microdosing

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Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

Hogan quotes an observation by Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.”27 These anecdotal accounts of microdosing enhancing creativity are supported by preliminary survey evidence. One recent study of online respondents28 contrasted the performance of self-reported microdosers and individuals who had never microdosed on the Unusual Uses Task (UUT). It found that microdosers generated responses that were rated as significantly more uncommon, unexpected, and clever than those of their non-microdosing peers. Another study of Dutch microdosers in a naturalistic setting29 found that administering a microdose of psychedelic mushrooms improved performance on two measures of creativity.

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LSD was instrumental in the creative design process that gave rise to circuit chips, and Apple founder Steve Jobs claimed that his experiments with LSD ranked as some of his most important life experiences.23 The synergy between San Francisco drug-based hippy culture and Silicon Valley innovation has been replayed in other places around the globe, from Berlin to Beijing, where intoxicant-heavy underground or bohemian cultures have rubbed shoulders with new industries dependent on creative insight rather than manufacturing muscle.24 A modern twist in hallucinogen use—a trend pioneered, as one might expect, in Silicon Valley—is making psychedelics easier to integrate into everyday life through the practice of “microdosing.”25 Microdosing involves taking frequent but small amounts of purified LSD or psilocybin, on the order of one-tenth of the normal dose, to induce mild, but sustainable, highs. The journalist Emma Hogan has documented widespread microdosing among knowledge workers in the San Francisco Bay Area.26 One interviewee, “Nathan,” credits microdosed LSD with increasing his productivity, giving him a creative edge, and magnifying his impact at investor-pitch meetings. “I view it as my little treat.

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“Effects of external evaluation on artistic creativity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(2), 221–233. Anderson, Thomas, Rotem Petranker, Daniel Rosenbaum, Cory R. Weissman, Le-Anh Dinh-Williams, Katrina Hui,…Norman A. S. Farb. (2019). “Microdosing psychedelics: Personality, mental health, and creativity differences in microdosers.” Psychopharmacology, 236(2), 731–740. Andrews, Michael. (2017). “Bar talk: Informal social interactions, alcohol prohibition, and invention.” (Unpublished manuscript.) Archer, Ruth, Cleo Alper, Laura Mack, Melanie Weedon, Manmohan Sharma, Andreas Sutter, and David Hosken.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, considered microdosing the most neglected area of research. Hofmann microdosed LSD often for the last few decades of his life. He remained sharp until he died at 101. He would take it when he was walking among trees. In Jim’s opinion, microdosing psychedelics does a far better job than a whole class of drugs we now call “cognitive enhancers,” most of which are simply derivatives of speed. Oddly, there are consistent reports of microdosing having a lag effect. I’ve experienced this myself, and it’s the reason for Slim Berriss’s Monday/Friday spacing of ibogaine. Many microdosers, including one executive who runs a large corporation with manufacturing in five countries, have said, “The second day is better.”

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Self-explanatory. 10 to 15 mcg is a “microdose.” Described by Jim: “Everything is just a little better. You know at the end of a day when you say, ‘Wow, that was a really good day’? That’s what most people report on microdosing. They’re a little bit nicer.” He elaborates: “What I’m finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what’s wrong with your life. We’ve made [depression] an illness. It may be the body’s way of saying, ‘You better deal with something, because it’s making you really sad.’ “[A microdose of psychedelics is] actually a low enough dose that it could be called ‘sub-perceptual,’ which means you don’t necessarily see any differences in the outside world.

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My Good Friend I have a good friend, let’s call him Slim Berriss, who’s devised a schedule for himself that combines practical microdosing and pre-planned 1- to 2-day treks into deeper territory. For him, this blend provides a structured approach for increasing everyday well-being, developing empathy, and intensively exploring the “other.” Here is what it looks like: Microdosing of ibogaine hydrochloride twice weekly, on Mondays and Fridays. The dosage is 4 mg, or roughly 1/200 or less of the full ceremonial dosage at Slim’s bodyweight of 80 kg. He dislikes LSD and finds psilocybin in mushrooms hard to dose accurately. Woe unto he who “microdoses” and gets hit like a freight train while checking in luggage at an airport (poor Slim).

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

* * * • • • ONE LAST NODE worth visiting in Al Hubbard’s far-flung psychedelic network is Silicon Valley, where the potential for LSD to foster “creative imagination” and thereby change the culture received its most thorough test to date. Indeed, the seeds that Hubbard planted in Silicon Valley continue to yield interesting fruit, in the form of the valley’s ongoing interest in psychedelics as a tool for creativity and innovation. (As I write, the practice of microdosing—taking a tiny, “subperceptual” regular dose of LSD as a kind of mental tonic—is all the rage in the tech community.) Steve Jobs often told people that his experiments with LSD had been one of his two or three most important life experiences. He liked to taunt Bill Gates by suggesting, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

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Around the same time, Willis Harman shifted the focus of his teaching at Stanford, offering a new class on “the human potential” that ended with a unit on psychedelics. The engineers were getting religion. (And have it still: I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted “microdosing Fridays.”) In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to dedicate himself full-time to psychedelic research. With Willis Harman, he established the orotundly titled International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) to explore the potential of LSD to enhance human personality and creativity. Stolaroff hired a psychiatrist named Charles Savage as medical director and, as staff psychologist, a first-year graduate student by the name of James Fadiman.

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In recent years, her focus has shifted from trepanation to the potential of psychedelics to improve brain function. In her own life, she has used LSD as a kind of “brain tonic,” favoring a daily dose that hits “that sweet spot where creativity and enthusiasm is increased, but control is maintained.” (She told me that there was a time when she put that tonic dose at 150 micrograms—far above a microdose and enough to send most people, myself included, on a full-fledged trip. But because frequent use of LSD can lead to tolerance, it’s entirely possible that for some people 150 micrograms merely “adds a certain sparkle to consciousness.”) I found Feilding to be disarmingly frank about the baggage she brings to the new conversation about psychedelic science: “I’m a druggie.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with “ecstatic technologies.”12 We met military officers going on monthlong meditation retreats, Wall Street traders zapping their brains with electrodes, trial lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, famous tech founders visiting transformational festivals, and teams of engineers microdosing with psychedelics. In other words, everywhere we went, someone was trying to steal the kykeon. We wanted to know precisely where this trend was originating and exactly how these leaders were altering their mental states to enhance performance. So we lit out on the trail of these modern-day Prometheans.

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While everyone experienced a boost in creativity—some as much as 200 percent—what got the most attention were the real-world breakthroughs that emerged: “Design of a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a mathematical theorem regarding NOR-gate circuits, a new design for a vibratory microtome, a space probe designed to measure solar properties, and a new conceptual model of a photon.” None of these practical, technical achievements are the kind of result that most people associate with the navel-gazing world of psychedelics. But similar outcomes are happening in Fadiman’s current survey of microdosing among professionals. With more than four hundred responses from people in dozens of fields, the majority, as Fadiman recently explained, report “enhanced pattern recognition [and] can see more of the pieces at once of a problem they are trying to solve.” With these developments, psychedelics have begun moving from recreational diversion to performance-enhancing supplement.

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Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, once pointed out that it’s hard for nonscientists to track progress in artificial intelligence because, when it shows up in the real world, “it looks like nothing fancier than a talking ATM.” It’s true for ecstasis as well. Soccer moms with Kundalini yoga practices; business men microdosing psychedelics; tech nerds tracking biometrics, The Simpsons going to Burning Man—these developments might seem pedestrian. But they are the “talking ATM’s” of altered states. They are proof that the chasm has been crossed, that the once cutting-edge is now integrated into the everyday. Nothing New Under the Sun Under the hot August sun, in the western wilds of America, tens of thousands of misfits gather to worship and celebrate.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Drugs,” New York Times, April 18, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/us/workers-seeking-productivity-in-a-pill-are-abusing-adhd-drugs.html. Carl Cederström, “Like It or Not, ‘Smart Drugs’ Are Coming to the Office,” Harvard Business Review, May 19, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/05/like-it-or-not-smart-drugs-are-coming-to-the-office. Andrew Leonard, “How LSD Microdosing Became the Hot New Business Trip,” Rolling Stone, November 20, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/how-lsd-microdosing-became-the-hot-new-business-trip-20151120. Lila MacLellan, “The Science behind the 15 Most Common Smart Drugs,” Quartz, September 20, 2017, https://qz.com/1064224/the-science-behind-the-15-most-common-smart-drugs/. 17. Burkeman, “Attentional Commons.”

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

I was speechless, but I knew what this was from experience, and from an early age: shame shock. Much of the suffering from being fat occurs on a gentler and more subtle scale. It’s the looks people give you in hallways and on airplanes, the waiter’s uneasy pause before asking if you want to see the dessert menu. Those microdoses of shame keep low-level misery and self-hatred on a steady course. Shame shock, though, is an explosion. It often occurs when someone confronts you, head-on, about your deepest shame. When you’re exposed. At that moment in the bodega, all of the shame’s poison coursed through my body, leaving me frozen, disoriented, in pain.

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And this gives birth to splinter groups and cults that reject mainstream views, choosing instead to piece together their own narratives and often conjuring up their own facts. Despite their optimizing algorithms, however, the platforms need help to manufacture shame. That’s where we come in. Hundreds of millions of us summon the requisite outrage and censure, often convincing ourselves that these microdoses of shame nudge the world toward justice and equality. After all, that’s what shame is for, isn’t it? The idea has always been to sting outliers, shepherding them back to shared values and acceptable behavior. A white woman calling a cop to settle a dispute with a Black neighbor is not OK, and she should be punished.

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

I had been educating myself on all things trauma for a few years by then, and had become quite intrigued by the research being done into the microdosing of various mind-altering substances. To be clear, I am under no illusions that I am an expert. I know exactly what I was: I was desperate. I had been swamped with the effects of trauma for as long as I could remember, and it was clear that the cutting edge of medical science was not going to cut through my trauma in my lifetime, because the cutting edge never seems terribly concerned with the biological specifics of autistic women, or any women for that matter. What did I have to lose? I had intended to try and see if microdosing could help me develop a buffer between me and the uncontrollable panic that thinking directly about my trauma inevitably invited.

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And this is what I did, in the order I did it: First, I went through all of my cards and picked out ten that I felt really good about. Then I cleared the next four days of absolutely everything. Stocked my kitchen up with nourishing food, locked the front door and turned my phone off, and spent the next few days repeating each of those ten phrases over and over and over again under the influence of my best guess at microdoses of MDMA. I feel obliged to tell you not to try this at home. But that feels cheap after I just told you that I did exactly that. But I would also tell you to never write a show out of your own trauma and then perform it two hundred times all over the world. That is more likely to shorten your life than experimenting with a bit of molly.

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

Like very expensive lipstick. I pick one up. It is satisfyingly heavy. “This is vaping, right?” “No,” she says. She takes it from me and presses on the end, and when I inhale, the scent of rosemary fills my nostrils. It’s like my mouth is getting an expensive spa treatment. “Vitamin smoke,” she says. “And it comes with a microdose of pure oxygen—great for asthmatics. There are going to be way more asthmatics in the afterworld.” Destiny nods. “True.” “It’s got all the good stuff—vitamins C and D, a bit of collagen, some vaporized A, antioxidants—you can customize it. It’s called Breathe Life.” “Breathe Life?” She does a toothpaste-commercial smile and says, “Do something great with your mouth!”

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“So do you guys hand out condoms at the door?” I ask brightly, as if I’ve ever seen thirty people naked at the same time before. “Oh, there’s none of that,” Craig says. “The cuddle puddle is a strictly non-penetrative ritual.” He looks to Cyrus for approval. Cyrus, who has finished his drink, appears not to have heard him. “Want to microdose?” Craig asks, removing a small vial from his pocket. I shake my head, but Cyrus doesn’t, so Craig passes him the vial and Cyrus casually tips the contents into his mouth. Cyrus and I have never done drugs and never really talked about doing drugs, and I wonder if there was a time before he met me when things like Molly were regularly on the menu.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

MOVEMENT Feldenkrais Pilates Assisted stretching Tai Chi Chuan Yoga (Ashtanga, Bikram) *Barefoot/Vibram walking (lower back) *Egoscue (cervical/neck and mid-back) MANIPULATION Massage (from Swedish to Rolfing) Acupuncture and acupressure *Active-release technique (ART) (shoulders) *Advanced muscle integration therapy (AMIT) (pectorals, glutes, and calves) Graston technique MEDICATION Topical Androgel® (crystallized testosterone) DMSO (a solvent popular among sprinters and racehorses) combined with MSM Arnica Oral Cytomel® (liothyronine sodium = synthetic T3 thyroid hormone) High-dose L-glutamine (50–80 grams per day) High-dose bovine and chicken collagen (types 1, 2, and 3) Intra-articular (in the joint) injections PRP Cortisone *Prolotherapy (left knee, right wrist) Intramuscular injection *Deca-Durabolin® (nandrolone decanoate) (left shoulder) Delatestryl® (testosterone enanthate) Depo®-Testosterone (testosterone cypionate) Sustanon® 250 (testosterone blend) HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) *Biopuncture protocol using microdoses of Traumeel and lympho- myosot (Achilles tendon, infraspinatus) Subcutaneous (under the skin) injection HGH (human growth hormone) *Biopuncture protocol (same as above) It’s quite the laundry list. The Chosen Few All of them helped to some extent, but only a few of them produced relief that lasted more than 48 hours, and some of the exercises were impossible to perform alone.

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Traumeel has been shown in some peer-reviewed journals to shorten recovery time from acute sports injuries and inhibit the secretion of immune mediators (IL-1B and TNF-alpha) that are associated with tissue damage and increased inflammation. Though biopuncture solutions aren’t diluted to the extent that they contain no active product (like most homeopathic medicine), they are diluted and referred to as “microdoses.” Lee used both Traumeel and lymphomyosot in my treatments. In addition to the drug treatments, we also tested a saline solution with 20% dextrose. It was just like prolotherapy but with shallower injections. The results of dozens of “baby jabs” with a small 30-gauge half-inch needle were amazing.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

I hate seeing the product I’m about to buy through clear glass. That’s why companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi are working on touch interfaces so that you can order your favorite drinks through a series of menus and error messages. As USA Today wrote of Coca-Cola’s efforts, “This teen-targeting, touch-screen dispenser flavors self-created beverages in micro-doses. It may be Coke’s best hope to keep Millennials fully engaged, socially involved and buying fizzy drinks at a time industry sales are falling faster than water down the drain.”7 Duh. Touchscreens are totally going to help sales. 4. UX ≠ UI: I make interfaces because that’s my job, bro Yeah, we went down the wrong path, but it’s not really our fault.

Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...And You Too! by Chelsea Handler

airport security, Burning Man, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, impulse control, microdosing, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, systems thinking, zero-sum game

* * * • • • The legalization of marijuana in California raised standards at dispensaries. The educative component that was lacking for so many years was now available on all store-bought weed. The labeling of strains, along with the labeling of THC vs. CBD ratios, was all right there in black and white. With the advent of medicinal-grade, controlled micro-dosing, there aren’t a lot of people I wouldn’t recommend it to. I’ve turned straight-arrow people into people I can actually spend time with. I’ve gotten friends who have never done any drugs, friends who have had terrible experiences with edibles, my Mormon sister, people’s parents, Muslims, and one nun to imbibe.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

As if in slow motion, I felt the force of the swerve. The polls were closing. The air was beginning to cool. EPILOGUE For months after the election, my friends and coworkers were not doing well. Stomachaches, insomnia, astrology. They drank too much. They took up moderate vaping. They went to meditative sound baths and considered microdosing to stave off looming depression or regain lost productivity. They appended their email salutations with phrases like “given the circumstances” and “despite the news.” Everyone engaged in deep and irresponsible magical thinking. On the heavily moderated message board, the commentariat discussed a Marshall Plan of rationality, a new enlightenment.

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

They walked out of Tenant of Trees. HRH turned to the woman sitting at his left. She twenty-five years old. She was an aspiring actress. She was from Kissimmee, Florida. She had moved to Los Angeles to follow her dreams. Her body was filled with the following psychoactive agents: Paxil, Lexapro, and a microdose of LSD. “My dear,” said HRH to the aspiring actress, “I wonder if you have ever perused the speeches of Cesar Chavez?” Chapter Fifteen Until the Wheels Fall Off and Burn By the way, all of the women in Fairy Land, and the Fairy Knight too, had Afro-textured hair and skin loaded with eumelanin in the stratum basale of their epidermis.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

But Uber is not volunteering to be the good guy – it costs too much – so legislation is the only way forward. That’s one example. The more I read, the more I realise that the tech companies are, at present, outmanoeuvring their social and fiscal responsibilities to the billions of people who are micro-dosing them with money 24/7. Accountability matters. In the Data Age, accountability is responsibility. That’s what Big Tech has to recognise. The usual definition of Big Tech is a reference to the top 5 tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. In reality, Big Tech is about global reach, global control, and a business model that seeks global power without local responsibility.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Notably, Daniel is also the founder of several start-ups, including Intellimedicine, which is developing a machine to 3D-print personalized Intellimeds containing exactly the right molecules, in exactly the right doses, that correspond to your conditions, nutritional needs, and daily health status. Intellimed’s prototype 3D printer has sixteen silos, which can combine 1- to 2-milligram microdoses of multiple substances into a single pill. Kraft envisions the machine being used to combine medicines in a pharmacy, before eventually becoming as commonplace for home use as a toaster oven. “Not all drugs or common doses work for all individuals,” reads Intellimedicine’s mission statement. “Differences in weight, age, activity, and diet . . . dramatically impact drug dosing and selection.”8 In the Near Horizon of Longevity, the ability to take control of your own health with personalized medicine will be available on demand.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

But however manipulated by marketing consultants, and however dubious its claims to healthfulness, wellness also gives a clear name and shape to a growing perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification. What has been called the “new New Age” arises from a similar intuition—that meditation, ayahuasca trips, crystals and Burning Man and microdosed LSD are all pathways to a world beckoning as purer, cleaner, more sustaining, and perhaps above all else, more whole. This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation—and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can.

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

Just enough to get you through a single day before you have to drag your delirious, fever-addled body back for more. There are, however, ways around this. During my last exchange at the local pharmacy, the woman behind the counter took pity on me and told me that she could only sell me ten without a prescription, unless it was ‘an emergency’. I was just about to accept the micro-dose and be on my way when she lowered her chin and looked up at me knowingly. ‘Is it an emergency?’ She tilted her head and nodded slightly, coaxing me to agree. ‘Er … yes?’ ‘So you’re telling me that this is an emergency?’ She asked again, nodding slowly. ‘Well, no,’ I started to panic under the pressure, ‘not really, it’s just man flu—’ The pharmacist shook her head furiously until I corrected myself: ‘I mean, yes, yes it is.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

People who watch MSNBC, meanwhile, are tuning in to receive mega-doses of the world’s thinnest compliment, i.e. that they’re morally superior to Donald Trump. The network lately has become a one-note morality play with endless segments about Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort. This isn’t the first time they’ve used this model. The coverage formula on both channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro-doses of safety and solidarity, which come when they see people onscreen sharing their fears. There is a promise of reassurance that comes with both coverage formulas. This is critical, that you’re encouraged to have consumer expectations, even though news should be unpredictable. Even sports fans expect disappointment about half the time.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Aaron’s girlfriend was twenty-three and working for the Trump administration in a low-level data analytics job at the State Department. She asked to stay anonymous, saying that she had come along to provide moral support. There was a lot of hugging and hand-holding during the interview. As I gained their trust, Aaron intimated that he was conducting experiments in his own body, using human growth hormone and microdoses of psychedelic drugs like mescaline and Ecstasy. When I asked about the warning from the FDA, Aaron told me about his plans to evade the government with a cryptocurrency infrastructure. “I just don’t think that it is very viable for them to stop the supply chain” for the DIY gene therapy, he said.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

When I caught my first glimpse of this strange new use for electricity in 2009, it was the stuff of obscure medical trials and secret military projects. Today, the notion of wearing an electrical stimulator on your head isn’t as foreign as it seemed back then; it’s certainly the kind of thing you can imagine someone in Silicon Valley doing for a little extra mental edge, alongside intermittent fasting or microdosing psilocybin. But it’s not just about boosting your brainpower with a volt jolt—there are many other ways electricity is being used to treat the ailments of body and mind. Take deep brain stimulation, a treatment of last resort for Parkinson’s disease, in which two electrodes the size and shape of uncooked spaghetti are slid into the deepest parts of your brain to quiet the disease’s destructive symptoms.

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully by Kelly Starrett, Juliet Starrett

airport security, call centre, COVID-19, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microdosing, Minecraft, phenotype, place-making, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

The Seated Hamstring Mobilization feels like a self-massage, but what it’s actually doing is loosening up the tissues in the backs of the legs so they move more fluidly. Other mobilizations help the brain learn to control movement. Collectively, they’ll help you score that 10 on the Sit-and-Rise Test. Think of these mobilizations as little microdoses of movement. They’re simple; you don’t need a super sophisticated intervention to increase mobility. You just need to start reintroducing your body to these very natural movements. There are four mobilizations in all. The ideal is to do two of them every couple of days (even if you passed the Sit-and-Rise Test).

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

Overall her mood has improved, however, I have given her a dose of Carcinosin Nosode 30C over the day followed by Berlin Wall 30C one a day in the morning…’ A response in the Medical Monitor emphasized the ridiculous nature of Berlin Wall as a homeopathic remedy: ‘What therapeutic advantages does Berlin Wall have over ordinary garden wall or Spaghetti Junction concrete? And do Scottish homeopaths use microdoses of that historic nostrum, Hadrian’s Wall? I think we should be told.’ So how did we get into a position whereby each year we are spending £40 billion globally on alternative therapies, most of which are as senseless as homeopathy, and many of which are a good deal more dangerous? In the penultimate section of this book we will look at the ten groups of people who are most responsible for our increasing enthusiasm for alternative medicine.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Harman got a placement at SRI, too, and he quietly resumed the acid experiments under the auspices of the Alternative Futures Project.17 Fadiman has continued the work into the present, and his 2011 book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, inspired a surge of interest in “microdosing,” now a popular performance-enhancing method in Silicon Valley tech circles that involves taking tiny amounts of LSD before work, a practice first proposed by Fadiman that’s sometimes imagined as a twenty-first-century off-label use of the drug.18 But acid was marketed to Bay Area knowledge workers as a productivity aid from the beginning.

…

Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Perennial Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1995), 178. 16. Willis W. Harman et al., “Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study,” Psychological Reports 19, no. 1 (August 1966): 211–27. 17. Todd Brendan Fahey, “The Original Captain Trips,” High Times, November 1991. 18. Vince Polito and Richard J. Stevenson, “A Systematic Study of Microdosing Psychedelics,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 2 (February 6, 2019): 2. 19. Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 17. 20. Ibid., 225–26. 21. Mona Lisa Saloy, “When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead: The Poetry of Bob Kaufman” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2005), 215, https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3400. 22.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The inventor agreed to build the soft drink behemoth a better soda fountain, and in return, Coke agreed to use their global distribution network to get the Slingshot into water-starved countries. Both kept their word. Kamen helped design the “Freestyle Fountain Beverage Dispenser,” which uses “micro-dose technology” to mix over 150 different beverages on demand (talk about choice paralysis). Coca-Cola, meanwhile, teamed up with ten other international organizations and began distributing the Slingshot in 2013, a core feature of their “Ekocenter” kiosks. Part general store and part community center, Ekocenters are solar-powered shipping containers that provide remote, low-income communities with safe drinking water, internet access, nonperishables (like mosquito repellant), first-aid supplies, and, of course, Coca-Cola products for sale.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Forced back to America a year later by the threat of the draft, Fadiman moved to California and began graduate work at Stanford. Ultimately he would become the bridge between East Coast and West Coast groups who were independently experimenting with psychedelic drugs. He would also go on to carry the torch for LSD for many years, becoming the public face of the microdosing scene that swept through Silicon Valley beginning in 2011. Fadiman arrived at Stanford as a distinctly unhappy graduate student in 1961. In school only to avoid the military, he was feeling that it was a waste of his life; he would rather have been in Europe. Having recently been introduced to psychedelic drugs, he now saw the world as a much different place.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“efficiency and effectiveness”: Arianna Simpson, “Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup,” Business Insider, February 3, 2014, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/arianna-simpson-on-women-and-bitcoin-2014-2. to focus while coding: Rhett Jones, “Lawsuit: VR Company Had a ‘Kink Room,’ Pressured Female Employees to ‘Microdose,’ ” Gizmodo, May 15, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/lawsuit-vr-company-had-a-kink-room-pressured-female-e-1795243868. The lawsuit was later settled out of court: Marisa Kendall, “Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Startup Settles ‘Kink Room’ Lawsuit,” The Mercury News, September 7, 2017, accessed October 7, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/lawsuit-vr-company-had-a-kink-room-pressured-female-e-1795243868.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

The excess lingers in soils, lakes and oceans, fertilising massive blooms of algae that can be toxic and use up the dissolved oxygen, suffocating other species. This causes dead zones for kilometres, and is a particular issue in China, where intensive farming has polluted whole river systems. A solution is targeted application – or ‘micro-dosing’ – directly to each plant, which minimises waste, and catchment reed beds can filter out any run-off before it enters waterways. Organic farming advocates prefer pre-industrial methods of soil enrichment, such as muck-spreading, crop rotation with legumes (which harbour bacteria in their roots that can ‘fix’ nitrogen directly from the air, enhancing the soil’s fertility for other crops while requiring little or no fertiliser), and so-called ‘conservation agriculture’, in which the stalks and leaves that are not harvested are left in the fields to mulch down.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

He has been awarded the Leopoldo Alas Prize (1959), the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1967), the National Critics’ Prize (1967), the Critics’ Annual Prize for Theatre (1981), the Prince of Asturias Prize (1986), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1994)—the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor,—the Jerusalem Prize (1995), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1996), the PEN/Nabokov Award (2002), and the Nobel Prize (2010). AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life, and of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

There are also cowpeas, oranges, pomelos, tangelos, and stands of Jatropha curcas, a Central American shrub whose oily seeds can be pressed for biodiesel. Lining the paths are Indian neem trees—a source of natural antiseptics and bug repellant. Under development are desert-adapted grapes and figs. ICRISAT has created this nutritious oasis with minimal insecticide and with only microdoses of fertilizers, injecting directly to the roots of each plant just one-fifth of a typical field’s normal application of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. It also has fifteen scientists, one hundred field technicians and support staff, and three hundred laborers. And something else, rare in Niger’s poor croplands: deep wells.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Their egalitarianism ensured that they were open to any unkempt upstart who might see something, sense something—something with the potential to change everything. You can still see traces of this counterculture in the Valley: in the sandals, even if next-gen nylon has displaced frayed leather; in the left-liberal, sometimes libertarian politics; in the conviction that your productivity can be augmented by micro-dosing LSD. But the trouble with the cultural explanation for West Coast exceptionalism is that the rest of the world has never been as buttoned up as the Valley’s boosters imagine. The hacker ethic, championed by communalist nerds who obsessed over code and declined on principle to monetize it, actually originated at MIT—with the Tech Model Railroad Club, a group of MIT undergrads enthralled by the technology behind model trains before their attention was diverted to the TX-0 computer.[6] (The TX-0 was so captivating that the authorities at MIT considered getting rid of it.