the political and economic implications of psy-
chedelic medicalization. Through similar approaches to
rhetorical analysis, each of the preceding papers in this
tradition have problematized widely-held, normative, and
hegemonic assumptions in the field to highlight how alter-
native approaches are obscured by the dominant discourses
(e.g., Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022; Gearin & Devenot,
2021, 2021; Noorani, 2019; Pace & Devenot, 2021; Plesa &
Petranker, 2022; Tvorun-Dunn, 2022; K. Williams, Romero,
Braunstein, & Brant, 2022). As this critical literature has
emphasized, the neoliberal and corporatized medicalization
of psychedelics promises to exacerbate the very issues that it
purports to solve. Although industry insiders have posi-
tioned psychedelics as solutions for civilizational threats
including political polarization, the rise of fascism, envi-
ronmental degradation, and increasing rates of mental
illness, scholars in other fields have associated all of these
problems with rising inequality in society.3 If the psychedelic
3
Alex K. Gearin and I describe how the discourse of psychedelic medical-
ization promises individualized solutions “to societal challenges of author-
itarianism and climate change,” and yet “both of these challenges have
been exacerbated by the global spread of neoliberal capitalism.” As a
result, “psychedelic medicine is being constructed within neoliberalism
as a means of furthering neoliberal priorities, in a manner that risks
exacerbating the very problems that some claim it solves” (Gearin &
Devenot, 2021, p. 927). Maxim Tvorun-Dunn similarly emphasizes how
the broader social impacts of the psychedelic industry’s financial backers
contradict their claims about prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes:
“Considering that Silicon Valley has directly contributed to [neoliber-
alism, environmental pollution, worker disempowerment, and digital sur-
veillance], the continued prominence of psychedelic drug use by tech
executives seems directly incongruous with the pro-social, progressive
forming, and environmental attributes which advocates claim psychedelics
provide” (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, pp. 1–2).
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
industry provides the impetus for yet more billionaires and
unicorn companies, these promised outcomes—which are
cited to justify the industry’s rapid expansion—will amount
to nothing more than a bait and switch: by increasing the
overall inequality in society, the psychedelics industry could
end up fueling the root causes of the very problems to which
it is selling supposedly novel solutions.
Rather than addressing the systemic drivers of these
interrelated problems, major funders are explicitly building the
psychedelics industry to extract wealth for ever-widening
inequality. In this paper, I will argue that this counterfactual
approach to mental healthcare is propelled by an elitist
worldview that is widely-held among Silicon Valley’s billion-
aires. The backbone of this worldview is the TESCREAL bundle
of ideologies—an acronym coined by the critical AI scholars
Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru to describe an interrelated
cluster of belief systems: transhumanism, Extropianism, sin-
gularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and
longtermism. Taken together, TESCREALism amounts to the
“court philosophy” of the global oligarch class, serving to
lionize the acceleration of inequality towards the goal of colo-
nizing far-distant galaxies. Just as earlier court philosophers
articulated the divine right of kings to naturalize monarchy,
present-day billionaires are funding TESCREAList philoso-
phers and “thought leaders” to articulate ethical justifications
for extreme inequality under oligarchic rule.4
In its most dangerous formulation, TESCREALism
sounds like science fiction. To its adherents, the rise of AI
signals that humanity is hurtling towards an evolutionary
phase change or technological singularity that can only be
realized through elite control of the world’s collective re-
sources. A prominent example is Elon Musk, who has
justified his extreme wealth in terms of “accumulating re-
sources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of
consciousness to the stars” (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5).
Beyond AI, TESCREALism is also a driving force in major
segments of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, where
it is influencing the design of extractive systems that directly
contradict the field’s world-healing aspirations. As this article
will explore, some of these figures envision psychedelics as a
new extractive industry for funneling wealth towards trans-
humanist evolution, whereas others anticipate accommoda-
ting the masses to impending evolutionary changes. In
parallel to the capitalist AI field, which is plowing past critical
4 home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need
In Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018),
Anand Giridharadas describes how billionaire philanthropists fund
thought leaders to justify the status quo of hierarchical power relations:
“[The elite] needed thinkers to…convince the wider public that they, the
elite, were change agents, were the solutions to the problem, and therefore
not the problem” (Giridharadas, 2019, p. 94). John Sanbonmatsu describes
the ascendency of TESCREAList ideas in terms of these selective pres-
sures: “unequal social conditions produce an unequal circulation of ideas,
enabling some intellectual positions to assume preeminence over others,
not because of their truth value, but because of their degree of compati-
bility with ascendant structures of the dominant economic system” (San-
bonmatsu, 2023, p. 204). As a result of these pressures, the most dominant
proposed solutions to social problems tend to reproduce the very systems
that caused those problems to begin with.
3
calls for transparency and democratic engagement (Luccioni,
2023), “corporadelic” actors in the psychedelics industry are
claiming an urgent mandate to address global suffering that
cannot wait (W. Williams, 2020). In their capitalist mani-
festations, both industries claim authority to pursue solutions
to the precise harms that their nascent systems are designed
to actively perpetuate. As I will argue, critical voices must
remain vigilant to these rhetorical strategies in order to reveal
—and counteract—the fabricated, hallucinatory character of
Silicon Valley’s self-serving narratives. Far from the promise
of healing trauma, the alternative would amount to both
fields’ complicity in the use of AI and psychedelics as tech-
nologies of elite persuasion.
ELITE HALLUCINATIONS IN AI AND
PSYCHEDELICS
Drawing on a distinction between genuine psychedelic in-
sights and illusory “tripping,” the public intellectual Naomi
Klein wrote in The Guardian about how corporate actors in
the field of generative AI have co-opted the word “halluci-
nation” as a means of subtly naturalizing their preferred
approach to AI development as both good and inevitable.
Klein argues that by describing unreal but plausible-
sounding facts and citations as “hallucinations,” this rhetoric
gives credence to the transhumanist fantasy that these
companies are on the cusp of birthing an advanced form of
consciousness that will trigger an “evolutionary leap for our
species” (Klein, 2023).5 For Klein, this belief and its atten-
dant mythologies—that AI will end poverty, cure all disease,
solve climate change, and make jobs more meaningful—are
the actual hallucinations, since these claims dissociate from
the evidence of material conditions to justify AI’s rapid
cultivation by corporate interests. Although Klein references
psychedelics as a metaphorical frame in order to highlight
this point within the specific context of AI hype, she does
not mention that these same elite hallucinations are also
fueling the rise of psychedelic medicalization.
In the corporate rollout of both psychedelics and AI,
capitalist logics actively undercut any potential for these
tools to address the problems of poverty, climate change,
and disease. As Klein points out:
There is a world in which generative AI…could indeed be
marshaled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared
to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social
order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting
of human needs and the protection of the [planet]…. In
[today’s] reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth,
AI…is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of
further [inequality]. (Klein, 2023)
5
I prefer cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane’s alternative use of “fabrica-
tions,” which avoids the misleading connotations of “hallucinations” in
the context of LLMs (Birhane, 2023).
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4 Journal of Psychedelic Studies
As it stands, both AI and psychedelics are bankrolled by
financial elites who are seeking new ways to profit off of
(and maintain) the status quo of power relations in society.
Klein argues that the solutions to climate change are not
elusive, as AI enthusiasts claim; rather, the known solutions
are at odds with the status quo of capitalism, which profits
off of the production of oil and “consumption-based
models” for economic growth. A similar argument applies to
the discourse on psychedelics: to actually fix the mental
health “crisis,” we need to address the root cause of
inequality by ensuring access to safe food, water, shelter,
education, and healthcare. Since this would require systems
change, economic elites are holding out for “magic bullet”
solutions that can be deployed at scale to prop up—and
develop new income streams for—the existing, dysfunctional
socioeconomic system. The elite vision for psychedelics as
individualized treatments for social problems is thus a
symptom of the problem itself, as Klein describes of AI in
relation to the climate: “The climate crisis is not, in fact, a
mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved…. We know what
it would take, but it’s not a quick fix—it’s a paradigm shift.
Waiting for…a more palatable and/or profitable answer is
not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.”
In line with the promotion of other psychopharmaceut-
icals during preceding decades, business leaders in the psy-
chedelics industry pitch their products as revolutionary
solutions for contemporary society’s ills, including the mental
illness epidemic. Often, these proclamations are informed by
political and economic ideologies that contradict their pur-
ported therapeutic aspirations. The following sections will
present case studies of prominent figures in the psychedelic
medicine industry in order to make legible what these figures
mean when they claim that psychedelics will revolutionize
mental healthcare. As close readings of their public state-
ments reveal, many leaders of the psychedelic medical in-
dustry express motivations that run counter to evidence-
based solutions for supporting human (and non-human)
flourishing. Although some of these figures’ visions for the
future are unlikely to succeed, their words reveal the extent to
which the public discourse about psychedelic medicines has
been shaped by vested interests in maintaining the status quo
of society’s widespread inequalities. As Tvorun-Dunn has
argued, such rhetorical analysis of this discourse provides
insight into the actual “meanings and motivations” that have
guided the development of psychedelics as pharmaceutical
medications and biotech investment opportunities—often in
contradiction to their prosocial and pro-evironmental claims
(Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 2).
“NET-ZERO TRAUMA” AND “MASS MENTAL
HEALTH” THROUGH MASS SPIRITUALIZATION
(RICK DOBLIN, MAPS)
As in the case of AI hype, industry leaders are arguing that
psychedelics offer a profitable solution to the ravages of
inequality without changing society’s underlying material
conditions. Rick Doblin—founder of the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—has repeatedly
stated that psychedelics “will be a catalyst for mass mental
health” through their capacity to change individual per-
spectives (Doblin, 2021). While international media outlets
have tended to run this line without further elaboration,
Doblin clarified his meaning in a 2020 podcast, when he
identified “mass mental health” with a “mass spiritualiza-
tion” of humanity. According to Doblin, the psychedelic
experience is “the antidote to genocide, to the holocaust, to
nuclear destruction, to racism…. I see the medicalization [of
psychedelics]…as a tool to bring about mass mental health
or mass spiritualization you could say…. I see that what we
need to do with psychedelics is expand our humanity” (CIIS
Public Programs Podcast, 2020). Doblin further defines this
spiritualization as a shift from literal or “fundamentalist”
religious beliefs to a spiritual mysticism rooted in unitive
psychedelic experiences (PSYCH, 2021, 39:53). This confi-
dence in the notion that psychedelics will radically minimize
interpersonal harms reappears in another frequent slogan: “I
believe that fully globalized access to MDMA-assisted ther-
apy can lead to a world of net-zero trauma by 2070” (Doblin,
2023). These claims are based on theological beliefs rather
than medical evidence, and Doblin’s suggestion that psy-
chedelic experiences necessarily encourage prosocial
behavior is contradicted by both cross-disciplinary research
(Pace & Devenot, 2021) and by the harms caused within
MAPS’s own clinical trials (McNamee, Devenot, & Buisson,
2023; Nickles & Ross, 2022).
The spiritual orientation of MAPS’s mission extends
beyond Doblin’s public relations strategy to the scientific
methodology of its clinical trials. Although MAPS describes
the therapy component of its MDMA for PTSD trials as
“non-directive,” their approach—which is explicitly informed
by Stanislav Grof’s psychedelic philosophy—includes a
range of spiritual beliefs that have never been empirically
supported (Devenot, Tumilty, et al., 2022; Love, 2022).
Chief among these is the notion that MDMA unleashes the
patient-participant’s “inner healing intelligence,” which
MAPS’s treatment manual characterizes as “a person’s
innate capacity to heal” (Mithoefer et al., 2017, p. 8).
Although this language sounds analogous to the body’s ability
to heal damaged tissue, the inner healing intelligence is a
Grofian concept that attributes healing to “ordinarily hidden
spiritual dimensions of existence,” which are accessed through
non-ordinary states of consciousness (Grof, 2006, p. 350).
MAPS’s manual directs adherence raters to monitor thera-
pists’ belief in the inner healing intelligence: therapists should
“trust” that difficult emotions are productive and emerge at
the “best time,” according to the wisdom of the inner healer
(Mithoefer et al., 2017, pp. 11–12). Although MAPS is
approaching FDA approval of MDMA as a medical treatment
for PTSD, this amounts to a form of faith-based healing
through the unfolding of teleological processes. As the
following sections will explore, these currents of teleological
spirituality within the field of psychedelic medicine have
primed its co-optation by Silicon Valley’s elitist, evolutionary
ideologies.
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
“TRICKLE-DOWN ECSTASIS”: ELITE THEORIES
OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN SILICON VALLEY
(RONAN LEVY, FIELD TRIP HEALTH)
While some psychedelic leaders are driven by spiritual
motivations that bypass material barriers to flourishing,
others are angling for market share by medicalizing the
distress associated with inequality. Approaching extreme
inequality as an inevitable feature of society, many psyche-
delic investors and CEOs frame psychedelics as tools for
adapting individuals to the consequences of inequality in a
manner that obscures the potential for societal trans-
formation. Often, this normalization of inequality specif-
ically venerates Silicon Valley’s culture of tech disruptions as
a societal good. In a paradigmatic example, Field Trip
Health—a mental health and wellness company that
described itself as “a global leader6 in the development and
delivery of psychedelic therapies” (Eldor, 2021)—announced
a special program to provide free ketamine services to in-
dividuals who were recently laid off from the tech industry
(Mikhail, 2022). In that announcement and an accompa-
nying tweet, then-CEO Ronan Levy reiterated that this op-
portunity was intended for white-collar workers from Silicon
Valley companies including Twitter, Google, Meta, Stripe,
and Amazon. Within a global context of worsening labor
relations, these mass layoffs presented opportunities to
challenge the inordinate power imbalances wielded by
multinational corporations, but Field Trip’s individualized
solution obscured these systemic issues.
As a consequence of Silicon Valley’s search for ever-more-
profitable solutions to the consequences of widening
inequality, the focus among tech elites is never on addressing
the social determinants of widespread distress, since inequality
is both their income stream and the object of their efforts.
As Nils Redeker has described, multinational corporations
(including those cited by Field Trip) have increasingly adopted
strategies that focus on investing profits into financial markets
rather than in workers and their pay. These corporate savings
and the corresponding divestment from workers have
contributed internationally to rising inequality and labor
disenfranchisement, which have devastating impacts on
mental health (Redeker, 2022). In a systematic review pub-
lished in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Tib-
ber and colleagues identified a consistent correlation between
income inequality and poor adult mental health at the sub-
national level, which reinforces the longstanding sociologi-
cally-informed understanding of the effects of poverty and
inequality on wellbeing (Tibber, Walji, Kirkbride, & Huddy,
2022). In their conclusion, the authors note that there is an
“ethical imperative” to address the environmental causes of
psychological distress, given that inequality is only predicted
to rise based on current market trajectories. As they note: “In a
6
Although Field Trip Health had reportedly raised more than $100 million
in investments since its founding in 2019, the company ultimately
collapsed in 2023 (Gunther, 2023; Smith, 2023).
5
recent report entitled ‘Britain in the 2020s’ the Institute for
Public Policy Research predicted that inequality will ‘surge’
over the course of the decade…with the income of the rich
forecasted to rise 11 times faster than the incomes of the poor,
and an extra 3.6 million predicted to fall into poverty within
this time-frame” (Tibber et al., 2022, p. 20). Instead of
addressing the structural and social drivers of inequality, Field
Trip’s narrative centers around medicalizing the distress
associated with involuntary unemployment. In doing so, it
promotes individualized, pharmaceutical solutions to the pain
caused by material instability, which obscures the structural
roots of a precarious labor market.
For Ronan Levy and other corporate actors in the psy-
chedelics industry, the comprehensible stresses and anxieties
of life under neoliberal capitalism present lucrative market
opportunities (Davies, 2022), and this profit motive is
reinforced by elitist beliefs about capitalism as a social good.
Speaking on a conference panel in 2020, Levy claimed that
“capitalism…often gets defined in a very…negative way, but
to me, capitalism is just respecting everybody’s agency”
(OPEN Foundation, 2021, 18:48). In a hierarchical system
that funnels wealth from the bottom to those at the top, this
emphasis on agency implies that elites have earned—and
hence deserve—their positions of power. This perspective
aligns with Silicon Valley’s hierarchical ideologies, which
often frame the billionaire class as more intrinsically
important and valuable than the masses, since their global
reach and ability to mobilize capital offer the greatest po-
tential for wide-scale impact (Chang, 2019, pp. 188–189).7
The translation of Silicon Valley’s ideologies into the
psychedelics industry is evident in hallucinatory assurances
that psychedelics will improve society by influencing elite
perspectives. As an example, Levy has justified prioritizing
the mental health of Silicon Valley’s “rich white men” in
terms of a “trickle-down ecstasis”8 model for social change.
The latter phrase alludes to the debunked theory of trickle-
down economics, whose proponents claimed that society’s
interests were best supported by further enriching the
ultrawealthy. In this context, “trickle-down ecstasis” cap-
tures the individualistic credo that psychedelics lead to social
change by percolating through the innovations and insights
of tech elites. As Levy described on an industry panel:
Even if you only serve rich white men with access to psy-
chedelic therapies, it’s going to change them in a way that
I think is constructive and positive, and will create an army
of people who are more open-minded and more willing
7
Douglas Rushkoff has described how this elitist view informs the rationale
for the Future Festival—a luxury environment where tech elites take psy-
chedelics and make business deals. In the words of its co-founder, Robert
Scott: “It’s important what we do here…. We’re shaping the Future. These
are the people who not only can do it, but these are the only people who
can” (Rushkoff, 2022, pp. 113–114).
8
Although the authors of Stealing Fire claim to have coined this term to
critique the phenomenon, their alternative (“ripple out”) model is func-
tionally identical to a “trickle down” model of social change, since they
frame such change as catalyzed by the insights and innovations of tech
elites (Kotler & Wheal, 2017, p. 174).
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6 Journal of Psychedelic Studies
to think about how we address the challenges of equity….
I know it seems counterintuitive that creating more inequity
is going to create equity, but I do genuinely believe that that’s
a possible outcome here. (PsychedelX, 2021, 50:14)
Although Levy’s perspective holds out the prospect of
improving the world through elite innovation, there is no
evidence that psychedelics make billionaires more interested
in equity. Despite claims to the contrary, psychedelic expe-
riences of interconnection are often interpreted as irrefutable
validations of existing status and power hierarchies (Pace &
Devenot, 2021, pp. 9–11, 13). Far from persuading billionaires
to relinquish their power over society, there is growing evi-
dence that psychedelics are actually fueling elitist ideologies
that naturalize inequality, as the next sections will explore.
“A SIGNIFICANTLY GREATER GOOD”:
TESCREALISM AND THE TECH OLIGARCHY’S
NEW COURT PHILOSOPHERS
Beyond medicalizing the stresses of living under existing
inequalities and social injustice, others in the psychedelics
industry are anticipating how psychedelic medicine might
lubricate a future world with even greater inequality.
As Maxim Tvorun-Dunn has argued, Silicon Valley’s elites
are operationalizing psychedelics within an anti-human,
“secular-esoteric” quasi-religion that frames capital accu-
mulation as the necessary means for heroic, evolutionary
ends (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, pp. 2, 5). Drawing on philoso-
phers like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, many tech elites
now embrace a worldview wherein “enterprising wealthy
individuals” will be necessary to achieve “utopian gains for
humanity which must not be stopped by democratic masses”
(Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5). Over the last decade, these
trends have coalesced in the Effective Altruism (EA)
movement and its associate philosophy of longtermism,
which are highly influential amongst Silicon Valley’s tech
elites and major funders of the psychedelics industry.
On its surface, the Effective Altruism (EA) movement
champions the use of science and reason to determine the most
high-impact applications of philanthropy, with the goal of
improving the world while reducing suffering. In practice,
however, EA rationalizes the increase of inequality as the most
effective means of changing the world, since it advances the
notion that individuals can best support EA’s goals by making
the most money as quickly as possible—a practice described as
“earning to give” (Current Affairs, 2023). The Oxford philos-
opher William MacAskill—a co-founder of EA who has drawn
positive attention for attracting tech and crypto billionaires to
the movement (Crary, Gruen, & Adams, 2022; Kulish, 2022)—
has argued that lucrative career paths (like finance) are more
ethical than working to improve local conditions, since
financial elites can scale their impact beyond the merely
proximal by amassing extraordinary material resources
(MacAskill, 2016). In exploring this line of reasoning, Mac-
Askill goes so far as to argue that working for a petrochemical
company can be an optimal means of mitigating climate
change if it generates income to fund meaningful philan-
thropic efforts (MacAskill, 2014, pp. 275–276). Along the same
lines, he advocates for professions that profit by “disrupting the
livelihood of the global poor” (MacAskill, 2014, p. 274)—such
as in the case of financial speculation on the price of wheat—so
long as the wealth generated contributes to “a significantly
greater good” that eclipses those incidental harms (MacAskill,
2014, p. 277). According to this line of reasoning, harmful
actions can be ethically justified “if the ratio of benefit to harm
is great enough” (MacAskill, 2014, p. 277).
In 2017, MacAskill coined the term “longtermism” to
enshrine the flourishing of distant-future generations as
among the greatest goods, and hence “a key moral priority of
our time” (MacAskill, 2019). Due to this consequentialist
philosophy, Silicon Valley’s tech-utopian fantasies of future
splendor can provide cover for the exploitation and brutal-
ization of actual humans (and non-humans) living in the
present. Scholars including Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres
have already begun tracing the consequences of this philos-
ophy for the rollout of AI, where glittering visions of a future
tech utopia are distracting from the real harms that AI is
causing today, including systemic discrimination from biased
data sets (Benjamin, 2019; Birhane, Prabhu, & Kahembwe,
2021) and the disenfranchisement of workers through mass
theft (Zanzotto, 2019). These harms are a consequence of the
specific ways that Silicon Valley’s elites are developing AI
systems, which are at the expense of other (prosocial, dem-
ocratic, non-extractive) approaches to AI development (Bir-
hane, 2021; DAIR Institute, 2021).
Torres and Gebru argue that Effective Altruism and
longtermism are the latest iterations within a cluster of ide-
ologies that they have named the TESCREAL bundle—an
acronym that organizes these worldviews according to
their chronological emergence (transhumanism, Extropian-
ism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective
Altruism, and longtermism).9 As embraced by the TESCRE-
ALists of Silicon Valley, transhumanism—the futurist vision
of technologically reengineering the human species—is a
racist and eugenicist project that labels some forms of con-
sciousness and modes of experience as inherently more
valuable than others.10 As Torres argues, the combination of
9
For a brief discussion of the full TESCREAL acronym, see Troy, 2023.
As Keira Havens observes, “Sociobiology and eugenics [are] once again
10
being repackaged for the public as part of the TESCREAL ideologies,
pressed into service to rationalize why those with power and resources
are morally justified in doing everything they can to retain it” (Havens,
2023). Along these lines, the longtermist Nick Beckstead has argued that,
in the project of working towards a transhuman future, “saving a life in a
rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor
country because richer countries have more innovation, and their workers
are more economically productive” (Linton, 2023). Taking an exception-
alist standpoint that prioritizes human rationality over other modes of
conscious experience, William MacAskill has claimed that “the lives of
wild animals” are plausibly “worse than nothing on average” (Torres,
2023a). As a result of these positions, TESCREAList assessments of which
modes of existence are deemed worthy of preserving—and conversely,
which modes are rendered expendable—are saturated with colonial, racist,
ableist, and speciesist assumptions.
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
these ideologies amounts to a secular religion that “justifies
pursuing the social preferences of elites” while it claims to
hold the solutions to “humanity’s deepest problems” (Torres,
2021a). Their scholarship reveals how, among AI’s major
funders and CEOs, TESCREAList beliefs have normalized the
perspective that extreme inequality is a societal good, which is
justifying the development of AI in a manner that exacerbates
inequality. This analysis explains why elites are warning of
AI’s existential risks in a manner that obscures the actual,
unnecessary harms that are caused by human decisions.
The TESCREAL bundle is so dangerous because it su-
perficially appears to align with genuinely prosocial and pro-
environmental orientations towards the future. For instance,
longtermism seems to echo the widespread Indigenous
principles of conservation and mutualism known collectively
as the Honorable Harvest, which the Potawatomi poet-
botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as “principles and
practices that…rein in our tendency to consume—[so] that
the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is
for our own” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 180). Although these
principles might sound compatible with longtermism’s focus
on the flourishing of distant-future generations, these two
worldviews—upon closer inspection—are actually based on
incompatible values and aspire to opposite goals. As Keith
Williams and Suzanne Brant (both of Haudenosaunee
ancestry) articulate in “Tending a vibrant world: Gift logic
and sacred plant medicines,” Indigenous views on the
wellbeing of future generations are commonly rooted in a
non-hierarchical ontology based on reciprocity and rela-
tionality with the specific, local diversity of the more-than-
human world (K. Williams & Brant, 2023).11 The authors
describe how this Indigenous ontology is incompatible with
neoliberal capitalism’s basis in extraction and exploitation,
which is premised on a colonial “hierarchization of all life.”
By imposing a hierarchy wherein some forms of life are
ascribed greater value and meaning than others, neoliber-
alism justifies the instrumentalization of those at the bottom
of that hierarchy by those at the top.
Longtermism is an extension of the extractive logics that
Williams and Brant characterize as “anti-life.” Drawing on
Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics or “the subju-
gation of life to the power of death,” they reveal how the
colonial project is premised on a (white supremacist) human
exceptionalism that assumes the right to label some life as
disposable, and hence to identify acceptable sacrifices in the
context of a more worthy cause. The irreconcilability of
colonial necropolitics with Indigenous gift logic is made
apparent in the context of the global climate crisis, which
is often mistaken as a justification for longtermism. At a
time when the impacts of climate change are increasingly
evident and disruptive, onlookers have misread longtermism
Rooted in this Indigenous ontology, which is “interdependent, participa-
11
tory, and ecologically-based,” Yuria Celidwen and colleagues led an Indig-
enous consensus process to articulate eight ethical principles for
psychedelic research and practice. In synergy with the work of Williams
and Brant, these principles are at odds with neoliberal enclosure, resource
extraction, and capital accumulation (Celidwen et al., 2023, pp. 2–3).
7
as advocating for sensible behavioral changes in the present
—like degrowth and fossil fuel divestment—in order to
safeguard the planet for future generations (Kaspersen &
Wallach, 2022).
The distinction between longtermism and Indigenous
relationality is apparent in Émile Torres’ analysis of the
discourse surrounding AI’s risks for human extinction.
Torres observes that this discourse relies on an idiosyncratic
sense of the word “extinction” (Torres, 2023a). Key figures
among Silicon Valley’s elite are interested in maintaining the
planet’s life support systems, but only insofar as they are
waiting to reap a very specific harvest: a new form of
(transhuman) consciousness that they believe will usher in a
future utopia. Within their TESCREAList belief system, all
of cosmic evolution has gotten humanity to a place where—
for the first time—we have the necessary technological ca-
pacity (paired with an awareness of this capacity) to birth
the true potential of consciousness, unshackled from the
limitations of biological drives and irrational emotions.
Climate disruptions only matter insofar as they might
jeopardize AI’s development into artificial general intelli-
gence (AGI), which will be capable of re-engineering hu-
manity and launching an intergalactic, posthuman
civilization. Concern for the Earth’s climate ceases beyond
that point: In order to purge consciousness of the in-
efficiencies of biological existence, we must be willing to
transcend humanity and to sacrifice our home planet as a
source of fuel towards this evolutionary transformation.
From the perspective of some TESCREALists, the stakes
for creating posthuman AGI are high (Torres, 2021a). If the
tech elites are unsuccessful in this project, their failure will
amount to a cosmic stillbirth. Consciousness will have failed
to develop past the fetal stage of its theoretical potential, and
this universe will have been a dud. In the context of this
mission to colonize the stars, accelerating inequality is
justified as an optimal strategy that increases the chances of
a successful launch sequence. With concentrated wealth, the
tech elites can funnel material resources to the right inter-
mediary steps (like advancing AI towards AGI) while sup-
pressing dissent by humankind’s masses, who might
otherwise resist this longtermist mission based on short-
sighted emotional preferences for notions like justice and
democracy. From this perspective, aversion to planetary
sacrifice amounts to nostalgic attachment to the familiar—a
limiting belief that must be overcome in order to achieve our
cosmic purpose. Torres summarizes the inherent dangers of
this perspective: “When one believes…that failing to realize
‘our potential’ would not merely be wrong but a moral ca-
tastrophe of literally cosmic proportions…you may be quite
willing to use extraordinary means to stop anyone who
stands in your way” (Torres, 2021a).
While this TESCREAList perspective might sound
outlandish to the average reader, it resonates with major
currents in the history of psychedelic philosophy, which
might contribute to acceptance of TESCREAList ideas
within the psychedelic conference community. Despite
widespread associations of psychedelics with prosocial out-
comes, the appropriation of psychedelics by TESCREAList
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8 Journal of Psychedelic Studies
billionaires had already been primed by major currents of
countercultural psychedelic thought in the twentieth cen-
tury, which blended evolutionary spirituality with elite the-
ories of social change. In a paper describing its hold on the
psychedelic imagination, Jules Evans defines evolutionary
spirituality as the notion that human evolution “can be
guided towards the creation of higher beings through such
techniques as meditation, psychedelics and eugenics or ge-
netic modification” (Evans, 2023a, p. 1). The extensive list of
“leading psychedelic thinkers” who have theorized a role for
psychedelics in catalyzing evolution includes MAPS’s Rick
Doblin and his mentor Stanislav Grof, who are at the fore-
front of the project of psychedelic medicalization (Evans,
2023a, p. 2).12
For many of these figures, spiritual evolutionary ideas
explicitly emerged from the phenomenology of psychedelic
experiences. For instance, Terence McKenna—the bardic
author of True Hallucinations (1994), on which my title
plays—described psychedelic visions that are virtually
indistinguishable from TESCREALism:
If history goes off endlessly into the future [without an evolu-
tionary advancement], [then the future] will be about scar-
city…. We are [currently] at the breakpoint. It’s like when a
woman comes to term. At a certain point, if the child is not
severed from the mother and launched into its own separate
existence, toxemia will set in…. The mushrooms said clearly,
“When a species prepares to depart for the stars, the planet will
be shaken to its core.” All evolution has pushed for this
moment, and there is no going back. What lies ahead is a
dimension of such freedom and transcendence, that once in
place, the idea of returning to the womb will be preposterous.
We will live in the imagination. We will quickly become
unrecognizable to our former selves because we’re now defined
by our limitations: the laws of gravity; the need to eat, excrete,
and make money. We have the will to expand infinitely into
pleasure, caring, attention, and connectedness. (Miller, 1993)
In this passage, McKenna frames the ongoing planetary
crises (including climate change) as positive signals that we
are on the right evolutionary track. Rather than alerting us to
pause and reassess our collective behavior, environmental
degradation demands an acceleration towards trans-
humanism—an evolutionary leap that will free us from um-
bilical dependence on our planetary home. In transcending
the inefficiencies of biological existence into a life of bliss in the
12
Aside from being the presumed forerunner to FDA approval, Rick
Doblin’s MAPS is coordinating with many other initiatives to create reg-
ulatory pathways for psychedelic access. This influence was evident during
a presentation at MAPS’s Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, as Patty
Salazar—Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory
Agencies (DORA)—described Colorado’s progress in creating a legal
framework for psilocybin access under the Natural Medicine Health
Act. In her coverage of the event, Jane Hu noted the clear intimacy be-
tween MAPS and this government agency, which demonstrates the impact
of MAPS on the broader psychedelic ecosystem: “Based on the acknowl-
edgments she made in her talk, it’s evident that Salazar has had close
relationships with MAPS” (Hu, 2023b). As a result of their proximity to
all the major power players in the psychedelic industry, the evolutionary
spirituality of Doblin and Grof is influential across this sector.
imagination, McKenna’s vision closely resembles the
TESCREAList ideas of Ben Goertzel,13 who coined the
term AGI:
This is a new phase of the evolution of our species, just
picking up speed about now…. Mind uploading technology
will permit [us] to leave biology behind…. We will spread to
the stars and roam the universe…achieving, by scientific
means, most of the promises of religions…. Radical tech-
nological advances will reduce material scarcity.… New
ethical systems will emerge, based on principles including
the spreading of joy, growth and freedom through the uni-
verse…. All of these changes will…[lead] to states of indi-
vidual and shared awareness…far beyond that accessible to
“legacy humans.” (Goertzel, 2010, pp. 9–11; Torres, 2023b)
Although this storyline reads like science fiction, this project
is being bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on the
planet, including many of the billionaires who are investing
in psychedelic medicine.
“A FEW BREAKTHROUGHS AWAY FROM
ABUNDANCE AT SCALE” (SAM ALTMAN,
OPENAI AND JOURNEY COLAB)
As Émile Torres emphasizes, TESCREALism—and its
evolutionary race to digitize consciousness—is the ideology
that drives Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, when he
claims that through the development of AGI, “we can
colonize space. We can get fusion to work and solar [energy]
to mass scale. We can cure all human diseases. We can build
new realities. We are only a few breakthroughs away from
abundance at scale that is difficult to imagine” (Torres,
2023a). When Altman says in the same Twitter thread that
“It’s obviously better to save a million lives in the future than
one life today,” he is not actually talking about human lives,
since humans are weak and unsuited to the harsh conditions
of interplanetary travel (Altman, 2022). To the contrary, his
TESCREAList vision is premised on the overcoming of
Homo sapiens by our digital, posthuman successors. As a
consequence, the extinction of H. sapiens and all other forms
of biological life is an acceptable—if not preferred—outcome
of an evolutionary, eugenicist process (Torres, 2023a).
As this example illustrates, longtermism is yet another
necropolitical manifestation of colonial inequality premised
on the hierarchization of all life—an exceptionalism that
justifies certain kinds of disposability (first of non-human
life and of lives in the Global South, and eventually of hu-
man life itself) in the service of an elite, teleological vision.
Despite proximity to discourses of Indigenous reciprocity,
Altman’s investments in psychedelic medicine must be un-
derstood as continuous with this TESCREAList mission,
13
During a 2018 recording for The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Goertzel
discussed his ideas about AGI in relation to Terence McKenna’s psyche-
delic eschatology and True Hallucinations (The Joe Rogan Experience,
2018, 1:51:47).
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
which is irreconcilable with Indigenous ontologies. Ac-
cording to a Washington Post article titled “Executive behind
ChatGPT pushes for a new revolution: Psychedelics,” Alt-
man first identified psychedelic medicine as “undervalued
technology” with high profit potential during his tenure as
president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator (Gilbert,
2023). In addition to overseeing the development of
ChatGPT, Altman now serves as the chairman of Journey
Colab, a pharmaceutical startup that is pursuing FDA
approval for psychedelic medicines including mescaline, the
use of which originated with Indigenous ceremonies
involving the San Pedro cactus and peyote.14
Within the psychedelics industry, Journey Colab has
been praised for its emphasis on Indigenous reciprocity,
beginning with its decision to place 10 percent of its
founding equity into an irrevocable “Reciprocity Trust” for
the benefit of Indigenous communities and “other stake-
holders in the psychedelic sector” (Journey Colab, 2022). In
2022, the startup also issued a “Patent Pledge” in which it
committed to not enforcing its mescaline-related patents
against any “Indigenous communities and practitioners who
use mescaline for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes”
(Psychedelic Alpha, 2022). Following the analysis by Wil-
liams and Brant, such displays of reciprocity obscure a
deeper, colonial imposition of power directed towards cap-
ital accumulation, enclosure, and extraction, which is
inherently at odds with genuine reciprocity. Altman’s praise
of Journey Colab’s reciprocity initiatives emphasizes capital
accumulation as the driving goal: “Those [Indigenous]
communities will share with Journey what they know of the
history of these medicines, and Journey will share what
Silicon Valley is good at, with how to use startups and
capitalism to deliver something to people who can
really benefit from it” (Al Idrus, 2020). For Altman, “reci-
procity” is code for strategic research and development
towards the further enrichment of Silicon Valley’s tech
elites. In this context, Indigenous knowledge is framed as a
source of extractable wealth to serve as grist for the
TESCREAL mill.
A NEW SOMA FOR THE MASSES:
PSYCHEDELIC SHIELDS FOR THE BUDDING
TECH-UTOPIA (CHRISTIAN ANGERMAYER,
ATAI LIFE SCIENCES)
While Sam Altman envisions the creation (and monopoli-
zation) of a global psychedelics industry as a means of
funneling capital towards TESCREAList projects, other
14
As Dawn Davis (Shoshone-Bannock) and other Indigenous scholars and
activists have highlighted, mainstream interest in peyote has led to
“poaching and unsustainable harvesting practices,” which threaten the
continuation of traditional ceremonial practices (D. D. Davis, 2012;
Oberhaus, 2018).
9
funders have anticipated specific roles for psychedelics in
building a TESCREAList future. Influenced by the arc from
transhumanism to longtermism, Christian Angermayer—
the billionaire founder of atai Life Sciences and a lead
investor in COMPASS Pathways—envisions psychedelics
as tools for accommodating the masses to societal instability
and disruption in a context of accelerating inequality.
Angermayer’s motivations are notable given his influential
position in the psychedelics industry: in Psychedelic Al-
pha’s 2022 Year in Review series, atai and COMPASS
accounted for nearly 40% of the aggregate psychedelic sector
public market cap by the end of 2022 (Psychedelic
Alpha, 2023).
Angermayer takes a tech elite vision of the future for
granted: humankind will be shepherded into a future of
Mars travel, artificial intelligence, and widespread auto-
mation, which promises to cause extraordinary stress for
the common masses of society. The influence of Silicon
Valley’s worldview is evident in Angermayer’s rhetoric,
which regularly emphasizes a transhumanist march
towards themes of “self-transformation, genetic modifica-
tion, nootropic drugs, AI, crypto-libertarianism and space
exploration” (Evans, 2022). In this context, Angermayer
presents a vision of psychedelics as tools for adapting and
mollifying the masses in order to ease their acceptance of
his assumed vision for this tech-utopian future world:
“We need to have the discussion that we, let’s say the
elite…. We need to offer…these people…[in] the lower-
level jobs…new jobs for them. But at the same time, we
need to make sure they want [their new jobs]” (The Rubin
Report, 2021).
In essence, Christian Angermayer argues that psyche-
delic medicines could be used to medicate popular resistance
to our impending, posthuman future. Angermayer’s public
statements regularly align with longtermism’s belief that we
should “use advanced technologies to reengineer our bodies
and brains to create a ‘superior’ race of radically enhanced
posthumans” in order to realize humanity’s ultimate—or
“longterm”—potential (Torres, 2021b). Since popular resis-
tance to these changes would pose an existential threat to
the wellbeing of future (transhuman) generations, Anger-
mayer highlights the urgency of attending to the mental
health of the common masses during the early, dis-
comforting stages of technological transformation. He notes
that—if left unaddressed—this resistance will likely explode
in retaliatory revolution, which would threaten the entire
enterprise of building a brighter, transhuman future
(Angermayer, 2021).
Rather than questioning the desirability or long-term
necessity of this elite project, Angermayer focuses on
addressing its near-term impacts on mental health in order to
ensure that this project continues unimpeded: “Unfortunately,
I deeply believe that the world we’re building, with all the
technology—and I’m part of the builders, this is why I’m so
conscious of that—is not good for our mental health” (The
Dales Report, 2023). To avert this possibility for disruptive
revolution, Angermayer goes on to propose a new diagnosis
for “fear of the future” (The Rubin Report, 2021), which could
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10
be treated with psychedelic medications: “Psychedelics…
generally help people to move forward into the future in a
positive way. Psychedelics can enhance creativity and improve
neuroplasticity—two essential abilities we need to be suc-
cessful with this transition, such as making ourselves open to
new models of living and new job opportunities” (Anger-
mayer, 2021). Across these descriptions, Angermayer is
essentially advocating for a use of psychedelic medicines that
approximates the role of “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s dysto-
pian novel, Brave New World: a drug that increases the
complacency of the lower classes to discourage rebellion
against an exploitative social hierarchy that does not serve
their interests (Hamamra, 2017, p. 15; Huxley, 2006).
THE EVOLUTIONARY PLAN MUST BE
“CULTIVATED CORRECTLY”: FROM
PSYCHEDELIC NEUROSCIENCE TO
COSMOPLASTICITY (ROBIN CARHART-HARRIS,
NEUROSCAPE PSYCHEDELICS DIVISION, UCSF)
Christian Angermayer’s call for “a new opium of the peo-
ple” represents a hyperbolic vision for how psychedelics
could facilitate the growth of capitalism’s inequalities.
However extreme this view may appear, his central
contention—that psychedelic medicine can successfully
medicate the distresses of living under capitalism—gains
credibility from leading psychedelic scientists. Speaking to
The Times, the psychologist and neuroscientist Robin
Carhart-Harris—described as a “pioneer” of the psyche-
delic renaissance—explains the therapeutic effects of psy-
chedelics in brain-based, depoliticized, and individualized
terms. From Carhart-Harris’ perspective, psychedelic
medicines are destined to render SSRI medications obso-
lete, since conventional antidepressants do not offer “a
good enough curative action” (Spencer, 2022). Through
this choice of language to describe the relative failure of
SSRIs, Carhart-Harris implies that psychedelic medicines,
by contrast, offer a cure—a possibility that is reflected in
the article’s headline: “Are psychedelic drugs the answer to
the mental health crisis?” By emphasizing this curative
alternative to SSRIs, Carhart-Harris positions psychedelics
as a lucrative new market, framing this new class of
pharmaceuticals as the successor to conventional antide-
pressants. In place of the previous paradigm of “chemical
imbalance,” Carhart-Harris and many of his colleagues
locate the cause of psychological distress in entrenched
“canals” within the brain’s energy landscape (Carhart-
Harris et al., 2023). Richard E. Daws, the first author on a
paper co-authored with Carhart-Harris, characterized
their research as demonstrating that “Psilocybin therapy
liberates the entrenched depressed brain by increasing
the global integration of functional networks” (Daws,
2022). While this proposed mechanism of action differs
from chemical imbalance, the underlying etiology still at-
tributes distress to an individual’s diseased brain. As a
result, this neuroscientific model functions like a docking
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
port or protein spike, facilitating the conscription of psy-
chedelic pharmaceuticals by neoliberal heuristics. If this
explanatory model aids the assimilation of psychedelics
within capitalist healthcare, it will undermine the healing
potential of psychedelics, since any mainstream rollout
of psychedelic medicine that fuels the current capitalist
system can never meaningfully improve the global toll of
mental illness.
Beyond the risk of facilitating neoliberal approaches to
healthcare, there is a deeper resonance here between the
language of psychedelic neuroscience and TESCREALism,
which provides insight into how the rhetoric of science can
carry political force despite pretensions to neutrality. Across
a series of Twitter posts, Carhart-Harris has articulated
sympathies with philosophers aligned with the TESCREAList
bundle, including the singularitarians Ray Kurzweil and
Teilhard de Chardin. By July 2023, he self-identified as a
“mechanistic mystic,” citing a term from Bobby Azarian’s
The Romance of Reality (2022) that bears striking resem-
blance to TESCREAList beliefs. In particular, Carhart-Harris
expresses enthusiasm for a short poem by Azarian, which
opens the book’s section on “Transcendence” and hinges on
the same teleological, evolutionary language that animates
elite invocations of AGI:
Chains of connected cells create cognition and consciousness
Conscious creatures coalesce into creative communities called
cultures
And cultures create a collective consciousness that,
If cultivated correctly, will cross the cosmos.
…sentience shall surely spread
Suffusing space-time with self-awareness and subjective
states…
Through our efforts to evade death and transcend our mor-
tality
We get grander glimpses of the romance of reality (Azarian,
2022, p. 183)
Read alongside accompanying screenshots of Azarian’s
philosophical prose, this “grander glimpse” into the nature of
reality reflects the guiding conviction of transhumanist
longtermism—namely, that humanity is an adolescent, larval
stage of consciousness that must be transcended to actualize
its cosmic potential of colonizing far-distant galaxies.
Azarian emphasizes that this cosmic “awakening process” is
by no means assured; it requires coordination and active
steering through “meta-aware” participation, which must be
consciously cultivated by switched-on individuals acting in
concert with the cosmic mission (Azarian, 2022, p. 277–278).
With language harkening to the EA movement, he asserts that
“our goal should be to try to achieve the greatest good for the
greatest number of people” within the context of “long-term,”
evolutionary aims (Azarian, 2022, pp. 278, original emphasis).
In his conclusion, Azarian explicitly suggests that psychedelic
experiences could serve to coordinate action towards this
evolutionary goal by initiating humanity into a shared “cos-
mic religion” (Azarian, 2022, p. 278).
Responding to Carhart-Harris’ initial post, Azarian
shared that his book had been “heavily influenced” by Car-
hart-Harris’ entropic brain hypothesis (Azarian, 2023), which
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
Carhart-Harris had developed through his research in psy-
chedelic neuroscience (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014).15 In his
book, Azarian implies that Carhart-Harris’ research has
helped to “reveal…that the universe seems to be evolving
according to a developmental plan…the way an organism’s
developmental trajectory is encoded in DNA” (Azarian,
2022, p. 187). From this perspective, actualizing AGI through
the constraints of humanity’s chrysalis will require “har-
nessing the energy in the environment” by accelerating
consumption of finite resources (Azarian, 2022, p. 187). As
this example illustrates, there is a danger that the rhetoric of
psychedelic science could extend beyond the shortcomings of
neoliberal healthcare: In parallel to the ways that psychedelic
experiences might be exacerbating TESCREAList convictions
among Silicon Valley’s elites (as I will explore further in the
next section), the discourse of psychedelic science might be
inspiring their court philosophers to articulate cosmic tele-
ologies that can only be actualized through elite
interventions. If psychedelics provide justifications for exac-
erbating societal inequalities along these lines, their structural
impact will directly counteract any world-healing potentials.
DISCUSSION: PSYCHEDELICS AND AI AS
NON-SPECIFIC AMPLIFIERS
Without the mobilization of social support, reductions in
inequality, attention to climate change, and other systemic
changes to society’s material conditions, there is no brain-
based solution to distress that will be capable of achieving
“mass mental health.” As the philosopher Mark Fisher has
elaborated, any “privatisation of stress” within the in-
dividual’s neurobiology serves the interests of capitalism by
deflecting from its social determinants. Promising new
pharmaceutical cures to systemic problems, corporadelia
feeds into political and economic systems that are objectively
harmful to mental health and to the flourishing of life on
this planet. Although Fisher wrote about this idea in Capi-
talist Realism before the present-day era of psychedelic
pharmaceuticals,16 his critique about the individualization of
15
In a 2022 article for Psychology Today, Azarian quotes Carhart-Harris’
hypothesis paper to present a quantitative, hierarchical assessment of “in-
telligence” across species: “The view taken here is that the human brain
exhibits greater entropy than other members of the animal kingdom,
which is equivalent to saying that the human mind possesses a greater
repertoire of potential mental states than lower animals” (Carhart-Harris
et al., 2014, p.2; Azarian, 2022). This human exceptionalist position mir-
rors the language used by longtermist philosophers to justify eugenicist
perspectives about which modes of consciousness are worthy of preserva-
tion (Torres, 2023a).
16
In an introductory essay that remained incomplete at the time of his death
in 2017, Fisher coined the phrase “acid communism” to articulate “ways of
imagining a world after capitalist realism” that gestured to political appli-
cations of psychedelics beyond the confines of neoliberalism (Mills, 2019).
Despite its fragmentary and provisional nature, Fisher’s introduction has
inspired scholars and activists during the era of psychedelic medicalization
to envision liberatory alternatives for psychedelics, as Emma Stamm and
Alex Dymock have explored (Stamm, 2019; Devenot, Conner, & Doyle,
2022; Dymock, 2023, p.102).
11
distress with SSRIs is equally applicable to this new psy-
chedelic research landscape:
The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course
strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering
mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has
enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s
drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick
because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an
enormously lucrative market in which multinational phar-
maceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we
can cure you with our SSRIs). (Fisher, 2009)
As Fisher elaborates in “The Privatisation of Stress,” the
ongoing environment of widespread inequality, precarity,
pollution, and exploitation is making people sick, and brain-
based solutions are distracting us from the only real solution,
which is societal transformation through organized solidarity:
“Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational phar-
maceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better.
The social and political causation of distress is neatly side-
stepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and
interiorized” (Fisher, 2011). Based on these dynamics, there is
a real risk that psychedelic capitalism will end up fueling the
social determinants of distress by creating yet new billionaires
and unicorn corporations, all while promising to cure the
very ills that capitalism is actively perpetuating. Although the
framing has changed from the days of “chemical imbalance,”
the underlying logic (and its relationship to perpetuating
capitalism’s inequalities) remains the same, which exposes the
inadequacy of corporadelia’s utopian justifications for rapid
scaling of the psychedelics industry.
In the absence of broader structural changes that address
root causes, there will be an inherent limit on the extent to
which psychedelic-induced insights can provide relief to in-
dividuals. As a metaphor, consider the theoretical risk of
a “self-awareness paradox” as described by neuroscientists
Gregory Scott and Carhart-Harris in a controversial paper17
that anticipates psychedelic research with individuals in co-
mas and minimally conscious states. The authors suggest that
if a psychedelic succeeds in increasing an individual’s level of
conscious awareness, the individual might experience
emotional distress as they become aware of their “clinical
predicament” and the impact of their brain injury (Scott &
Carhart-Harris, 2019, p. 5). Explaining this idea for Double-
Blind, Scott “recounts a frightening possibility where ‘you
wake someone up to the reality that two years have passed
[and] their wife has left them”—cognizant of, but unable to
change, their circumstances (Moens, 2023). Under our
existing social system of widening inequality, attempts to treat
the ills of poverty with psychedelic medicines might only lead
to this kind of “paradoxical” reaction. Without the requisite
material conditions to support positive change, psychedelics
might only heighten an individual’s awareness of being
trapped by material circumstances that prevent human
17
For a discussion of the complex ethical issues involved in this proposal to
study psychedelic treatments for disorders of consciousness, see Peterson
et al., 2019.
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12
flourishing: they can’t afford healthcare or feed their kids,
they’re working three jobs around the clock, and their water is
full of lead.18
Instead of addressing these structural issues, Silicon Val-
ley’s multinational corporations are exacerbating the
inequality and precarity that are driving widespread distress.
These corporations rely on a global, anonymous workforce of
precarious and underpaid workers to process (or “annotate”)
the large-scale data sets that enable their various AI systems,
ranging from chatbots to e-commerce behavioral analytics
to self-driving cars. The pay provided for this challenging yet
tedious work is variable and unpredictable, since companies
continually shift their outsourcing to regions with the cheapest
labor force. The result is “a vast tasker underclass” (Dzieza,
2023) that exploits refugees and other “victims of economic
collapse” in order to build systems that maximize profits
through widespread immiseration:
Each task represents a stretching of the gulf between the vast
and growing ghettos of disposable life and a capitalist
vanguard of intelligent bots and billionaire tycoons….
Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of
firms on the other side of the planet and in different time
zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon’s Shatila
camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists.
Their nights are spent labeling footage of urban areas
—“house,” “shop,” “car”—labels that, in a grim twist of fate,
map the streets where the labelers once lived, perhaps for
automated drone systems that will later drop their payloads
on those very same streets. (Jones, 2021)
In addition to those who are conscripted into such crowd-
work or clickwork with no other options, some annotators
are explicitly motivated by the AI hype to act against their
own interests, persuaded by TESCREAList hallucinations
to build the very systems that are accelerating inequality
and increasing the ubiquity of alienating forms of work.
In his reporting for The Verge, Josh Dzieza introduces
Victor, “a self-proclaimed ‘fanatic’ about AI” who “started
annotating because he wants to help bring about a fully
automated post-work future” (Dzieza, 2023). Although
corporations mask their identities to clickworkers, Dzieza
points to evidence that Victor had been training ChatGPT
for around $3 per hour. Rather than following the hype to
serve as foot soldiers for elite interests, there are opportu-
nities in these examples to mobilize in solidarity against this
extractive machinery, as Adrienne Williams, Milagros
Miceli, and Timnit Gebru have emphasized in Noema
(Williams, Miceli, & Gebru, 2022). Instead of medicating the
distress from job loss with ketamine at wellness clinics,
highly-paid tech workers could join unionizing efforts to
push back against the disposability of labor and join in
solidarity with the lower-paid, precarious gig workers on
which these industries depend.
18
As Sean Viña and Amanda Stephens point out, marginalized groups might
experience “few positive outcomes” from psychedelics due to “liv[ing] in a
world with a significantly less optimal set and setting” (Viña & Stephens,
2023, p.14).
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
Silicon Valley’s construction of this “vast tasker under-
class” was not anticipated by early tech-utopians, who
viewed the internet as an inherently democratizing force that
was destined to connect the global population through new
forms of equitable participation and peer-to-peer commu-
nication. In practice, multinational corporations built the
infrastructure of the internet in a manner that now enables
unprecedented surveillance, restrictions on information
flows, and platforms for scaled behavioral control. Douglas
Rushkoff—formerly among the most prominent techno-
utopians—conveys the extent of this capitalist capture in the
subtitle to Team Human: “Our technologies, markets, and
cultural institutions—once forces for human connection and
expression—now isolate and repress us” (Rushkoff, 2019).
Rather than inherent features of the technology, these out-
comes resulted from elite decisions that were optimizing
for profit. A different internet was possible, as Rushkoff
states: “This is not just coincidence, or some circumstantial
byproduct of how these platforms function. This is the sci-
ence of designing for behavior change” (Rushkoff, 2022,
p. 105).
As happened with the early internet, the AI and psy-
chedelics industries are still in nascent phases, and the
same utopian hype is desensitizing people from noticing
how elite decisions are optimizing both for profit. If we
want AI and psychedelics to be used as forces for healing,
connection, and expression, now is the time to name—
and resist—the corporate takeover of both industries,
because we might not get a second chance. As Celeste
Kidd and Abeba Birhane describe, AI-generated text and
images are now saturating the internet with millions of
daily outputs due to the widespread adoption of genera-
tive models. Since the training data for generative AI
models are largely drawn from the internet, the biases
present in today’s models are introducing “systemic dis-
tortions” by getting baked into the training data for all
future models (Kidd & Birhane, 2023, p. 1223). In parallel
to AI, corporations are now building the infrastructure for
a global psychedelic industry. We must be vigilant about
the possibility that harmful, untested norms and as-
sumptions may be baked in at this early stage—especially
if those norms are tuned towards the generation of profit
and widening inequality. For instance, Tvorun-Dunn ar-
gues that the push to integrate psychedelics with AI
and data-harvesting digital apps must be understood as
“opportunities for Silicon Valley to exploit” towards
TESCREAList ends, which would open new avenues to
surveillance and behavioral control despite therapeutic
justifications (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, pp. 3, 5).
Writing in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the
Tech Billionaires (2022), Douglas Rushkoff suggests
that Silicon Valley’s embrace of psychedelics might be tur-
bocharging its TESCREAList plans for AI. Returning from
experiences at Burning Man or Amazonian retreats, many of
Silicon Valley’s elites report psychedelic-induced, evolu-
tionary insights that reveal lucrative solutions to human-
kind’s biggest problems. With their elitist views newly
garbed in TESCREAList beliefs, “they return to the same
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Journal of Psychedelic Studies
exploitation, domination, and chauvinism they were doing
before, only camouflaged…with more cosmic justifications”
(Rushkoff, 2022, p. 115). In June 2023, an article on the front
page of The Wall Street Journal described many of Silicon
Valley’s billionaires, including Elon Musk and Google’s
Sergey Brin, as “part of a drug movement” that is embracing
psychedelics as “gateways to business breakthroughs” (Grind
& Bindley, 2023). The authors state that among Silicon
Valley’s tech elite, taking psychedelics is now “a practice that
has become for many a routine part of doing business.”
Within this community, psychedelics are framed as offering
“the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing
for yourself what’s going on,” as one tech industry micro-
dosing coach described in an interview. Since psychedelics
commonly induce noetic feelings of cosmic insight, often
tinged with grandiosity or messianic convictions (Anderson,
Danforth, & Grob, 2020), these tech elites are primed to
interpret their experiences as subjective confirmations of
their hierarchical, TESCREAList beliefs. Despite claims that
psychedelics will make billionaires more empathic, the use of
psychedelics by billionaires might be fueling the hype behind
both AI and psychedelics, which increases the risks of both
tools to broader society.
CONCLUSION: LONGTERMISM IS
INCOMPATIBLE WITH INDIGENOUS
RECIPROCITY
Rhetoricians including Richard Doyle and Amanda Pratt
have argued that conceptions of psychedelic harm reduction
must develop extra-pharmacologically, extending from
considerations of substance and dosage to the social impact
of the field’s rhetorical ecologies (Doyle, 2011, p. 7; Pratt,
2023, p. 153). Within these ecologies, the competing dis-
courses of hype and anti-hype are “social facts” (Langlitz,
2023, p. 12) that influence the possible cultural applications
—and risk profiles—of otherwise mutable technologies
(Hartogsohn, 2017, p.10). Whereas Nicolas Langlitz has
championed a descriptive, ethnographic approach to the
resulting diversity of psychedelic practices, this article has
taken up a more activist orientation that experiments with
the field-building potentials in staking explicit moral claims.
Future work in the psychedelic humanities can explore the
potential for activist scholarship to shift the research land-
scape through counter-hegemonic speech-acts—as when
“the emperor has no clothes.” In this context, inter-field
collaborations—including exchanges between critical
scholars in AI and psychedelics—present intersectional op-
portunities to expose pretense and contradictions within the
dominant narratives, since these patterns can become more
apparent as they reappear and play out across disparate
contexts. This collaborative work can extend beyond AI to
include other overhyped technologies that have been con-
scripted by “the gospel of tech solutionism” (Byrum &
Benjamin, 2022), such as cryptocurrency and other appli-
cations of blockchain.
13
One clear example of the tensions and contradictions
within the rhetoric of psychedelic healing emerged at the end
of MAPS’s Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, as reports of
an Indigenous protest trickled onto the internet. In video clips
shared from cell phones, the protestors (a group that included
Dr. Angela Beers and Kathoomi Castro) condemned the
psychedelic industry’s continuations of colonialism under the
banner of healing. As Castro stated to the assembled audi-
ence, “I want you to be aware that you have been deceived by
this movement…. Please stop. Think! Think critically…. We
need to stand in liberation together. This is not a collective
liberation movement. This is a capitalization” (Rodgers, 2023,
4:47). In its coverage of the event, Lucid News praised Rick
Doblin’s graceful response to the protest—including his
invitation for the protestors to join him onstage—as an
embodiment of the field’s ideals of “ego death and collective
healing.” Lucid’s coverage implied that there could be simple
resolutions to the protestors’ concerns, such as extra com-
plimentary tickets and additional travel support for Indige-
nous speakers at the next conference. In its description of the
protest’s conclusion, Lucid reinforced this premise of mutual
benefit without any fundamental change to the field’s status
quo: “A silence familiar to medicine people filled the space as
[Lira Ornelas] Godoy and Doblin, alone on the stage, faced
each other. Godoy then embraced Doblin to thunderous
applause” (Lucid News, 2023).
As a microcosm of the field’s tensions, this example re-
veals how the rhetorics of healing and intergenerational
benefit are obscuring the extent to which different perspec-
tives cannot actually coexist.19 As this paper has demon-
strated, corporate psychedelia is imbued with colonialist and
longtermist ideas and orientations that are incompatible with
Indigenous relational ontologies. So long as the infrastructure
of the psychedelics industry is built as an engine of inequality
that channels wealth to its funders, it will remain nonsensical
to claim that the industry is oriented towards decolonization
and collective healing. As Tvorun-Dunn has argued, “To
promote psychedelics…as commercial…services offered by
private institutions with little oversight and a vague and
The incommensurability of perspectives in the psychedelics field is encap-
19
sulated in responses to the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference. While the
POC Psychedelic Collective issued a statement of “solidarity with the
Indigenous group of protesters who interrupted the closing ceremony”
(POC Psychedelic Collective, 2023), Germany’s MIND Foundation
praised the conference using colonial tropes of conquest: “The Psychedelic
Science 2023 concluded on a high note…. It felt like a new frontier was
breached, so perhaps it is no coincidence that the organizers chose the
Wild West state, Colorado” (MIND Foundation, 2023). As scholars have
noted, the “Wild West” frontier myth has served to perpetuate and glorify
colonialism by obscuring the brutalities of genocide, racism, and the rapa-
cious exploitation of natural and cultural resources (Boyer, Clark, Halttu-
nen, Kett, & Salisbury, 2018, p. 493). TESCREALism represents a new
frontier myth for the tech elite, since it justifies colonial expansion to the
stars and renders as heroic their preferences for rising inequality. As
Richard Slotkin describes of the earlier frontier myth: “Myth does not
argue its ideology, it exemplifies it. It projects models of good or heroic
behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the
distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes” (Slotkin,
1998, p. 19).
Unauthenticated | Downloaded 10/16/23 10:28 AM UTC
14
undemocratic goal of improving human capacity is to relegate
further commercial power to a consolidated elite who see
themselves, and not others, as those who must guide our
lives” (Tvorun-Dunn, 2022, p. 5).
In the fields of AI and psychedelics, where the contexts of
use constrain possibilities for outcomes and applications,
extractive industries cannot be expected to produce just fu-
tures. While the outputs of both AI and psychedelics often
seem veridical and agentic, both can behave as “non-specific
amplifiers” of available models (Pace & Devenot, 2021, p. 2)—
remixing and sampling from the “building blocks…of existing
beliefs, learned patterns of perception, and available cultural
scripts or authorized explanations” (E. Davis, 2019, p. 28;
Devenot, Seale-Feldman et al., 2022; Noorani, Bedi, &
Muthukumaraswamy, 2023). LLMs are stochastic parrots
(Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, & Shmitchell, 2021) that
regurgitate pre-seeded biases in their generative outputs, while
psychedelics can project images and interpretations influ-
enced by expectancy and priming. If tech elites control the
infrastructure for global access to these tools, the encoding of
normative ideologies in AI’s datasets and in psychedelic
medicine’s therapeutic protocols could have far-reaching
implications by influencing beliefs and expectations in a
manner that aligns with elite interests. In both cases, echoes
and reflections of the status quo of power relations can seem
like evidence about the fundamental nature of reality, which
undermines their utility as tools for healing and liberation.
While prominent figures are now discussing the “exis-
tential risks” of AI and the “catastrophic risks” of psyche-
delics (Evans, 2023b) in the context of inflated hype, the
mundane risks of capitalism and its ideological drivers are
underemphasized topics in these fields. In parallel to these
omissions, critical scholars and activists in both fields—often
the very people who initiated public discussions of risk, at
personal expense—have described continuing patterns of
marginalization and exclusion for highlighting the real
harms already caused by these industries.20 In identifying
these patterns across apparently disparate fields, we can gain
While philanthropic support flows to TESCREAList institutes to study
20
AI’s existential risks, Abeba Birhane has described the difficulty of
receiving funding for critical work on AI (Birhane, 2022), and Timnit
Gebru has “faced retaliation for uncovering and communicating the
harms of AI systems” (A. Williams, Romero, et al., 2022). In the psyche-
delics industry, the 2022 Wonderland Miami conference—described by
organizers as “the world’s leading psychedelic event” (Walker, 2022)—
gained notoriety for banning critical scholars, journalists, and activists
under the pretense that they posed a threat to the physical safety of pre-
senters. As James Kent wrote in coverage of this incident, “Corporate
psychedelia has created a privileged class of industry insiders, and if you
are not showing up to specifically amplify their message, you could find
yourself on the outside looking in” (Kent, 2022). Russell Hausfeld reported
that MAPS included a “reputation clause” in its speaker contract for Psy-
chedelic Science 2023, which stated that MAPS may rescind participation
by anyone who “discredits MAPS or tarnishes its reputation and goodwill”
(Hausfeld, 2023). In coverage of Psychedelic Science 2023 for The Micro-
dose, Jane Hu described a demonstration against MAPS’s treatment of
Indigenous voices, where one speaker “acknowledged that by speaking
out, she recognizes she might not be invited back to future conferences”
(Hu, 2023b).
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
insight into the influence of Silicon Valley’s power on the
circulation of ideas and identify the real risks facing our
planet. To prevent psychedelics from becoming yet another
extractive industry, we need to organize beyond the hubristic
fantasies of the elite’s TESCREAL hallucinations. Any
genuinely prosocial applications of either AI or psychedelics
will depend on collective resistance to their conscription by
neoliberalism and colonialism. The alternative is complicity
in their use as technologies of elite persuasion.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers in addition to
Brian Pace, Brian Normand, and Russell Hausfeld for
providing feedback on earlier versions of this article. In
particular, this article benefitted from conversations with
Brian Pace regarding the parallelism between “ripple out” and
“trickle down” ecstasis. Thanks also to Sasha Sisko for iden-
tifying several of the video sources that informed the analysis.
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