Sunday Brunch: The Priests of the Omniverse
This week's links on VR, psychedelic abuse, the 'meta-tribe' and other stories
Welcome to Sunday Brunch, our weekly round-up of the best links on ecstatic and psychedelic integration, ethics and harm reduction. The newsletter is for paid subscribers only but we always provide a few links free.
This week, NVIDIA became the sixth US company to reach a trillion-dollar market capitalisation, after its share price went up 25% in a day. If a billion-dollar company is a unicorn what is a trillion-dollar co? A universe? NVIDIA makes Graphic User Interfaces (GPUs) used for AI image rendering, enabling users to create alternate worlds and digital avatars like the avatar of himself that CEO Jensen Huang introduced in his company presentation last year (check it out here). Huang says in the future we’re all going to live in the Omniverse - a blend of the real and the virtual, in which our online avatars are as important as our flesh-and-blood selves. Imagine if reality was owned! Meanwhile, Apple is expected to launch its first virtual reality headset on June 5. Virtual reality start-ups - including psychedelic VRs like Entheo Digital and Tripp - are hoping this could be an i-Phone moment for VR, ie the moment that VR stops being niche and starts to become part of all our lives.
This article from the European Council of Foreign Relations suggests these new alternate realities will be the religions of the future, and companies like Apple, Meta and NVIDIA will be the new priests…
I’m researching psychedelic polyamory - or, specifically, the overlap between polyamorous and ‘neo-tantric’ culture and psychedelic culture in the West. I’m looking particularly at cases of abuse and boundary-violation within that overlap but I also want to highlight positive stories. If you have a story or opinion to share, take this very brief survey. After the paywall, how do you discern whether Mama Ayahuasca is telling you the truth, and holding abusive psychedelic healers to account.
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