Acid Capitalism

It's common-enough knowledge that if you ingest a couple tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD, or 'acid' - it will transform your consciousness, provoking a psychedelic 'trip' that may last up to 16 hours. What is not common-enough knowledge is that the economic organization of society is itself a psychedelic arrangement that transforms consciousness, provoking a trip that gets disguised as "ordinary consciousness". The effects may last a lifetime.

This, I contend, is very bad. We're subliminally dosed into believing that our holistic experience of what being alive is like - our consciousness - is a given, rigid, natural phenomenon that cannot be meaningfully altered by such man-made, social constructions as economic policy. All the while, exactly that is happening.

We don't suspect that one of the most potent ways to evolve the panorama of human experience towards a more beautiful condition is by altering the economic structures that guide that condition along in its development. We don't suspect this, because 'the economy' is thought of as something fundamentally othered from consciousness; like comparing apples and supernovas.

What follows is an attempt to display the common loom upon which these two phenomenon - the economy, and consciousness - are strung, with an eye towards revitalizing each by way of the other.

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Psychedelics provide a guiding resource throughout this project, both in metaphor and actuality. The most explicit attempt at tying together the consciousness-transforming properties of psychedelic drugs with the economic organization of society might be the cultural theorist Mark Fisher's writing on Acid Communism. Before taking his own life in 2017, Fisher wrote 20-or-so pages that were meant as an introduction to a book, tentatively to-be-titled Acid Communism: Post-Capitalist Desire.

Fisher was interested in what we might learn from the 60's and 70's, how we might "regain the optimism of that Seventies moment" that was subsequently "deflated" by the "machineries of capital". For Fisher, the heart of acid communism was the belief that altered states of consciousness could be used to galvanize anticapitalist movements. The neoliberal form of capitalism that arose in the 70's deflated the revolutionary mood, quieting the collective movement for fundamental changes to the economic system. But the use of psychedelics, Fisher believed, could remind us that just as the basic categories of consciousness can be transformed - such as how we experience space, time, self, and other - so, too, can the basic categories of how the economy is structured, and the subsequent shape and textures of our everyday lives.

Crucial to Fisher's vision for the acid communist project was a historical study of how the five decades of capitalism following the 60's deflated an entire country's, if not a world's, consciousness. Fisher:

"...we must carefully analyse all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness-deflation worked is the first step to reversing it."

Such an analysis requires a direct focus on the relationship between economic institutions and consciousness. But a divide was ripped between the disciplines studying economics and those studying the broader vistas of human development, and they grow wider by the day.

Bringing these discourses together could provide fertile ground to rediscover an emancipatory project of human and economic development. Fisher provides a good starting point. The acid communism project requires precisely this sort of psychedelic investigation of capitalism, seeking to understand how economic decisions of the past 60 years affected consciousness, and exploring how we might realign economic institutions with a shared, enriched vision of progress.

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In service of this need, this essay constructs the subsidiary idea of acid capitalism. Acid capitalism is an analytical framework that sees the economy and consciousness as complex systems always mutually transforming each other.

If acid communism envisions a strategic use of altered states of consciousness to mobilize economic movements, acid capitalism flips this strategy on its head: a strategic use of economic movements to enable and empower altered states of consciousness. By surveying how neoliberal economic policy altered consciousness, we can develop a countervailing vision, an explicit framework for transforming consciousness once again by transforming the economy.

Notice that the project is not to break the connection between economies and consciousness. As we lean into a globalized, digitized, interdependent age, the avenues by which economies influence consciousness will only grow wider. The question, then, is two-fold. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher of consciousness, gives the first leg:

"As soon as we concern ourselves with what a human being is as well as with what a human being ought to become, the central issue can be expressed in a single question: What is a good state of consciousness?"

This question is primarily dealt with in the young field of neuroethics. But acid capitalism connects it with the social sciences, asking what kinds of economic institutions, policies, and practices can best design our social environments to support the cultivation of these 'good' states of consciousness.

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The Molecular Structure of Capitalism

To show capitalism as a psychedelic system requires a shared understanding of what I mean when I write "capitalism" - no easy feat. We can understand psychedelic compounds in refreshingly clear, molecular fashion. Acid is a molecular compound, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), that activates the brain's 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. Psychedelic mushrooms contain psilocybin, which after ingestion, is converted into psilocin, then activating the same serotonin receptor.

What are the active ingredients in capitalism that provoke psychedelic effects? If we broke capitalism down into its molecular components, they might be: private ownership of the means of production, the pursuit of profit, and wage labor.

There's a long history stretching back to at least Jean-Jacques Rousseau of social philosophers who claim that as our civilization has developed atop these building blocks, they've given rise to psychedelic effects that have shaped the kinds of consciousness that our capitalist society provokes.

But in the spirit of Fisher's inquiry, I restrict my exposition of acid capitalism to the period from 1971 to the present. This serves two purposes. First, it makes this essay more manageable for reader and writer alike. But more importantly, this period represents the psychedelic aspects of capitalism at their most potent, at the peak of their impact on the trip of ordinary consciousness. A phenomenon at its most potent is also in its prime for analysis.

Many names have been given to this time period in capitalism's evolution, none of which I'm eager to use. "Neoliberal capitalism" may be the most common, though neoliberalism is a phenomenon relatively separate from the digital revolution, which is crucial to the consciousness-transforming elements of the period. "Digital capitalism" is the inverse, focusing on data-driven practices to the exclusion of neoliberal policymaking. One of the chewiest labels may be the most encompassing, at least to date: hyper-capitalism. The term was developed explicitly to suggest both neoliberal and data-driven practices.

Above and beyond capitalism's basic ingredients, hyper-capitalism is defined by at least two distinctive ingredients:

I. Rising precarity

II. Algorithmic and cognitive determinism

By analyzing each in turn, we'll gain a richer understanding of how the landscape of American capitalism is shifting, how these shifts are driving changes in consciousness, and how we might redesign our economic landscapes so as to provoke better trips.

In addition, drawing upon the psychedelic principle of 'set and setting', we'll explore how the organization of the American workplace can foster a growing sense of 'alienation', and what role economic democracy could play in designing a better set and setting for everyday consciousness.

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Precarity Is Psychedelic

Precarity In the Age of Hyper-capitalism

One may think of precarity as the politically shaped distribution of existential precariousness. That is, all life is precarious. Poised upon a knife's edge that may cut into oblivion at any moment. Precarity is a measure of our political successes, and failures, in managing that precariousness.

The philosopher Judith Butler writes:

"Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious...Political orders, including economic and social institutions, are designed to address those very needs without which the risk of mortality is heightened. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."

The hyper-capitalist period, breaking from previous trends, is marked by an increase in precarity for a growing segment of the population. So much so that the economist Guy Standing calls for a new socioeconomic class: the precariat. The precariat is a class defined by a disproportionate lack of material and psychological welfare. If minting a new class sounds hyperbolic, consider that nearly 1/3rd of the U.S. population lives below 200% of the poverty line, which has been called the threshold for "economic insecurity".

The affect theorist Lauren Berlant, alongside Standing and others, sees the rise of the precariat as a direct consequence of neoliberal practices. She writes of the connection between the "spreading precarity" that "provides the dominant structure and experience of the present moment", and the "neoliberal feedback loop, with its efficiency at distributing and shaping the experience of insecurity throughout the class structure and across the globe."

What is the neoliberal feedback loop, and how does fuel a spreading precarity? The rise of neoliberal economic practices is associated with a list of factors: a shrinking, means-tested welfare state; rising levels of financialization and debt; deregulation of controls on capital and top-tier compensation; declining pension plans; declining union coverage; rising costs for healthcare, housing, and education amidst a period of wage stagnation; and the rise of 'flexible' practices that classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

If precarity has indeed risen to provide the "dominant structure and experience of the present moment", the question of its psychedelic effects are crucial. What does precarity do to consciousness?

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Scarcity

There is growing literature on the relationship between economic insecurity - a parallel, if not synonym, for precarity - and mental health. The findings are as you might expect: economic insecurity is no good for mental health.

More penetrating research has been carried out on scarcity, of which precarity is a sub-category. In Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan's book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, they define scarcity simply: scarcity is a condition where you have less than you feel you need. Their research studies not what the experience of scarcity is like, but how scarcity changes the way that people experience things in the first place. In other words, they study not how the condition of scarcity shows up in consciousness, but how it transforms consciousness.

"Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it. The mind orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled needs...Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds...scarcity’s capture of attention affects not only what we see or how fast we see it but also how we interpret the world...Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think...By staying top of mind, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave.”

The mind warps around the object of scarcity. Economic insecurity - a scarcity of money - "automatically", meaning beyond or beneath our conscious perception, orients the mind around money. Of the torrent of perceptual stimuli that crash upon our nerve endings in each moment, we begin to pick out stimuli associated with money more quickly, more efficiently. Our daydreams begin veering towards topics of money. Our impulse control pertaining to areas of money dwindles. A summary of a Shafir & Mullainathan paper reports:

"The authors suggest that when faced with chronic resource scarcity, the resource that is scarce (e.g., money) becomes the main focus of people’s cognitions. In support of this, the authors demonstrate that lower-income consumers are more likely to falsely recall hearing the word “money,” have more difficulty suppressing thoughts related to costs, and are faster to identify stimuli that have been associated with money than higher-income consumers."

Another example of how scarcity subliminally warps the mind comes from the anthropologist David Graeber. He notes how visions of paradise in medieval and early modern Europe varied, depending on one's socioeconomic class. The paradise envisioned by peasants and the urban poor revolved around objects they lacked: food. Thus:

"When peasants, craftspeople, and the urban poor tried to imagine a land in which all desires would be fulfilled, they tended to focus on the abundance of food. Hence, the land of Cockaigne, where bloated people loll about as geese fly fully cooked into their mouths, rivers run with beer, and so forth. Carnival, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) so richly illustrated, expands on all the same themes, jumbling together every sort of bodily indulgence and enormity, pleasures sexual as well as gastronomic and every other kind. Still, the predominant imagery always centers on sausages, hogsheads, legs of mutton, lard and tripes, and tubs of wine. The emphasis on food is in striking contrast with visions of earthly paradise in other parts of the world at that time (such as those prevalent in the Islamic world), which were mostly about sex. Erotic fantasies are usually strikingly absent from the literature on the Land of Cockaigne; if they are present, they seem thrown in rather by way of an afterthought."

While food-starved peasants imagined utopias of food, and sex-starved Muslims imagined utopias of sex, the medieval nobility envisioned utopias of "elite consumables". Spices, incense, and perfumes. The elite, too, Graeber writes, "constructed their ideal of desire around that which somehow seemed to escape their hold."

But "constructed" gives the impression that they chose to do so. They did not. Their ideal of desire was constructed in tune with their set and setting, unconsciously, warped around their objects of scarcity.

Economics is commonly defined as a system for managing our scarcities. In doing so, we manage everything from how we weigh our choices, to how we envision our utopias. Scarcities define the social topology around which consciousness flows.

We might then spend more time considering how exactly the scarcities we maintain affect the kinds, patterns, and qualities of consciousness that develop. The above provides a few specific examples. But we can dig deeper.

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Polar Opposites: Functional Rigidity, Mental Autonomy

Theories that take a more holistic view of consciousness are scarce. In part, because we lack a consensus theory as to what consciousness actually is, how it came to be, or how it works. Thomas Metzginer stands among those who've nevertheless ventured a real, meaningful attempt at providing such a theory.

Two concepts in particular from Metzinger's work can help us understand, if only at the level of hypotheses, the veiled relationship between precarity, consciousness, and economic development. Namely, functional rigidity, and mental autonomy.

The two form a spectrum, or rather, a zero-sum relationship. More of one means less of the other. Considering them in light of hypercapitalism provides us both with a grounds for critiquing the present situation, and developing a pathway for positive change.

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Metzinger uses the metaphor of a dolphin-filled ocean to describe consciousness. The water level is the line separating the surface of conscious perception from the depths of the unconscious. Thoughts are like dolphins, bursting from the deep, hanging in the light of day for a moment, maybe a few, and then plunging back in, disappearing.

The thing is, the human body sends about 11 million bits of information per second to the brain, and our conscious minds can only process about 50-or-so bits per second. Imagine then, you're on your back porch looking out over a stretch of ocean. Beneath the visible stretch of water lurk 11 million dolphins. Unconsciously, you perceive them all. Each gets registered by your nervous system, translated into electrical impulses that travel the body's labyrinthine network. But only 50-or-so pierce through the surface of the ocean. Only a handful get 'sent upstairs' to be consciously perceived by you, or what Metzinger calls your 'self-model'. Our conscious awareness is populated only by this small handful of thought-dolphins. So whatever filtering process that decides whether this-or-that dolphin gets sent upstairs plays a pretty large role in determining the contents and quality of our states of consciousness. The question, for Metzinger, regards this filtration process:

"The really interesting question then becomes: how do various thoughts and actions ‘surface’, and what’s the mechanism by which we corral them and make them our own? We ought to probe how our organism turns different sub-personal events into thoughts or states that appear to belong to ‘us’ as a whole, and how we can learn to control them more effectively and efficiently. This capacity creates what I call mental autonomy, and I believe it is the neglected ethical responsibility of government and society to help citizens cultivate it."

To a large degree, we already know how this filtration process works, and why. Areas such as the salience network of the brain work to select stimuli for perception that are relevant for our chances of survival. But it's also true that, in varying degrees, we possess the capability to choose what we attend to. The degree to which we can exercise this rational, reflective, intentional self-selection of attentional objects is the measure of our mental autonomy. Do the contents of our consciousness simply happen to us, or do we play a role in shaping those contents?

Mental autonomy is then both capability and a skill. The second concept, functional rigidity, is then like an injury that damages that capability. Crucially for our inquiry, functional rigidity has a close relationship with precarity.

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In his magnum opus, Being No One, Metzinger writes that not all contents of consciousness are created equal. The seascape of consciousness is populated by all sorts of dolphins, some being more difficult to notice, or ignore, than others. One's mental autonomy may determine their "flexibility and autonomy in dealing with these contents", in selecting which get held in the small window of conscious perception.

Functional rigidity is one dimension of the many different kinds of contents that populate consciousness. Some types of experience are easier to control, such as deliberate ideation. For example, my vision rolls over a small jade plant potted near my window. I may choose to rest my vision on the plant, imagining the slow movements it makes, waltzing with the sun. I may also decide to end this line of thought, and think about something else.

Other types of experience are more difficult to control; more functionally rigid. These hold their place in consciousness with greater resilience, like a boulder withstanding gusts of wind. Metzinger writes:

"...the degree of flexibility and autonomy in dealing with the contents of self-consciousness may vary greatly: emotions and sensations of pain and hunger are much harder to influence than, for instance, the contents of the cognitive self. There is a gradient of functional rigidity, and the degree of rigidity itself is available for phenomenal experience.”

Generally, the more threatening to one's survival or basic wellbeing, the more functionally rigid any given experience will be. All of those affective states, those types and textures of experience associated with precarity, then, instill a greater degree of functional rigidity into the overall seascape of consciousness.

So here's a hypothesis: If the hyper-capitalist period is distinguished by a rise of precarity, then the varieties of consciousness being produced under this paradigm are growing more functionally rigid.

Functional rigidity reduces mental autonomy, which Metzinger claims is a crucial skill if we are to be the authors of our own lives, or to possess 'agency', as we like to call it nowadays. But we can get more specific. By looking at the burgeoning cognitive science of psychedelics, we can hypothesize that higher levels of functional rigidity across society as a whole locks the evolutionary trajectory of consciousness in place. Higher degrees of functional rigidity may reduce our capacity to reinvent ourselves, explore new modes of consciousness, or reimagine the basic tenets of how society is organized.

Adaptability has always been a most important evolutionary skill. In an age of accelerating risk, where the global landscape can change as much in a month as it used to change in a century, nothing could be more important to cultivate in ourselves than the capacity to adapt; to reimagine our ways of living in light of rapidly shifting circumstances. Functional rigidity is growing deadweight that impedes such capabilities.

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Predictive Ruts: Cognitive & Algorithmic Priors

Whereas traditional psychedelic drugs wear off within a day, perhaps leaving behind subtle changes to one's dispositions, psychedelic systems such as capitalism normalize and sediment the very states of consciousness they provoke.

Hyper-capitalism, with its unique relationship to rising precarity and thus functional rigidity, is growing in its capacity to normalize the psychedelic transformations of consciousness it provokes. High degrees of functional rigidity work like anchors that hold existing paradigms in place, of consciousness and economy alike. This is largely because of the relationship between functional rigidity and our brain's capacity to imagine, to conceive of, possibilities that radically depart from the configuration of the past.

What I'm calling the "imagination" here is given in more technical terms by Metzinger as "our phenomenological possibility space", that space of what is possible for us to experience at all within consciousness. Or by the philosopher of psychedelic cognitive science Chris Letheby as "the brain's hypothesis space". Fisher himself is most famous for crystalizing this dynamic into the concept of capitalist realism: how neoliberal capitalism increasingly swallows 'the real', eroding our capacities to even imagine alternatives to the neoliberal way of organizing the economy. The precepts of neoliberal logic are progressively transformed from one logical structure among many alternatives, to the only conceivable logical structure in town. This, despite the sociologist Max Weber's caution:

"It must not be forgotten that one can 'rationalize' life from a vast variety of ultimate vantage points. Moreover, one can do so in very different directions."

As attractive as 'capitalist realism' may be to sympathizers, it remains highly abstracted. How does one logical structure impose itself upon our minds, crowding out alternatives? Recent literature in computational neuroscience and psychedelic therapy can help explain.

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Priors Build Worlds

Putting capitalist realism in the terms of this essay, the claim goes: functional rigidity shrinks our brain's hypothesis space. How? To venture a theory, we turn to a prevailing view in cognitive science, the 'predictive processing' (PP) paradigm.

In short, this paradigm views brains as systems that aim to reduce prediction error. Through trial-and-error experience, our brain's construct internal models that aim to predict the world 'out there'. Brain's constantly check the predictive output of their models with incoming sensory experience. When the sensory experience confirms the prediction, great, the model is deemed successful, and gains more confidence in its veracity. If the sensory experience contradicts the model, an error-correction process occurs where the brain searches for a more appropriate prediction, and/or updates the parameters of its model to better fit the data.

A good way of understanding what these internal models of the world are like, and how comprehensive they are, is to think of dreams. Every dream is an eerie reminder of how comprehensive and convincing a world our brain's can internally construct.

Brains advance in their quest to reduce prediction error by developing priors. Priors are assumptions about the world that are so repeatedly confirmed by incoming sensory data that they sink deeper and deeper into the construction of the model. As the brain's confidence in the predictive efficacy of any given assumption grows, the amount of conscious deliberation it devotes to making that assumption diminishes.

For example. If I jump up, I will fall back down. Every time I have jumped, I have fallen back down to earth. This has become a part of my bedrock understanding of how the world works. It is taken as given; I do not spend any time or energy deliberating whether, upon jumping, I'll fall back down. These most basic assumptions about how the world works are called hyper-priors.

The sedimentation of hyper-priors looks a lot like what the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls civilizational progress: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

But it's important to understand the tradeoffs - all hyperpriors come at an imaginative cost. Once we grow so confident in an assumption that they become unconscious, we lose the ability to readily imagine a world in which that assumption is overturned. Hyperpriors are essentially limiting assumptions. Chris Letheby writes:

"On the PP scheme, the [neural] networks...implement the highest levels of the brain’s generative model. This is to say that, among other things, they encode our most abstract, fundamental beliefs about self and world—our bedrock, unconscious, domain-general assumptions concerning space, time, and causality, the laws of logic, and the existence of the self. Philosophers have repeatedly noted the existence and significance of these foundational beliefs. Riding roughshod over important subtleties...In ordinary cognition, these “hyperpriors” play a crucial role in constraining the brain’s hypothesis space, drastically limiting the kinds of world-models that it can generate..."

Often, such limitations are worthwhile. But things really start to get problematic once we see that the encoding of hyperpriors does not differentiate between natural law and social constructions.

The brain doesn't only encode such solid assumptions as the laws of gravity into the unconscious givens of our world-making imaginations. Even socially constructed, biased experiences, if experienced consistently enough, or early enough in one's life, can get encoded with the same facticity as gravity.

This may occur at both the individual and collective scale. For example, an individual may have a highly critical and condescending father who sneers at any ventured opinion other than his own. Throughout childhood, any opinion expressed is met by scowls and criticism. The child may learn the simple maxim that expressing an opinion leads to criticism, leads to Dad not loving you, and will guard her opinions for the rest of her life. Of course, this is an arbitrary lesson, having less to do with how the world works in general, and everything to do with the child's particular world. But this subtlety gets lost in the PP meshwork.

On the collective level, we may find ourselves born into a world where working 40 hours a week at a less-than-enjoyable job is a given fact about how the world works. This gets encoded as a given, insulating it from critical reflection. Of course, it isn't a solid fact about the world, like a rock or gravity. Working hours have fluctuated throughout our species' history, and today more than ever, we have the resources to change such norms. But givens about our socially constructed world get encoded into our cognition via socioculturally transmitted hyper-priors just the same as natural laws.

Ok, so what's any of this have to do with acid capitalism? Clearly, hyperpriors have nevertheless changed throughout history, especially those concerning social constructions. But the rising functional rigidity that characterizes hypercapitalism poses a unique threat to our brain's capacity to revisit its hyperpriors.

Specifically, recent insights from psychedelic science are illuminating what we have to gain from the periodic revisitation of such priors, and what we have to lose as functional rigidity grinds away our capacity for such revisitations.

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Psychedelics & Possible Worlds

Psychedelic drugs are proving far more effective at treating a range of afflictions - from depression to addiction - than any other therapeutic strategy we have. Accordingly, the scientific research is finally being liberated from inane restrictions to understand why.

At the forefront of theories regarding the psychedelic mechanism of action is the REBUS model, or RElaxed Beliefs Under PsychedelicS model, as developed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston.

It suggests that psychedelics work by relaxing the brain's confidence in its priors, temporarily liberating cognition from the strict determinism of hyperpriors. Carhar-Harris and Friston write:

"...via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity - psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow, particularly via intrinsic sources such as the limbic system...With regard to their potential therapeutic use, we propose that psychedelics work to relax the precision weighting of pathologically overweighted priors underpinning various expressions of mental illness."

Building on this premise, Letheby is interested in the ways such relaxed beliefs expand the kinds of conscious experience available to us:

"Meanwhile, when we shift our focus to the other varieties of psychedelic experience, we can see why high-level priors should constrain cognition, and relaxing them unconstrain it...Hyperpriors constrain cognition by deeming many logically possible (and, indeed, logically impossible) worlds so improbable that they become cognitively and phenomenologically impossible. By diminishing the brain’s confidence in its foundational axioms, psychedelics expand the phenomenological possibility space...expanding the space of phenomenologically possible worlds."

The imagination does indeed have boundaries. But they're buried out of sight, set by the hyperpriors that determine what our brains deem even worth considering, or rather, what they deem probable enough to allow cognitive reflection.

Psychedelics thus reveal to us the value - therapeutic and existential alike - of transcending our priors. Doing so allows us to revisit entrenched patterns that no longer serve us, and induces a heightened state of plasticity and awareness to change them.

And by revealing the value of transcending priors, psychedelics also suggest the perils of a socioeconomic system that heightens precarity and functional rigidity. Here, again, the fundamental difference between drugs and capitalism is illuminating. The transformations of consciousness induced by drugs wear off, perhaps leaving behind subtle changes in disposition. These drug-induced psychedelic states of consciousness are practically defined by their otherness, their non-normality, the contrast they generate between our ordinary waking state and the trip. But as capitalism transforms consciousness by reshaping both our social environments and our landscapes of possibility, there is no perceptible departure from normality. Instead, there is a paving-over, an appropriation of normality. A new normal is created and cemented, the durability of which may be directly related to the general degree of functional rigidity throughout the population. Thus, a socially constructed variety of consciousness is disguised as natural, inevitable, and our imaginations grow confined within its parameters, like plants growing inside an empty wine bottle whose roots cannot break through the glass.

Already, the picture is discomforting. But applying this same framework that values the periodic transcendence of priors to data capitalism - in which data has replaced oil as our most 'valuable' (as defined by its profitability) resource - digs the hole deeper.

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Algorithmic Minds

Man-made algorithms in the age of information capitalism follow the same maxim as human brains, as understood via the PP model: algorithms and humans alike are systems that seek to minimize prediction error. For humans, the fuel that drives the minimization of predictive error is sensory experience. For algorithms, it's data.

Data is mainly valuable as an input into machine learning algorithms that predict future behavior on the basis of surveilled past behavior. But as algorithms grow more pervasive, as they govern more and more of the information we encounter day-to-day, their predictive power begins to transcend mere prediction; powerful algorithms are beginning to shape the future. They function as high-probability, self-fulfilling prophecies. By predicting with 80% accuracy that showing me a particular advertisement, at a particular time of day, will lead me to purchase the advertised product, they increase the probability that I will, in fact, purchase that product. Had I not been intentionally shown that product by the company using the algorithm for ad placement, the odds I would've bought that same product would've been lower. The role of algorithms in online advertisement is an obvious example, but it covers over the rise of algorithms in a far greater spectrum of human affairs, from medicine to policing.

Algorithms both predict and shape the future, then, on the basis of the past. They project insights gleaned from prior experience (data) onto the future, and seek to minimize the prediction error, pursuing a more perfect projection of the past onto the future.

In other words, algorithms are not only fully determined by their 'priors', the project those priors onto the future, thereby preserving and entrenching them.

We can now make a surprising, but retrospectively obvious connection between the rise of functional rigidity in humans and the rise of algorithms in a data-driven society. Both functional rigidity and algorithms solidify priors, and make their transcendence more difficult. Thus, the same problem confronting human minds on the individual level is facing data-driven society on the collective level: we are losing the capacity to transcend our priors. Simultaneously, psychedelic science is confirming that it is precisely this capacity to transcend our priors that leads to some of the most potent healing, creativity, and innovation known to humankind (I don't even think that's an exaggeration).

Andy Clark, a philosopher of cognitive science at the forefront of the PP model, agrees that if humans are understood as systems driven to reduce predictive error, that process appears at odds with human flourishing: "Prediction error minimizing agents are driven...by a fundamental information-theoretic goal that is itself inimical to human flourishing."

His response is to acknowledge the role that cultural environments play in continually shaking up the world we live within, thereby ensuring that our quest to minimize prediction error never gets too far; we never get good enough to minimize so much predictive error that we venture into the terrain where it becomes "inimical to human flourishing". Cultural evolution forces the predictive processing system to start over each time there's a fundamental shift in the social environments they set out to predict. Novelty and innovation, then, can be understood as responses to novel environments generated by human activity:

"An implication may be that true conceptual novelty, when it arises, is better explained as (at least in large part) a result of the framing and scaffolding of human activity by shifting cultural practices and changing sets of concrete constraints."

This ties back into the framework of acid capitalism, which claims that the socioeconomic environments we exist within are fundamentally psychedelic - that our mind's are manifested in different ways depending on those economic landscapes we inhabit. The evolution of the economy is the evolution of those "shifting cultural practices and changing sets of concrete constraints". Clark suggests that by changing our cultural environments, we change the conditions that give rise to, constrain, enable, or otherwise deeply modulate cognitive processes, to the point of shaping what kinds of worlds it is possible to imagine.

The question faced by individuals embarking upon a psychedelic trip is thus the same question faced by a democratic society that designs its own economic, cultural, and political institutions: what kinds of consciousness do we wish to enable, and how best might we do so? This is, at heart, the driving question of the acid capitalism framework.

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Better Acid

Here's the story so far: the hyper-capitalist period beginning around 1971 began reversing the trends of economic progress by concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands, leading to increasing inequality in the distribution of precarity in our lives. For perhaps the first time in capitalism's development, the general level of precarity for average people began rising. These higher degrees of precarity have a range of cognitive consequences, ranging from reduced executive control, lower fluid intelligence, less bandwidth, less grey matter density, and a warping of the mind around objects of scarcity. Together, these raise the general level of what Metzinger calls functional rigidity, or inversely, lowers the general degree of what he calls mental autonomy. Lower mental autonomy and higher functional rigidity make it more difficult to break from prevailing patterns of consciousness and economic ideology alike, as it grows more difficult to literally imagine alternatives to existing patterns and perspectives.

All of this is a psychedelic interaction that influences the evolutionary direction of consciousness. Acid capitalism is thus interested in asking how to design a better trip-of-everyday-consciousness via redesigning our economic environments.

So far, we've already hinted towards one leverage point: reducing precarity so as to reduce cognitive determinism, creating environments more conducive to innovation, creativity, and mental autonomy (otherwise known as "agency").

In addition, drawing upon the psychedelic notion of set-and-setting to analyze how our environments influence our states of consciousness, a program of economic democracy may help counteract a phenomenon that's gone by many names, from "alienation" to "burnout".

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Against Precarity

America has a long, bipartisan history of thinking about progress as a march against precarity. In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published one of his most celebrated essays, titled Self-Reliance. Precarity was defined by Berlant precisely as a condition of dependency where one lacks the resources to rely on themselves. Prior to the emergence of corporations and industrial modes of production, the picture of freedom in America was the self-reliant farmer. He owned his own land, and sustained his family through the labored-upon fruits of that land. Self-reliance was freedom.

The American homestead acts beginning in 1862 sought to democratize this vision of self-reliance to all citizens. These acts granted a plot of land, usually 160 acres, to any American - man, woman, immigrant, black, or white - willing to settle on and farm the land. The land was given for free. In sum, more than 160 million acres, or 10% of the total area of the US, was given away as part of these programs.

But the shape of American life changed when agrarian society was superseded by what the political theorist Robert Dahl calls "corporate capitalism". He writes:

"By 1900 and even before, it was increasingly evident that the ideology of agrarian democratic republicanism had developed during a pe­culiar moment in world history—a moment of ex­traordinary importance, but a moment nonetheless. For the agrarian socioeconomic order was destined to be wholly superseded by corporate capitalism...What no one could fully foresee, though advocates of a republic constituted by free farmers sometimes expressed worrisome anticipations, was the way in which the agrarian society would be revo­lutionized by the development of the modern corpo­ration as the main employer of most Americans, as the driving force of the economy and society. The older vision of a citizen body of free farmers among whom an equality of resources seemed altogether possible, perhaps even inevitable, no longer fitted that reality of the new economic order in which eco­nomic enterprises automatically generated inequali­ties among citizens: in wealth, income, social stand­ing, education, knowledge, occupational prestige and authority, and many other resources."

Ever since, we've taken half-hearted measures to rediscover a coherent and democratized stance against precarity. There were bright moments, such as the establishment of the weekend, or social security. But since 1971, a neoliberal economic ideology rose to power that has rationalized the increase of precarity in a growing number of American lives.

It's becoming increasingly popular to mark Joseph Biden's 2021 presidential inauguration as the 'end of neoliberalism'. There have indeed been historic signs of changing tides, but as of yet, no sweeping policy changes to cement a meaningful transition (the fully refundable child tax credit aside). Two such policies that could kick off a meaningful march against precarity have also been the subject of increasing public debate: universal healthcare, and a progressively designed basic income.

I have written extensively about the various forms of basic income - a set of varied policies that all guarantee, in their own way, a minimum level of income below which no American can fall. Most recently, Hamilton, Zewde & co. released a proposal that does well to integrate political feasibility with a progressive vision.

Debates over universal healthcare are largely giving way to what kind of universal healthcare fits the American landscape best. Universal catastrophic care only, or should plans include dental coverage? Psychotherapy? Should it replace the private system entirely, or remain as one option among other private offerings, as a 'public option'?

Taken together, a guaranteed income and some form of universal healthcare - as complements, rather than replacements, for the existing welfare system - could go a long way towards ushering in a new paradigm of American life by abolishing the lowest levels of precarity that still threaten some 106 million Americans who live below 200% of the poverty line.

Abolishing the lowest levels of precarity would also do away with some of the most potent, and man-made, causes of functional rigidity. National mental autonomy would rise. A heavy set of the strictures placed upon consciousness would lift, an anchor holding consciousness in place would be released, allowing for a multiplicitous bloom of phenomenological possibility.

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Your Mind On Economic Democracy

If the rise of the modern American corporation is what unsteadied self-reliance, perhaps it is changes to the American corporation that can reaffirm it.

Dahl spent a lifetime expounding the philosophical and moral case for extending the principles of democracy to the workplace, summarized in his short book, A* *Preface to Economic Democracy. But showing the logical inconsistencies in a commitment to democracy that ends where the workplace begins is not proving an effective mode of argument to win the hearts and minds of a populace.

Seen through the framework of acid capitalism, the workplace is a crucial component to the development of consciousness. Its effects can be understood by using what the psychedelic community calls "set and setting". Psychedelic science finds that deeply meaningful psychedelic experiences are not singularly dependent on taking a certain dose, but also on having a certain kind of experience. The kind of psychedelic trip one has is less dependent on the kind of drug one takes than the set and setting during the trip. In his guidebook to psychedelic experiences, Timothy Leary writes:

"Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting. Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality structure and his mood at the time. Setting is physical — the weather, the room's atmosphere; social — feelings of persons present towards one another; and cultural — prevailing views as to what is real."

Here, too, we see the role that freedom from "ordinary patterns and structures" plays in facilitating new kinds of conscious experience. The converse, of course, is that the more deeply entrenched we are in our cognitive patterns, say the more functionally rigid our consciousness is, the more difficult it will be to have a conscious experience that 'transcends' these ordinary habits of consciousness.

The workplace is a dominant setting for the everyday life of most Americans. Whatever dynamics and qualities pervade the workplace, they will also bleed into the kinds of consciousness that we develop as a result of so frequently being in these environments. This raises two questions.

First, how has the American workplace affected the kinds of consciousness that arise? And second, how might implementing the principles of, and institutions for, workplace democracy change those dynamics that sculpt our states of consciousness?

The first question has a deep history, often under the heading of alienation. Alienation, as Stephen Bronner puts it in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction, "imperiled the exercise of subjectivity, robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine." No small matter!

Since Karl Marx's writings on alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the term has proliferated in meanings, uses, and contexts. Like a weed, or a flower, depending on your stance. Broadly, alienation is when a subject (a person, or a group) is problematically estranged, distanced, or otherwise separated from an object. In Marx's use, alienation occurs as the capitalist mode of production forces workers to labor in conditions that estrange them from their inmost human potentiality. As their labor is guided by the unquestionable will of their employer rather than their own agency, a rift grows between an employee's interior and exterior lives. The products of their labor are increasingly separated from their own intrinsic motivation. What they are doing grows insulated from what they are thinking, or imagining.

This situation changes the nature of the human imagination, a capacity that Marx saw as central to what makes us most human, and what allows us to develop our inmost potentialities. For Marx, an intrinsically motivated human is one that uses their imagination as the source of inspiration for their labor. The fruits of one's labor are the concrete manifestations of the ideas born of the imagination. This connection between the imagination and labor is what distinguishes humans from other animals, whereas its absence erases the distinction. Marx:

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be."

Alienation is a product of this forced close attention. Almost like a measure of psychological strain. Workers under the capitalist mode of production do not subordinate their will to a purpose that arises from their own imagination, but from their boss'. Alienation is what accumulates as one must sustain forced, close attention upon externally given purposes. The consequence is not only that "work" is often experienced as a drag; as a persistent phenomenological experience, 'the drag' begins to raise overall levels of functional rigidity, albeit in a different way than classically functionally rigid experiences.

Classically functionally rigid experiences, like persistent hunger, take up space in one's consciousness, are difficult to move one's attention away from, and warp the rest of one's conscious experience around them. Alienation raises levels of functional rigidity a little differently. It increases overall rigidity by subtraction and neglect, rather than addition. That is, rather than increasing the load of functionally rigid experiences held within one's consciousness (think of someone who barely makes enough to feed her children, and incurs significant medical debt, and her car breaks down, and her rent is going up, etc), alienation raises overall rigidity by preventing one from exercising their more flexible, imaginative, agentive capacities. Rather than adding more functionally rigid experience to one's bandwidth, alienation simply fills the space with lifeless activity.

When Fisher writes that "Populations are resigned to the sadness of work," or calls for an "Understanding of how this process of consciousness-deflation worked", precarity and alienation are two prime suspects.

In its introduction to the concept of alienation, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy comments, perhaps rather wryly: "So understood, it [alienation] appears to play a largely diagnostic role, perhaps showing that something is awry with liberal societies and liberal political philosophy." Something being "awry" is a gentle way of suggesting that the primary organizing principle of modern life is one that "imperiled the exercise of subjectivity, robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine."

What if the off-note in liberal societies is the deepening echo of our failure to adapt our institutions of democracy and freedom when the basic fabric of society evolved from agrarian to corporate capitalist? Though we espouse a rhetoric of freedom and democracy, we spend half our waking lives in what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls private governments. The phrase private government should be a contradiction, a paradox existing only in unreality. Instead, it's a plausible sociological description of the primary institutional environment shaping most of our lives today. What's at stake goes well beyond corporate governance, reaching into the depths of the human imagination, and what sort of role it might play in our socially constructed worlds.

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Economic democracy is one way to begin rebuilding a pathway between what's going on inside the minds of workers, and what they're actually doing. It can rebuild bridges between the imagination and labor.

To understand how, we can return to the 'cog-in-the-machine effect' commonly ascribed to the present, generally non-democratic system of labor. A cog either performs its specified function, or doesn't, in which case it gets repaired or replaced. There is no 'will' internal to the cog, it has no relevant mind of its own. The interiority of workers-as-cogs, then, similarly has no relevance to the production process. It does not matter how the worker feels, what the worker thinks; what matters is whether the worker performs the specific function given by their boss.

Institutions of economic democracy change the relationship of the workers interiority to the production process, and thereby, to the work environments on the whole. By providing pathways for workers to participate in the production process itself - whether in determining its direction, or improving its conditions - their interiority is made to matter, it's given an avenue by which to be a causal force. In short, the worker gains a form of agency that they'd lacked. No longer is work a matter of forcing close attention to labor that is utterly disconnected from the worker's own imagination and will.

But by speaking of economic democracy in the abstract, rather than in the actual policies that might be considered to implement it, we risk painting a rosier picture than would be merited by a renewed commitment to economic democracy.

For example, some might argue that Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP's) would instill a sufficient commitment to economic democracy. ESOP's align incentives between workers and executives by providing employees with stock ownership in the company. This creates new incentive for employee engagement, but would hardly provoke a revolution in the relation between workers' interiority and their work environments as suggested above. In 2018, there were already.) 6,501 ESOP's in the US, holding assets of over $1.4 trillion, covering 14 million employees, mainly in the manufacturing industry. These industries are yet to display the revolution of dis-alienated labor suggested above.

Moving beyond ESOP's, policies such as codetermination apply a measure economic democracy to precisely the institutions that imperiled it: large corporations. Codetermination mandates that a certain percentage of corporate board seats be held by worker-elected representatives, though the specifics of implementation vary across countries.

For example, in Germany, codetermination laws have been in place for decades that stipulate companies with more than 2,000 employees must have 50% of their supervisory board seats held by worker-elected representatives. This grants employees voting rights on company decisions, ranging from executive bonuses, to how corporate profits are spent. Again, it's difficult to parse the evidence and determinate how much of a difference codetermination actually makes, insofar as alienation is concerned. Evidence from codetermined European countries tends to suggest either null or minimal gains in almost every measurable dimension, from firm outcomes like productivity, innovation, to job satisfaction.

Crucially, alienation is not a measurable dimension. Thus, for advocates of economic democracy on these grounds, the absence of economic effects supports the argument for codetermination. If it does nothing else but implement the principles of democracy in a primary site of our lives (the workplace), and there are no economic consequences, then there is no reason not to do so. But again, the question looms: has German codetermination squashed alienation? Or does this, too, fail to provoke the revolution of dis-alienated labor?

Among the strongest instantiations of economic democracy are worker owned cooperatives, where all employees have not only an equal say, but an equal stake of ownership in the company's assets. The paradigmatic example of how this strategy scales is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which employs over 81,000 people across 257 companies.

The principle underlying cooperatives - the democratized ownership of capital assets - can be pursued in other ways, such as public investment banks, baby bonds, social wealth funds, or government retirement accounts. It can also be extended to domains beyond capital assets, such as natural resources.

For example, Alaska has democratized ownership of their oil reserves for over 40 years. All oil revenues received by private companies are subject to a 25% tax that feeds a public wealth fund, the dividends of which are distributed equally to all Alaskan citizens (averaging between $1,000 - $2,000, annually). The same principle can be extended to natural resources ranging from broadband spectrum rights to land.

The debate over the best way to apply the principles of economic democracy to the actually existing American economy is wide open. But a revitalized commitment to the idea would go a long way towards furthering the necessary debate. I'll give Robert Dahl the last word here:

"Like a state, then, a firm can also be viewed as a political system in which relations of power exist between governments and the governed. If so, is it not appropriate to insist that the relationship between governors and governed should satisfy the criteria of the democratic process - as we properly insist in the domain of the state?"

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Integrating

Together, a platform against precarity and a recommitment to economic democracy could redesign the American socioeconomic landscape, the daily set and setting that modulates the varieties of consciousness that emerge. By reducing the functional rigidities put in place by rising levels of precarity and alienation, we could gain more freedom, or greater mental autonomy, in designing our own trips, rather than having them imposed upon us by circumstance.

Edging towards a conclusion, we can return to Whitehead, who wrote:  "In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious." In light of our analysis, we discover that the inverse is equally true: progress is also a revisitation, and reformulation, of precisely that which was taken to be obvious.

We can also add more precision as to what the term "obvious" means in this context. What we take as obvious is the group of assumptions coded so deeply and reliably into our predictive cognition as to become hyperpriors, and thereby, to elide critical reflection.

Acid capitalism is a framework for elevating our everyday experience of consciousness, of what it is like to be us, to be alive, from this bedrock of hyperpriors. Our experience of consciousness is not fixed and determinate, but fluid, plastic, and always responding to our environments. And we are responsible for creating and maintaining one of the largest socially constructed sets of institutions that shape how consciousness evolves: the economy.

It's exciting, then, that we're now living through a revolutionary period in both economics and the study of consciousness. Acid capitalism offers a framework to bring these frenetic moments together. The study of consciousness can help us understand what kinds of consciousness we value, while the study of economics can help us design social institutions that support the emergence of those kinds of consciousness.

Fisher suggested that the rise of capitalist realism was directly correlated with the "receding of the concept of consciousness from culture." Now, amidst the resurgence of the concept of consciousness back into culture, the question that remains open is what economic visions will arise as the fertility of the socioeconomic imagination is restored.

In this essay, I've offered one such vision. I hope it gets trampled by 1,000 more, and we're forced into the task of sifting through innumerable visions of a more beautiful world, and building the economic institutions that may empower us to live them into existence.