Where Silicon Valley Is Going to Get in Touch With Its Soul #MakerBusiness
Fascinating piece from The New York Times on Esalen Institute, a retreat for soul searching Silicon Valley ex-pats.
Does this remind anyone else of Don Draper’s retreat at the end of Mad Men?
Silicon Valley, facing a crisis of the soul, has found a retreat center.
It has been a hard year for the tech industry. Prominent figures like Sean Parker and Justin Rosenstein, horrified by what technology has become, have begun to publicly denounce companies like Facebook that made them rich.
And so Silicon Valley has come to the Esalen Institute, a storied hippie hotel here on the Pacific coast south of Carmel, Calif. After storm damage in the spring and a skeleton crew in the summer, the institute was fully reopened in October with a new director and a new mission: It will be a home for technologists to reckon with what they have built.
This is a radical change for the rambling old center. Founded in 1962, the nonprofit helped bring yoga, organic food and meditation into the American mainstream.
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