This article was taken from the December 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Thanks to the global spread of startup culture, you're just as likely to run into an over-caffeinated entrepreneur or over-pitched investor in London's E1 or Edinburgh EH1 as you are in the zip codes of San Francisco and the Bay. Whether it's the Fen, the Glen, the Roundabout or the Gorge, policy-makers tend to get excited about nominally replicating Silicon Valley's success. And when they do so they invariably focus on technology businesses' relationships to outward-looking universities, all set within creative, vibrant places to live. There is, however, one ingredient in the Bay Area cocktail that the wonks overlook: namely the role played by spiritual and contemplative communities in the development of digital culture.
The most well-known meeting of contemplative practice and technology is the influence that Zen Buddhism had on Steve Jobs.
This itself was the result of a generation of leading technology practitioners and thinkers in the late 60s and 70s such as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly who, at the same time as laying the foundations for what we know as the digital world, were also exploring Asian culture and the then esoteric practices of mindfulness and meditation. In the intervening years, counterculture has become in part mainstream and in part marginalised, and with it the conversation between those pioneering new technologies and those practising inner investigation became less prominent... until now. For back in that Californian city which is as much hippy as it is hacker, technology and wisdom are back on speaking terms. And as with the generation before, their conversation has the potential to change the world.
For the last two years, Mountain View has hosted Wisdom 2.0, a conference which is as fascinating as its title is dated. Convened under the question of "How do we live with greater purpose and meaning in the technology age?", its speakers and attendees are certainly not hippies and neo-Luddites. Instead, alongside the leading mindfulness and contemplative teachers, you also find Zynga, Twitter and Facebook cofounders. One of the poster boys for this important new conversation is Chade-Meng Tan, a long-time Googler who established Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness programme for Google staff. His recent book on the topic has given new permission to legitimise contemplative practice and creativity enhancement, as well as calm and compassion in technology circles and corporate culture.
All this is a good start. But what I find exciting is not when mindfulness becomes more common as a personal development tool in business, but when it influences the technology itself and we start to see digital tools that actually increase our well-being and understanding of what it is to be human.
For too long has the narrative around digital and the mind been negative. Pop tech is constantly being accused of fragmenting our attention, ruining our concentration and at worst dehumanising us.
This may well be true. But is it because all of that is intrinsic to technology, or because we've just not designed our technologies with the mind in mind?
The good news is that the tanker shows signs of turning around.
The convergence of three trends - the continuing mainstreaming of mindfulness; rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the efficacy and benefits of meditation; and the emergence of a generation of technologists and entrepreneurs who are contemplatives - suggests we will benefit from a new wave of digital tools that not only reduce stress but lead to genuine insight, wisdom and compassion. And not an incense stick in sight.
Rohan Gunatillake created buddhify*, the urban meditation app*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
