Trampled by Unicorns

CHAPTER 7Psychos of the Valley

In December 2018, Twitter's charismatic co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey went on “a 10-day silent vipassana meditation” retreat in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar, to mark his 42nd birthday.¹ The entrepreneur, who also happens to be founder and CEO of mobile payment unicorn Square, detailed his experience in a series of tweets² to his more than 4 million followers, noting, among other things, that “Vipassana is a technique and practice to ‘know thyself.’ Understanding the inner nature as a way to understand…everything” and that “Vipassana's singular objective is to hack the deepest layer of the mind and reprogram it: instead of unconsciously reacting to feelings of pain or pleasure, consciously observe that all pain and pleasure aren't permanent, and will ultimately pass and dissolve away.”

So far, so Silicon Valley. Yet while extolling the virtues of meditation and praising his host country (“Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing.…We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country”), Dorsey's tone-deaf tweets studiously neglected to mention Myanmar's brutal repression and persecution—including mass murder, infanticide, and rape—of Rohingya Muslims, which to date has driven some 700,000 from their homes into neighboring Bangladesh³ and has seen former Nobel Peace Prize winner and Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi defend her country against accusations of genocide at The Hague.⁴

“If meditation ...