Abstract Background and Aims While many scholars have called attention to similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications, the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and esoteric aspirations that have no parallel in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. This utopian discourse provides insight into the ways that global tech elites are instrumentalizing both psychedelics and artificial intelligence (AI) as tools in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality. If realized, this project would undermine the use of both tools for prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes. Methods My argument develops through rhetorical analysis of the ways that industry leaders envision the future of medicalized psychedelics in their public communications. I draw on examples from media interviews, blog posts, podcasts, and press releases to underscore the persuasive strategies and ideological commitments that are driving the movement to transform psychedelics into pharmaceutical medications. Results Counterfactual efforts to improve mental health by increasing inequality are widespread in the psychedelics industry. These efforts have been propelled by an elitist worldview that is widely-held in Silicon Valley. The backbone of this worldview is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies, which describes an interrelated cluster of belief systems: transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism. Conclusions This article demonstrates that TESCREALism is a driving force in major segments of the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, where it is influencing the design of extractive systems that directly contradict the field's world-healing aspirations. These findings contribute to a developing subfield of critical psychedelic studies, which interrogates the political and economic implications of psychedelic medicalization.
  • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    it’s very hard to have a healthy relationship with drugs when TESCREAL assholes and fascists keep colonizing and trying to control both the substance itself and the ways we engage with it. it’s unfortunate how normal it is to think of psychedelics in terms of Silicon Valley guruism (which stole from and corrupted Native American and other indigenous peoples’ spiritual rituals, sans any inconvenient context; a bunch of Silicon Valley gurus are also guilty of a ton of documented instances of abuse), capitalist utility (psychedelics as “optimization”, a way to reframe altered mental states in a way that does not allow you to switch off or view the systems around you in any way but a prescribed one), and general woo (psychedelics as a gateway to metaphysical belief and conspiracy thinking; this is one of the ways that fascists use psychedelic spaces to spread and reinforce their fucked up values)