Why We Need Earth Technologies to Counteract Conventional Medicine and Digital Technologies
Living in the matrix of late-stage capitalism with exponentially accelerating digital technologies, you likely have some apprehension about whether all of these changes will help us societally.
As we become increasingly addicted to our screens, as the space race continues, and as the rate of the development of digital technologies is accelerating exponentially, you, like me, might have some apprehension over whether what we are seeing unfolding entails “progress.”
Or you are at least questioning how flawed such so-called progress is when we see giant monoliths such as Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, TikTok, and so forth essentially continue to privatize and influence how we interact while mining our data from our actions and interactions in the digital space.
An investing newsletter I subscribe to made a great point about how these disruptive digital technologies are increasingly taking over how we interact and the backbone of our economy itself. Furthermore, these digital technologies, such as Amazon (retail and cloud storage), Uber/Lyft (car-sharing), Airbnb (home-sharing), Apple (phones), Facebook (an advertising company disguised as a social media company), Google (information, but again, ad-based) and so forth do not actually have any products (with the exception of Amazon and its warehouses) but rather sift through how we access information and mine our information.
The most disruptive part of these companies is that they are designed to make us reliant on their platforms, profit from mining our data and attention spans, and often foster “locked-in” syndrome, whereby the consumer is essentially locked into using a platform/company for life. In short, the newsletter declared, as if triumphantly, our society is moving from being an analog society to a digitally-based society.
Sure, ease of access to information, shopping, and to digital communities seems promising, yet the ease of access to everything from dates to food to places to stay has become a veritable minefield. We have to continue to ask ourselves: At what cost? Profits are valued over credibility and over the users’ best interests at hand. Marginalized people become increasingly surveilled, and dissenting and offensive viewpoints have become censored. We like to think we live in a country with free speech in the U.S.A., but when we largely live our lives digitally, on privately owned platforms, that is not the case.
For example, I was recently banned by OkCupid after a user was offended that I dared to suggest he could help pay for a babysitter if he wanted to meet in person (as he’d been so insistent to continue our conversation in-person, without even having had a video chat). The icing on the cake was that he had the audacity to angrily declare that he could “hire a h — ker if he wanted” and couldn’t help it that I have a child. While OkCupid professes to not let users maliciously cause other users to get banned, they stood firm in their two-fold decision to both keep my profile banned and to let his remain on the platform.
The argument can be made that people will continue to behave however they will, regardless of the interactions being online or IRL, but in my own experience, men can be a lot more predatory, low-vibrational, and entitled behind a screen. I have also come to the conclusion from my experience of being thrown off the OkCupid platform that the trash takes itself out.
Being barred from participating on a platform where women cannot ask for gift-giving or share personal interests outside the express purpose of the date has helped me remove energetic access from unhealed men who largely are seeking hookups yet minimally put in the time or effort to earn access to women’s time or energy.
Ok Cupid is only one example of the era of techno-fascism that we are in, when we become the product by these companies that mine our information and attention for their financial gain. While we purportedly live in an era of free speech, women have become censored in this SOSTA-FESTA era. For asking for a nominal contribution toward babysitting help to be likened to prostitution and cause me — and any user who may be argued to cross that line — to be banned from a mainstream dating platform is absurd, but it is the reality we live in.
Skype, Microsoft, Google, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, OkCupid, and Craigslist are just a few of the companies that have been cracking down on content and removing and/or shadow-banning users posting content that has even a semblance of something objectionable. With the reality of us living largely in the digital realm and the very real and harmful consequences of SOSTA-FESTA, women are being censored and harmed more than ever. Ironically, these bills profess to crack down on sex trafficking, but they just make lives more dangerous and risky for women and marginalized people.
If these bills don’t truly help, why have they gained so much ground? As per the Vox article by Aja Romano, “There is one group that does stand to gain a significant amount from this [SOSTA-FESTA] bill package: a network of corporate giants ranging from Hollywood studios to Silicon Valley behemoths” (2018).
Romano elaborates on how this bill package threatens free speech and transfers more power into the hands of powerful digital technology companies: “Whether or not Section 230 is ultimately weakened overall because of FOSTA-SESTA, it seems clear that we’re in a moment when many of the freedoms and protections we’ve previously assumed were woven into the fabric of the web are being systematically unraveled, challenged, and overridden by powerful special interest groups. If this continues without abatement or countering, we will inevitably face a drastically different, far less democratic version of the internet” (Romano, 2018). [Bold font added for emphasis.] And here we are, four years later, in a techno-fascist surveillance state.
Digital technologies were created with the promise of empowering individuals and democratizing access to communication globally (see, for instance, Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, 2006). Yet, while many of us see the internet as the embodiment of the saying, “information wants to be free,” few people realize the origins of this quote. On the flip side, Brand continued, “information also wants to be expensive.” This quandary and paradox has accelerated the rise of misinformation and censorship online, as well as the race to privatize and data mine from users in online spaces.
Hacker Steward Brand is the person behind this quote, and the full context of it is the following: “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better” (1984). So as ease of access to information has accelerated, so too has the reliability of the information that we access declined.
Google is a poor substitute for a library, as information is ranked algorithmically and not according to credibility; yet the expediency of finding information has eclipsed the underlying importance of the reliability of the information. Big Tech relies on and, more importantly, capitalizes on this paradox of information both wanting to be free and is expensive. As I have written, I believe our global information literacy crisis is interconnected with our health literacy crises.
As Anna Wiener wrote in her memoir, Uncanny Valley, of the Big Tech world, “Data collection and retention were unregulated. Investors salivated over predictive analytics, the lucrative potential of steroidal pattern-matching…. Transparency for the masses wasn’t ideal: better not see what companies in the data space had on them” (p. 39, 2020). Conventional Western medicine likewise is predicated on keeping people distanced from ourselves, from our connectedness not only to ourselves, but to each other and this world.
The conventional Western medical model fails to address the root causes of diseases or inflammation. The role of lifestyle and nutrition are too infrequently addressed by primary care providers when assessing health conditions, particularly chronic ones. Our traditional medical system is designed to treat illness but not to promote wellness. It’s become clearer than ever that profits are prioritized over people’s health.
Regardless of your views on Big Pharma and the system of conventional Western medicine, you can’t blame people for being skeptical and suspicious of the medical-industrial complex. Society is collectively realizing that Big Pharma and the government systematically strove to push out cannabis and other earth medicines by delegitimizing them and by stigmatizing and criminalizing these substances and their users. Big Pharma is predicated upon the medicinal benefits of cannabis and psychedelics being deeply suppressed; yet, the green wave and the psychedelic renaissance have arrived because the truth of their legitimacy can no longer be denied.
Just as the blockchain threatens/promises to disrupt Web 2.0 and decentralize the Internet, earth medicines are entering the stage to disrupt our current medical model. Everyday citizens such as you and me are not only consumers; we are reclaiming our power as co-creators, as conscious individuals who are navigating our communication and our health increasingly consciously. In the face of our broken medical and technological models, it is no surprise that people are rebelling and re-claiming their power, racing to bring earth medicines back to the medicine cabinet and decentralization back to the Internet.
And so, as many systems in this late-stage capitalist system are breaking down and being disrupted, earth medicines offer the antidote and the symbiotic funhouse mirror to both conventional medicine and digital technologies. Many proponents of Web3 and the blockchain evangelize the promise of bringing back a decentralized and democratized internet. Earth medicines, such as cannabis and psilocybin, similarly offer the potential to help people regain their power, consciousness, and their health; these medicines are the original technologies that both informed the development of digital technologies and supersede them.
Conventional medicines work for an industrialized world, succeeding, in many ways, at treating symptoms, yet our medical model struggles to treat chronic mental and physical health ailments. Our Covid-19 public health crisis has highlighted and exacerbated our underlying physical and mental health epidemics. Earth medicines offer the opportunity for humanity to regain our consciousness, to treat both symptoms and root causes in a way much more aligned to our bodies and our souls.
Let us begin to question the narrative that all drugs from Western medicine are good and that natural, mind-altering substances are bad. Yes, let the evidence speak for itself, but let’s not forget researcher bias or, for example, the role of the pharmaceutical industry in sponsoring studies that have been shown to exaggeratedly highlight the efficacy of their products in treating a condition while downplaying the side effects (i.e. SSRI’s, benzodiazepines (called “benzos” for short), and opiates). Let us stop calling modalities outside of the Western conventional approach “alternative” healing modalities and stop inferiorizing and dismissing them.
And as the development of digital technologies accelerates, let’s also continue to remember that while psychedelics played a role in the development of both the personal computer and the Internet, capitalism has corrupted and corporatized the promise of the Internet. Let us counter the “appification” of life and the culture of instant gratification promoted by digital technologies with the deep work and connectedness that working with ancestral earth technologies promotes. Let us remember to use technologies intentionally — both ancestral earth technologies and digital technologies.
The growing, re-emerging medical and societal interest in psychedelics and cannabis offers the promise that there is a better way forward. Yes, the medical industry will capitalize on the green wave and psychedelics, just as corporations have capitalized on the possibilities offered by the personal computer and the Internet. Yet these earth medicines are easily available and affordable in their natural forms, and science has finally come up to speed to recognize that as humans, we have an endocannabinoid system and default mode network that cannabis and psychedelics, respectively, can regulate and influence, to foster greater, conscious, and embodied well-being.
Earth medicines have been so suppressed and controversial because they offer tools to enable a more conscious, egalitarian, harmonious, grounded, and embodied way of living. These medicines promise to live more consciously and authentically with oneself, with each other, and with the environment, for our individual and collective well-being and healing.
The pharmaceutical industry, the government, and the nature of this capitalist, materialist, rationalist, industrialized culture have all played a role in suppressing knowledge about and stigmatizing cannabis and psychoactive mushrooms. Yet the momentum has already begun and the healing powers of cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms can no longer be denied; the laws and society must work to catch up to help us individually and collectively harness the powers of this potent medicine.
Psychedelics exemplify the paradox stated by Brand of information being both free and expensive. Psychedelic therapies can be exorbitantly expensive, but the knowledge on these substances is freely available, and therapies can be affordable; one just has to look. The truth is often hidden in plain sight.
*For informational and educational purposes only.*
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Sources:
Grinspoon, Peter, M.D. (August 11, 2021). “The endocannabinoid system: Essential and mysterious.” Harvard Health Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-endocannabinoid-system-essential-and-mysterious-202108112569
Lattin, Don. (2017). Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy. Synergetic Press: Santa Fe and London.
Mader, Stewart. (2009). “Stewart Brand: Information wants to be free. It also wants to be expensive.” Retrieved from https://www.stewartmader.com/stewart-brand-information-wants-to-be-free-it-also-wants-to-be-expensive/
Markoff, John. (2006). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Penguin Books.
Merry Jane. (2020). The CBD Solution: How Cannabis, CBD, and Other Plant Allies Can Change Your Everyday Life. Lauren Wilson, Ed. Chronicle Books.
Pollan, M. (2018). How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529343/how-to-change-your-mind-by-michael-pollan/
Romano, Aja. (July 2, 2018). “A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it.” Vox.com. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom
Wiener, Anna. (2020). Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. Picador: New York.