Wired has a long piece about mindfulness in Silicon Valley, and its rather… complicated relationship between contemplative practice as religious practice, contemplative practice as form of self-optimization, and the connection between counterculture and computing. With programs like Search Inside Yourself, meditation retreats, and like, Noah Shachtman argues, Silicon Valley companies

are doing more than simply seizing on Buddhist practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valley’s goal-oriented, data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never mind nirvana. The technology community of Northern California wants return on its investment in meditation. “All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. “This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”

It can be tempting to dismiss the interest in these ancient practices as just another neo-spiritual fad from a part of the country that’s cycled through one New Age after another. But it’s worth noting that the prophets of this new gospel are in the tech companies that already underpin so much of our lives. And these firms are awfully good at turning niche ideas into things that hundreds of millions crave.

The rest of the piece looks at several different facets of this intersection of contemplative practice and technology: the Wisdom 2.0 conference; Arturo Bejar’s work to make Facebook more compassionate; Kenneth Folk’s concept of open source enlightenment; and so on.

Some of the details also seem to me to be spot on: the sense impatience with things as they were done any time before, oh, 2005– “in today’s Silicon Valley, there’s little patience for what many are happy to dismiss as ‘hippie bullshit'”– lamentably rings very true– as is the idea that you can reduce meditation to a bunch of code that you can either run on human hardware or computer hardware, it doesn’t really matter– are both right. (Though back in 2009 Ryan Tate nailed this strange nexus in his hilarious but I’d like think off-base* portrait of sumi-e performance artist Drue Kataoka.)

But I’m not sure I buy the bigger tension that Shachtman introduces in his reflection on the Wisdom 2.0 conference:

Siddhartha famously abandoned the trappings of royalty to sit under the Bodhi Tree and preach about the illusion of the ego. Seeing the megarich take the stage to trumpet his practices is a bit jarring.

It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that these ancient teachings are being used to reinforce some of modern society’s uglier inequalities…. Steve Jobs spent lots of time in a lotus position; he still paid slave wages to his contract laborers, berated subordinates, and parked his car in handicapped stalls….

Looking around Wisdom 2.0, meditation starts to seem a lot like another secret handshake to join the club.

Yes, you can argue that there’s something contradictory here; but I think it’s the same contradiction between the otherworldliness of spiritual practice and the desire for advancement and power is visible in Weber’s account of Protestantism; the history of the Quakers, who formed an important Atlantic commercial and inventive network in the 18th and 19th centuries; the tangled history of Zen and Japanese militarism; and indeed the entire history of nearly any religion successful enough to leave a mark in world history.

What I think is more of a challenge for the Valley specifically is this: Can a place that has made so much money distracting people, convincing advertisers that it can parse and monetize attention, really incorporate ideas about contemplative practice and attention? Or will the host treat these ideas as foreign invaders, and ultimately reject them?

It’s one thing to be more mindful in order to be better prepared for battle, as Valley lawyer Bill Fenwick argues, or to see contemplative practice merely as a kind of engineering; it’s something else to make products that go in a radically different direction because you think differently about the mind, attention, and the relationship users should have to your products. (The throwaway line that “these firms are awfully good at turning niche ideas into things that hundreds of millions crave” kind of sums up the tension: craving and mindfulness are not two things you can really put together.)

But I’m not entirely pessimistic that contemplative practices could have a real impact, not just serve as a veneer atop bad products or a set of ideas that helps greedy people feel better about themselves.

One of the few things that makes me hopeful that wearable computing won’t collapse in a mire of distraction, turning out products that behave like demanding three year-olds rather than English butlers– that is, always demanding that we pay attention to them, instead of creating the impression of always being present and ready when we need them, but otherwise respecting our space– is that many of the people I know who work in this space have meditation practices, or are otherwise very interested in contemplative practice.

It may never have a serious effect on traditional desktop / laptop WIMP systems, but maybe that’s okay; they’re on the way out anyway. But it could take hold in wearables and always-on devices, which have a far greater chance of really affecting how we spend our attention, and how well we’re able to focus on anything.

* Drue’s mother Barbara was the STS program’s admin when I was a postdoc at Stanford, and was always very nice to me.