How living in Mexico has changed my views on Silicon Valley technology, data-driven decisions, and why alignment is the only thing that matters

“Have you done DMT?” 

If you’ve heard that phrase more often than you would like in the past month, chances are, you’ve found yourself in Tulum. 

Once selected by the Mayans as a sacred site for being an energetic portal open to higher realms, Tulum is the place to make your wishes to the universe heard.

You will meet the right people who will point you in the right direction. After being here for a while, being at the right place at the right time happens so much more often than not that you forget how to live any other way. Signs, symbols, and synchronicities become the new language you speak. You learn to pick up where you left off and surf the present moment. Like hitching a ride on a cruise ship that does not reveal where it’s going, now is the time to go to bed and trust that the ship knows exactly how to take you through this vast, inexhaustible ocean. 

Thanks to the development of technology, we have far greater control over nature than ever before. As we rise to take our rightful place as mortal Gods within the natural world, we start to notice that it’s actually quite hard to exert control over nature. The more we try to fight against nature, the more it fights back. Nature, much like a honey badger, does not give a f***.

The Mayans knew this very well. They built century-lasting products without AI or machine learning by forming a close relationship with nature.

For example, if an architect wanted to know where to put a house, they would check the size and symmetry of the mounds around trees which have been moulded by water erosion to figure out what the tidal range of the area is.

Nature’s infinite intelligence has attracted many who see the business opportunity of bottling it up and selling it to affluent white people. Spiritual greenwashing is common in Tulum, where ancient traditions such as temazcal are offered as a daily activity at trendy hotels. Since many who are still caught up in the material world are in desperate need to feel a connection to something greater, the demand for those who can ctrl+c what the indigenous tribes have done and ctrl+v it a thousand times over is high. There is only one small problem with this otherwise flawless approach: the copy and pasted version is no more than a temporary feel-good solution that keeps people coming back to attend more full moon ancestral reiki sound bath circles. 

The most recent trend in cannabis tech is using data to create new niche strains in order to serve specific use cases. Meanwhile, for thousands of years, indigenous farmers have been communicating with their plants to get the plants in their most optimal form, not for their own profit and gain but for the well-being of the entire ecosystem.

Guided by the principle of having a harmonious relationship with nature, indigenous farmers sync their agricultural cycles to the natural rhythms of nature. Since we are made up of the same fundamental units of matter as nature, being at harmony with nature is the same as being at harmony with ourselves. 

Experiments in quantum physics reveal to us that it’s impossible to separate the role of consciousness from all scientific experimentation. Consciousness will always push the results in the direction it wants them to go. In other words, we cannot separate matter from consciousness. All matter is conscious and is able to discern between what is conducive to life and what is not. This is why anything created through spiritual greenwashing will always feel fake, even if we are not able to explain why. It is impossible to lie to the physical body - the protoplasm of every cell is a primordial soup of consciousness. Products that have been created the “right” way will always vibe differently than products which have taken a shortcut, and the end user is smart enough to know the difference. 

A phrase that gets floated around in Silicon Valley is the saying “data is king”. We no longer entrust humans with decisions. Engineers lost the ability to make product decisions a while ago when we created role called “product manager” that encompasses all the skills that we do not believe engineers possess such as creativity and empathy. Now, we are removing that responsibility from product managers and giving it instead to the machines running algorithms written by the engineers. In the technology space, human consciousness is becoming less and less valued outside of its ability to tend to machines. 

This is why data is such a coveted resource. The less people are allowed to use their creative intuition, the more valuable data becomes. The commoditization of data has created a concentration of power around those who control the majority of it. Facebook made the strategic move of acquiring Giphy with some numbers on a computer because numbers on a computer have no intrinsic value while the world’s biggest collection of GIFs only gets more expensive as the demand for richer forms of communication increases.

It is no longer the wealthy who are in control of the masses, it’s the wealthy who are wealthy enough to have heaps of data, which is an even smaller percentage. 

If you live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, you can basically get everything you need without ever having to leave your apartment. You can get takeout from UberEats and groceries from Amazon Fresh, schedule a cleaning with Handy, date from the comfort of your couch by swiping on Hinge, get alcohol brought to your door with Drizzly, do a workout on your Peloton, which you keep at home to avoid ever having to step foot in a gym. You can live suitably in a 400 sq. ft box, and if you’re lucky, you have the option to upgrade to a bigger box every year with better furniture as your employer keeps paying you the appropriate amount of salary to keep you hooked on comfort.

In Western society, one can design a life where every ounce of unpleasantness is surgically removed with fine-grained precision. 

This is quite the opposite of Mexico. Since uncertainty came with the environment (because if you’ve ever ordered a service in Mexico, you know that there is a 75% chance they will show up and 5% chance they will show up on time), I started playing around with Law of Attraction as it was more fun to manifest something than to go about the normal way of acquiring it. For example, if I wanted water, I would just visualize a water truck driving by my apartment.

In Mexico, relationships are very important. People mainly use their networks to get things done. Over time, you start to build up a network of people who can either help you or know people who can help you. Additionally, there is not a strict line between a business relationship and a friendship and, strangers are always willing to help each other.

The other lesson I learned from traveling is how valuable the information from local people is. This was especially true in Puerto Escondido where it’s a small community of people, many of whom have lived here their entire life. I found that the deeper I dove into one subject, the bigger my world got. There were many exciting rabbit holes to go down, and each opened the door to a whole new universe.

I learned that instead of relying on the municipal government to do things such as putting down roads, neighbors may get together and hire their own contractor to do the job. Upon noticing the wide assortment of point-of-sale systems used by businesses here, I started asking questions about the banking system and the tax system and discovered that there is a lot of mistrust in both. Finally, it was through the experience of finding a suitable way to donate money that I discovered that cryptocurrency is still quite inaccessible for those without a cushy amount of assets or those who don’t want government control over their assets.

I used to think that it was only a matter of time before big tech got to every city in the world, but after spending some time in Mexico, I don’t think that anymore. I recently met a wonderful woman who owns an Ayurvedic catering business, and they are in the process of setting up a meal delivery system that will probably look oh similar to UberEats but with all the profits going back into the local community. There are examples of solutions that have been developed by local people grew up in that area and thus have a better understanding of what types of solutions will best fit into local ecosystem. Each locality has its own unique set of cultural, economic, and political constraints (for example, Internet in Puerto Escondido is notoriously bad which poses a problem for payment systems that rely on good Internet connectivity).

I believe that the direction we’re headed now is one where each of these localities will flourish in their own, unique separate ways but still remain connected to the whole. The solutions that stick will be ones where cultural uniqueness is seen as a gift. The technology landscape will look different in every locality, and travel between these place will happen more often. I wrote a blog post regarding the future direction of money where I talked about how information transfer is important for the growth of the universe. Humans are carriers of information, and traveling is one of the best ways to disseminate information.

Silicon Valley, in general, has this ideology of getting as many users on the product as possible, which leads to searching for half-baked solutions that work for everyone. This is one of the shortcomings of relying on data as opposed to intuition.

I made an Instagram post about how evolution is less like an ascending ladder and more like an exploding fractal with all organisms expanding to inhabit all environmental niches. Every organism holds a unique space in the world where they are given the opportunity to reach their full potential with zero traffic in their lane. 

Diversity is the result of a universe that desires different ways to experience itself. We don’t need generic solutions that work for everyone. We just need to solve the problems of one person because every person in an expression of the whole universe.

Because self-similarity is baked into the design of the fractal, what matters is not scale but alignment. If you can solve a small problem but solve it really well, you may find that some of the bigger problems begin to change shapes. Being in alignment leads to one of the most joyous aspects of life, and that is the experience of having an entire world made solely for your existence.