Google-Phonics, or, "What is the Sound of a Thousand Tech Workers Meditating?"

http://religiondispatches.org/google-phonics-or-what-is-the-sound-of-a-thousand-tech-workers-meditating/

BY KEVIN HEALEY DECEMBER 12, 2014



On a wicked-cold Sunday morning early last month, I found myself running through the mostly-empty streets of downtown Boston on my way to a colleague’s presentation at the International Symposium for Contemplative Studies. A crumpled and wet street map in my hands, I stopped periodically at unfamiliar intersections to get my bearings and adjust my rain-proof hood. “What on Earth am I doing here?” I asked myself, thinking, “I could be home in bed reading with my daughter.” At that moment, I didn’t know that I’d soon be asking a pointed—perhaps indignant—question to Google’s in-house mindfulness guru, Chade-Meng Tan.

Arriving late at the Marriott Copley Place, I sat in the back of a seminar room and settled in for one of the few presentations that offered a critical analysis of corporate mindfulness programs. One slide referenced my own critique of the integrity bubbles that have come to characterize Silicon Valley’s spiritual meritocracy. The meditation rooms now commonplace in many corporate headquarters are like tiny bubbles in which small groups of high-powered employees experience a sense of work/life balance premised—wittingly or not—on the externalization of risk and suffering that is endemic to capital markets. From the perspective of socially engaged Buddhism, a key flaw in corporate mindfulness is its neglect of the relationship between personal and institutional suffering (or dukkha). The audience was both intrigued and challenged by such ideas. One attendee snapped photos of subsequent slides.

Quite unexpectedly, Google’s own Jolly Good Fellow walked into the room. Flashing a winning smile at the gathered attendees, he found a seat a couple of rows behind me. Now it was clear why I had run, sweating and disoriented, through the freezing rain toward the Marriott. Two days before, during my own presentation, I had displayed a screen shot from a now-viral video in which local activists from Oakland’s East Bay Meditation Center took to the stage at the Wisdom 2.0 conference, calling attention to the problems of gentrification precipitated by the growth of the tech industry in San Francisco. In the image, Meng sits cross-legged as the activists hold high a banner reading “Eviction-Free San Francisco.”

“For me,” I had explained, “this image represents a distinction that Martin Luther King, Jr. made during the height of the civil rights movement: that between the negative peace of complacency within an unjust system, and the positive peace that arises from non-violent resistance to the status quo.” Readily acknowledging that I was “picking on Meng,” I lamented that he was not present to engage the question of whether corporate mindfulness offered something beyond the negative peace of complacency.

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