In her classic essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, first published in 1967, Joan Didion chronicled a trip she took to meet the hippie children of Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, during the Summer of Love, in an America where, as she put it, “The center was not holding.” The images she details there — stoned teenagers nearly burning their squalid housing units down; young runaways, wasting away in the streets and parks — remain some of literature’s most harrowing correctives to the Boomer mythology of the Sixties’ utopian dreams. At one point, Didion is taken to see Susan, a five-year-old girl, tripping on acid. “For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote,” Didion writes. “Susan describes it as getting stoned.” Didion’s prose betrays little obvious judgement, but the numb horror of the moment speaks for itself. Arguably, it speaks for an entire era.
The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had travelled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.
Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.
From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programmes in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.
As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channelled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centred religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanised popularisations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.
For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.
“For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves.”
Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicentre of the coming digital revolution.
Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.
According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgement of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”
Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidised monopolies.
The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalised the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.
Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratising” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarisation and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centres, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behaviour to murky influence on the rich and powerful.
“We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language.”
Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterised the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.
It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.
The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
