Digital Psychedelia: Hidden Experience and the Challenge of Paranoia

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials at university sites such as Johns Hopkins, New York University and Imperial College London, in the treatment of clinical targets such as unipolar depression and anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when compared with next-best treatments. Population scientists have also marshaled survey evidence from the underground use of psychedelics, revealing some of the lowest harm profiles amongst all psychoactive drugs. I have been following conversations amongst university-based psychedelic researchers and therapists and community-based psychedelic advocates since 2013. From 2013-2015 this was as part of the research community, as a postdoctoral researcher conducting a qualitative study for a prominent US psychedelic research group. Since then, I have been conducting an extended ethnographic study of the revival of interest in psychedelics in North America and Western Europe, including through attending psychedelic workshops, conferences and meet-ups. Over the years I have gotten to know many healers, mental health professionals, drug reform advocates, Psychonauts (‘explorers of the mind’), hippies and New Agers, advocates of ‘cognitive liberty,’ and psychedelic-inspired artists, who have been keen to see a wider appreciation and use of psychedelics – whether viewed as ‘tools’, ‘drugs’, plant and fungal ‘allies’, ‘teachers,’ or ‘medicines.’ During the last five years, several pharmaceutical companies have gotten involved, and venture capital is now reshaping the psychedelic ‘community’-cum-industry in key ways. There are heated debates over the value of psychedelic ‘mainstreaming’. The use of digital platforms in the administration and aftercare of psychedelic-assisted therapies has been less-debated, though it is growing apace. When the largest psychedelic biotech company Compass Pathways relaunched as a for-profit company in 2016, it did so in partnership with the predictive analytics company MindStrong, and with capital investment from Peter Thiel, billionaire founder of the controversial big data analytics company Palantir. Fast forward to this year and in April, a partnership between ATAI Life Sciences and the digital therapeutics company Psyber announced approval for psychedelic-assisted therapy trials for depression and addiction that will use a brain-computer-interface in place of human therapists. Meanwhile, smaller players like Mindleap Health and Field Trip have begun offering apps for ‘integrating’ the insights and experiences produced through psychedelic use – regardless of whether these were had legally or illegally – into clients’ everyday lives. Maya Health has launched an app for therapists and practitioners looking to organize their caseload of psychedelic-using clients. The MyDelica app to be launched later in 2021 aims to provide advice to psychedelic users, while recording data on psychological history and trip experiences for the explicit purposes of research and selling data “to industry organizations so that they can better serve you.” I use the term ‘digital psychedelia’ to refer to an infrastructure of digital platforms that is capitalizing on the revival of interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic experiences. The use of digital platforms to guide and research psychedelic experiences is inspiring both utopian and dystopian imaginaries for my interlocutors. How might we approach the big data-enabled analysis of an expansive set of experiences, including the mythic and the mystical, the revelation of inner and (and as) outer truths, and encounters with other planes of existence and spiritual agencies? In this short piece, I will introduce utopian and dystopian visions of where the mainstreaming of psychedelics through digital psychedelia is leading. I hope to show how the very friction between these visions is suggestive of wider and more liberatory psychopolitics at this rapidly unfolding juncture. The revival of psychedelic-assisted therapy has been to a large extent premised on the permeability of psychedelic and everyday experiences, with the drug-induced states holding a kind of promissory value through experiences and encounters that then require being integrated into the everyday. Big data analysis also raises questions about the susceptibility of those under the influence of psychedelics, to different modes of address, encounter and attention. I have become curious about the predictive possibilities being opened up, not least because speculative futures are driving the economic boom of the emerging psychedelic industry (Noorani and Martell, 2021; Sanabria, 2021). In other words, these once-countercultural and still-illegal drugs are successfully being rebranded as much-needed, innovative mental health treatments. In a March 2021 press release launching their psychedelics-related Master’s program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison predicted that the psychedelic therapeutics industry will grow to $100 billion USD by 2030. What the intersection of psychedelic experiences and predictive analytics might yield is being read with excitement by some, and suspicion by others.