Soma Now

Huxley's Prophecy, the Attention Economy, and the Only Technology That Actually Works

I. The Valve and Its Discoverer

Aldous Huxley didn’t believe that the brain generates consciousness but constructs a limited and constrained framework of reality based on sensory input filtered through a "reducing valve" — a filter that screens out most of reality in order to deliver the narrow trickle of perception sufficient for biological survival. Loosen the valve, and the flow of sensory data increases. Close it, and the sensory flow diminishes. Each of us is, in theory, capable of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere. The nervous system's job is to suppress that vast, near-infinite reality — to protect us from being overwhelmed, passing through only what is practically relevant to an organism trying to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

Buddhism has long described this view of consciousness as mental formations.

What Huxley grasped was that the valve was controllable — and that it could be weaponized. He spent the first half of his intellectual life mapping the interior architecture of consciousness. He spent the second half watching that architecture be systematically exploited for profit and control. He wrote both the diagnosis and the prophecy in his landmark novel Brave New World. We are living in it now.

II. The Perennial Philosophy: The Standard Against Which Everything Is Measured

Thirteen years after Brave New World, in 1945, he published The Perennial Philosophy. In it, Huxley sought to identify what all the world's contemplative traditions share. His answer: they all point toward direct experiential contact with a reality the reducing valve normally screens out entirely — what he would later call Mind at Large.

What I find essential in Huxley's argument is this: our rational discursive mind, operating behind the valve, is simply not designed to see this reality, let alone hold it. The instrument that would perceive it is the same instrument doing the screening. The only way to see beyond the filter is the disciplines of stillness and attention that every serious contemplative tradition has developed.

The Perennial Philosophy reads, today, like a bulletin from the future. Commenting on what he called the assault on silence, Huxley described radio as a conduit for pre-fabricated din flowing into homes, penetrating the mind with a babel of distractions: news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis. He was warning us about the systematic suppression of the interior conditions under which wisdom becomes possible. Every tradition that has taken consciousness seriously has identified silence as the prerequisite. The assault on silence is, therefore, an assault on the possibility of wisdom itself. If you find that a reach, consider how modern military incarceration uses stress positions and the blaring of constant loud music as interrogation techniques.

III. Brave New World: The Valve as State Architecture

In Brave New World, Huxley imagines soma — a drug engineered and administered by the state to control citizens' mental and emotional states. What I find most chilling about this is not the drug itself but the mechanism it represents: soma is a chemical enhancement of the body's own biological reducing valve. The state isn't forcing anything alien on its citizens. It is simply taking control of a filter that was already there.

The state doesn't want the valve opened. It wants it managed. A population capable of perceiving reality as it actually is — impermanent, interdependent, shot through with suffering and with beauty — is ungovernable. A population whose consciousness is regulated to the level of comfortable stimulation is stable. Stability is the state's highest value. Everything else — art, science, truth, love, genuine spiritual experience — is sacrificed to it. If you find this an overreach, consider the quiet legalization of numbing substances, and look honestly at the sneaking mediocrity of contemporary art: the filters, the auto-tuning, the AI-generated faces where human presence used to be.

The World State explains its design logic without apology. There is always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. Not from suffering — from reality. The key word is holiday: a managed departure from what is actually the case, with a guaranteed return to the same managed state. Soma does not transform the user. It suspends them, repeatedly, indefinitely, in a condition of comfortable non-perception. As I read these passages, I keep hearing the voice of tech executives before Congress — the same serene confidence, the same framing: we are simply giving people what they want. That's freedom, right?

What progress. Now all we have to do is swallow two or three tablets and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry your morality about in a bottle. As Morpheus asks Neo — do you want the red pill or the blue pill? That is what soma is. That is what the smartphone is now.

Christianity without tears. Buddhism without practice. Transformation without the interior work that transformation actually requires. This is not incidental to the state's design. It is the design. A population that has access to the simulation of spiritual attainment — the peace, the equanimity, the absence of distressing emotion — will never seek the genuine article. Why undergo the arduous, destabilizing, self-dissolving work of actual practice when the feeling that practice promises is available on demand, in tablet form, without risk? I am not against drugs as medication. I am against them as a life-hack and as recreation.

We as a society might as well put a gun to our heads.

Buddhism’s Three Poisons — greed, anger, and ignorance — are not eliminated in Brave New World’s state. They are managed. Greed is satisfied on demand. Aversion is chemically neutralized. Delusion is administered as policy. The root conditions remain perfectly intact. The population remains perfectly dependent. And the supply chain remains perfectly in the hands of the state.

There is one more passage from Brave New World I think deserves close attention, because it predicts something specific. When Ireland's workers were given a four-hour workday, the result was unrest and a large increase in soma consumption. Those extra hours of leisure were so far from being a source of happiness that people felt compelled to take a holiday from them. Freedom from compulsory distraction, in a population conditioned by managed consciousness, does not produce awakening. It produces withdrawal. The valve, once externally managed, loses its capacity for self-regulation. I have watched this happen. The practitioner forgets how to sit still. Forgets how to find meaning and purpose in their own life without external stimulation filling every available moment.

IV. Brave New World Revisited: The Prophecy Sharpens

Huxley published Brave New World in 1932 and did not believe his own timeline. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness — these were coming, but not in his lifetime, not even in his grandchildren's lifetime. By 1958, twenty-seven years later, he had changed his mind. The nightmare of total organization had emerged from the safe, remote future and was, he wrote, now awaiting us just around the next corner. And I want to pause on that for a moment — because this is his revised opinion in 1958. He had not yet seen computers, the internet, smartphones, social media, or AI.

What changed his mind was not pharmacology. It was the mass communications industry. Early advocates of universal literacy and a free press had envisioned a wonderful lifting of all people through universal literacy. Knowledge made accessible and free to all. A brave new world!  They did not foresee what in fact happened — the development of a vast mass communications industry concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account humanity's almost infinite appetite for distraction — what Buddhism has always called ignorance, the third and deepest of the Three Poisons.

The political consequences follow with terrible and brutal logic. A society whose members spend a great part of their time not here and now, but somewhere else — in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy — will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

And then, in 1961, at the California Medical School, Huxley stated the completed prophecy: “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude — producing dictatorship without tears, a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel.” He called it the final revolution.

He was wrong about only one thing. It did take a little longer, and it did not require pharmacology — it was technology. Either way the effect was the same. Enter AOL: "You've got mail!"

V. The Farm

Soma Arrived on Schedule

The attention economy is Huxley's soma. Not as metaphor — as mechanism. The slot machine variable reward schedule, the infinite scroll that eliminates stopping cues, the notification timed to the moment of maximum neurological susceptibility, the algorithm that learns with extraordinary precision which emotional trigger produces the longest session time: these are not design accidents. They are the product of years of deliberate engineering, A/B testing, and optimization against a single metric — engagement — that turns out to be a polite word for compulsion.

The dopamine architecture is the tell. Dopamine is the wanting neurotransmitter: anticipation, seeking, the craving for the next stimulus. Serotonin is the contentment neurotransmitter: sufficiency, belonging, the neurochemical signature of genuine connection and rest. The attention economy runs entirely on dopamine. It systematically starves serotonin — which requires precisely what the platform displaces: stable relationships, embodied presence, genuine accomplishment, unstructured time, sleep. The platform does not merely compete with these goods. It is calibrated to prevent the neurochemical state in which they become possible. You cannot settle into contentment when the next notification is thirty seconds away.

This is Buddhism's Three Poisons deliberately encoded into an algorithm. What alarms me most is that someone — some people in a room somewhere — actually discussed this, including the science behind it, and made the deliberate decision to build these toxic, addictive platforms.

Greed — the grasping orientation toward the next stimulus — is the engine of the engagement model. Aversion — the rejecting orientation that generates outrage — is cultivated because anger captures attention more reliably than any other emotional register. The research has been consistent across platforms: content that generates fear and hatred outperforms content that generates joy or curiosity. The algorithm does not prefer hatred because it is malicious. It prefers hatred because hatred is maximally engaging, and engagement is the revenue model. Getting you addicted and keeping you online is their entire business model. They do not care whether this is good or bad for you. Delusion — the structural not-seeing — is administered through filter bubbles that make the reducing valve impermeable to disconfirming information. The platform does not just distort reality. It constructs a personalized reality calibrated to keep you in it. As the wizard says: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The Psychic Suicide Bomber

Social media is a psychic suicide bomber — and I mean that exactly. A suicide bomber destroys others by destroying itself — the weapon and the devastation are the same event. The platform destroys the user's capacity for discernment by weaponizing the user's own need for connection and validation. The user is the bomb. The detonation is the share, the repost, the outraged comment that recruits the next user into the loop. The explosion propagates laterally through social networks at the speed of dopamine, leaving behind it a landscape of eroded attention, degraded epistemology, and manufactured certainty.

Social media is an accelerant of mass psychosis — collective delusion operating below the threshold of self-awareness. The Three Poisons have always operated in human minds. What the attention economy accomplishes is their industrialization and synchronization across billions of minds simultaneously, calibrated to a common frequency of outrage and craving, in real time, with the enthusiastic participation of the people being destroyed.

The Meetings

None of this happened by accident. This needs to be stated without qualification, because the standard framing — even among the most serious critics — tends toward the language of unintended consequences, emergent harms, incentive structures that no one fully anticipated. That framing is too generous, and the documentary record no longer supports it.

Real people sat in rooms and had these conversations. Engineers studied the behavioral psychology literature and imported the slot machine mechanism deliberately. Product managers received the internal research showing that Instagram was accelerating depression and body dysmorphia in teenage girls and made the business decision to continue. The Facebook documents Frances Haugen released were not the revelation of a secret. They were the confirmation of what the internal research teams — the ones whose recommendations were systematically overridden by growth and monetization — had been documenting for years.

The tobacco parallel is exact and the legal system is beginning to catch up to it. In 1994, seven tobacco CEOs testified before Congress that nicotine was not addictive. They had internal research going back decades proving otherwise. More than thirty state attorneys general have now sued Meta on the same theory: that the company designed a product it knew was harmful to minors, concealed that knowledge, and continued deployment. The business decision was made by named individuals in documented conversations. Somewhere in the conference rooms of Silicon Valley, people discussed — with the vocabulary of product management and engagement metrics — how to more effectively colonize human consciousness. They went home afterward to their families and put their children to bed with stories of hope and joy. They are ordinary people. What were they thinking? How are they justifying their behavior? What do they see when they look in the mirror?

The answer, I think, is that they too are captive to the Three Poisons — in this case, greed. They need to earn a living. They tell themselves this is "stuff I do at work and shit that happens to other people. I can't control how people use the product." Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil. She was writing about different conference rooms. The mechanism is the same.

The Captive Farm

Social media’s business model is not advertising. Advertising is the revenue mechanism. The business model is the construction and maintenance of a captive population of conditioned consumers whose consciousness — their attention, their time, their neurological reward architecture — is the commodity being sold. The user is not the customer. The user is the livestock. The advertiser is the customer. The platform is the farm. Can you hear the baaing of the sheep as a susurrus of the 21^st century?

The billionaires this system has produced are not incidental to the argument. They are the argument. The Forbes top ten is now dominated by tech and energy precisely because the Three Poisons at civilizational scale produce exactly what Buddhist philosophy would predict: the extraction of wealth upward, the externalization of suffering downward, and the concentration of the delusion-generating apparatus in the hands of those who profit from it. The fossil fuel billionaires belong in the same frame. Different extraction industry, identical Three Poisons architecture: privatize the profit, socialize the cost, fund the political machinery that keeps the delusion operational.

Huxley’s state kept God locked away and humanity sedated. The tech billionaires lock genuine human connection behind a paywall of manufactured craving and call it a social network. The state at least had the integrity of their cynicism. Silicon Valley delivered the same design wrapped in mission statements about connecting humanity.

Here I want to name what I think Huxley's World State actually looks like in 2026. The idea of a "state" is now somewhat quaint. What we have instead is an oligarchy — a billionaire class that has, with increasing efficiency, purchased the political architecture of democratic nations. According to Oxfam's January 2026 report, global billionaire wealth reached a record $18.3 trillion in 2025 — up 81% since 2020 — growing three times faster than the average annual increase of the previous five years. The world's twelve richest billionaires now hold more combined wealth than the poorest four billion people on earth. Billionaires are estimated to be four thousand times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens.

The Solitary Confinement

The Supreme Court has established that prolonged solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has called solitary confinement beyond fifteen days a form of torture, without qualification. The psychological damage is documented, consistent, and severe: anxiety, depression, cognitive deterioration, loss of the capacity for normal social interaction.

Now hold that against this: a teenager in their bedroom, phone in hand, connected to three thousand followers, has not had an unmediated face-to-face conversation with a peer in how many hours. The platform presents itself as the antidote to loneliness. It is the manufacturer of it. Every hour spent in the feed is an hour not spent in embodied human presence — the specific thing human neurology requires for serotonin regulation, for the development of empathy, for the formation of a stable self.

The cruelty of the design is that it feels like connection while producing the neurological signature of isolation. The prisoner in solitary knows what has been taken from them. The teenager scrolling at two in the morning believes they are not alone. They are surrounded by faces, reactions, validation — and yet their nervous system is registering solitude. That is not a kindness. That is the exquisite refinement of the cruelty.

Jonathan Haidt's research documents what the smartphone era has done to the cohort that grew up inside it: the collapse in face-to-face social interaction, the collapse in sleep, the corresponding explosion in anxiety, depression, and clinical loneliness. These are not correlations of coincidence. They are correlations of mechanism. The device displaced the embodied contact. The displaced contact produced the loneliness. The loneliness drove users back to the device for relief. The device delivered dopamine instead of serotonin. The deficit deepens and accelerates. The tech bros and investors profit from every revolution of that cycle.

Into that manufactured loneliness steps the AI companion. The girlfriend and boyfriend replacement services explicitly marketed to people whose capacity for human connection has been eroded — by the same industry now offering the prosthetic. First, engineer the isolation. Then sell the remedy for the wound you inflicted. The tobacco companies sold cigarettes and donated to cancer research. The attention economy manufactures loneliness and monetizes the longing for its cure. “These AI companions know me so well, they never tell me anything I don’t want to hear!”

Each iteration goes deeper. Soma managed the emotional surface. Social media replaced civic reality with emotional spectacle. AI companions now offer to replace relational reality itself — intimacy without friction, presence without demand, love without the irreducible otherness of another actual person. The state abolished family and deep attachment by deliberate design. The attention economy is accomplishing the same thing by consumer preference, one upgrade at a time. A tech bro recently said, "I have no time to sleep. Look at all the cool new things I can do with AI agents!" What he doesn't see — ignorance and delusion in their purest form — is that he has simply dug a deeper hole to collapse into.

The Carbon

The attention economy presents itself as weightless — cloud, stream, feed, flow. All the metaphors are aerial. But the infrastructure that delivers the dopamine hit to five billion people is burning carbon at a rate that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago. Data centers are among the most energy-intensive structures human beings have ever built, and their appetite is not stable — it is accelerating, driven by the same AI systems now being deployed to make the farm more efficient.

Each large language model training run consumes energy on the scale of a small city's annual output. I need to repeat that: a small city's annual output. Holy Burn the World Down Batman — I need my next dopamine hit!

Each AI companion interaction, each generated response, each inference — multiplied across billions of users, around the clock, globally — runs on the same fossil fuel infrastructure that is destabilizing the ecological systems human civilization depends on. The soma is not weightless. It has a physical cost, and that cost is being paid by the atmosphere, by communities downwind of the data centers, by everyone downstream of the emissions — while the profits flow upward to the same class of people now also invested in the energy systems powering the servers. We are literally eating ourselves alive.

This is the Three Poisons completing their circuit. Greed generates the platform. The platform generates the addiction. The addiction generates the engagement. The engagement generates the revenue. The revenue funds the infrastructure. The infrastructure consumes the energy. The energy consumption accelerates the ecological crisis. The ecological crisis generates the fear and instability that makes people more susceptible to the platform. The cage is burning the world to keep itself lit.

Huxley's state was stable. That was its horror. What we have built is not stable. It is extractive all the way down — burning the physical world to fuel the psychic one, in the service of quarterly earnings reports, in the fiction of human connection.

VI. The Door Out

You Cannot Legislate Wisdom

I believe there are policy prescriptions worth naming. Smartphone bans in schools are already law in France, several Australian states, and growing numbers of American districts. The evidence on academic performance and adolescent wellbeing is accumulating. Age restrictions on social media access have a coherent rationale: the developing brain between ten and sixteen is in a critical window of social and emotional formation that the attention economy is specifically calibrated to exploit. Handwriting requirements in schools are not nostalgia — they are cognitive resistance training, preserving the slower, more deliberate modes of thought that the feed systematically atrophies. Business model reform — moving away from advertising-engagement toward subscription or public utility models — changes the incentive structure at its root. Algorithmic liability, on the products liability theory already being tested in court, is the legal framework the industry has most to fear and most deserves.

Name all of these, and more. Then we need to be honest about what they are: harm reduction. Guardrails on the cliff road. The ambulance at the bottom of the hill. Necessary, and completely insufficient.

You cannot legislate your way to wisdom. You cannot vote away greed, anger, and ignorance. You cannot regulate the Three Poisons out of existence, because the Three Poisons are as old as time and will outlast every framework we can devise. The attention economy did not create greed, aversion, and delusion. It discovered them, mapped them with extraordinary efficiency, and built a two trillion dollar industry on their reliable operation in the human nervous system. The cure cannot come from the same cause as the disease.

Here is what I see as the stark and sobering flaw in America's founding. Our founders believed in the Enlightenment^[1] — the conviction that reason, science, and liberty were sufficient foundations for a just society. The Enlightenment's values are noble, true, and good. But they presuppose an educated, moral, and engaged electorate. They did not predict a disenfranchised, disconnected, and addicted population that couldn't care less about those values — only where and when the next dopamine hit will come from, and with oligarchs all too willing to exploit them for their own benefit.

There is no political solution to a spiritual crisis. There is only wisdom — and the practices that make wisdom possible.

The Only Technology That Actually Works the Mechanism

Every secular diagnosis of the attention economy ends in the same place: an appeal to political will, regulatory courage, corporate accountability, consumer awareness. Tristan Harris wants design reform. Jonathan Haidt wants age restrictions and school policies. The attorneys general want liability. These are not wrong, and I think they are in fact necessary. But they are insufficient in the way that rearranging furniture is insufficient when the house is on fire. They are also as effective as handwringing as long as the political system remains as corrupted by the oligarchy as it is today.

The fire is the Three Poisons. And Buddhist practice — specifically the practice Nichiren taught, the accessible, non-institutional, non-retreat form available to anyone in any circumstance — is the only technology that operates on the fire itself rather than on the architecture of the room it is burning.

Shikan — stopping and seeing, the śamatha-vipaśyanā practice Zhiyi systematized in the Great Calming and Contemplation — interrupts the dopamine loop at its root. Not by suppressing craving but by creating the interior space in which craving can be observed rather than acted upon. That observational space is precisely what the attention economy is designed to prevent. Every design feature of the platform — the notification, the infinite scroll, the variable reward — exists to prevent the half-second of stillness in which the user might notice what is happening to them. Shikan is the cultivation of that half-second into an hour, a day, a life.

Chanting Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō is the accessible form of this — Nichiren's democratizing genius for the Latter Day, the practice available without retreat, without extended training, without institutional access or permission. The rhythm of the daimoku occupies the narrative layer of the reducing valve — the storytelling system, the third filter, the structural not-seeing — with content that is not generated by the platform, not optimized for engagement, not calibrated to exploit the Three Poisons. It is, in the most literal sense, an alternative feed. One that nourishes rather than harvests.

What practice restores is exactly what the platform destroys: the serotonin architecture of genuine belonging, the capacity for sustained attention, the interior stillness in which the Three Poisons can be seen rather than simply operated by. Community — the third of Buddhism's Three Jewels — is not optional. It is critical. The self that practices is a relational self. You cannot develop genuine compassion through a feed. You cannot cultivate patience through a comment section. You cannot experience the three marks of existence through a dopamine loop. I have watched the platform do this work on people I care about. It does not just distract from practice. It destroys the relational and neurological substrate that practice requires.

This is why the door out is not resistance. Resistance still defines itself against the thing it resists, which keeps the thing at the center. The door out is transformation — of the interior conditions that make the cage effective, and of the exterior conditions that make it universal. These are not competing projects. They are two registers of the same project, and both must be pursued simultaneously.

Regulate the farm. Reform the business model. Protect the children. Do all of these things, urgently. And practice. One breath. One daimoku. One moment in which the algorithm does not get to decide what happens next. Not as retreat from the world — as preparation for genuine engagement with it.

Huxley ended Brave New World Revisited with this: perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. That is a humanist's courage, and it is admirable. But it is insufficient. It offers duty without a way of fulfilling it, clarity about the problem without a practice for transformation, resistance without the interior resource that makes resistance sustainable.

The tradition I have practiced for fifty years goes further. The crisis is real. The race is on. Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō is not a consolation offered to people suffering in a burning world. It is not more soma to placate the masses. It is the medicine that works the mechanism the world is burning to suppress. Practice is what makes genuine response possible. One breath, one daimoku, one moment of clear seeing — and then out into the world, with clear eyes and an open heart.

Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō.

^[1] The Enlightenment: the 18th-century intellectual movement — Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Jefferson — that held reason, science, and individual liberty to be sufficient foundations for a just society. Given access to information and freedom from tyranny, human beings would naturally govern themselves wisely. It was a magnificent vision. It assumed the primary obstacle to good governance was ignorance imposed from without — by kings, priests, and censors. It did not reckon with ignorance generated from within, by the structure of the human mind itself. Buddhism had been working on that problem for twenty-five centuries.