Awaken from the Algorithm

Tantra and Restoring Wholeness in the Era of Digital Manipulation

1992: In a makeshift office in the attic of our house on Chicago’s North Shore, the desk squeezed in between bins of Legos and Ninja Turtles, I log on to my little Macintosh—the kind with the square monitor perched above a built-in floppy disk drive. The modem plays that familiar digital processional, heralding the opening portal… ta-da! Welcome, Christine, to everything at your fingertips.

Well, not quite everything. Back then, it was only low-resolution, small kine offerings. Page loads were interrupted by incoming phone calls. Pictures were almost impossible. Yes, the true pioneers were over on the WELL or on Usenet, but for the rest of us, Tim Berners-Lee had just released WorldWideWeb, America Online was gaining traction, and the revolution that was the Netscape browser hadn’t yet arrived. Still, the trajectory was evident: soon, every kind of information would be instantly available. We would be able to navigate—whenever we wanted—to the most profound historical and emergent insights produced by human consciousness across all times and spaces. Our attention would no longer be constrained by standardized curricula or censored by mainstream acceptability. We would explore the edges, access humanity’s most evolutionary knowledge, and celebrate intelligences of all kinds.

For me, hungry to learn yet physically bound to place, the web was a dream of liberation. I thought: I will find my people—my authentic tribe. Nation-states bound by geography would give way to global constellations of genuine interest. In fact, the first domain name I purchased was EvolveBeyond.com—and the second was AuthenticNation.com. Even if you were a 20-something like me, in suburban Illinois, surrounded by small children, you could go on intellectual journeys no humans before us had been capable of. In this youthful techno-utopian fever dream, I believed this technology could only render us more creative, caring, and connected.

In many ways, those dreams have come to fruition—especially around self-directed learning, the witness of humanity’s breadth, and diminished gatekeeping.

Yet even then, I had a creeping awareness… which had started during the dawn of cable TV (and the first video recordings, which made asynchronous viewing possible): we were already losing our common lens. Media, like all systems—biological and inorganic—inevitably fragment, speciate, and specialize the moment the environment makes it possible. The fragmentation of our attention would connect some of us profoundly, in alliances once limited by proximity, but also isolate us deeply in other directions. There would be fewer universally shared experiences, fewer communal moments when everyone witnessed the same event simultaneously.

Further, the promise of the online world was so great, so attractive, that we might lose our contact with the physical world. If you know anyone caught up in multiplayer online games or alternative worlds—or if you’ve been on a subway and seen a car full of people looking into their phones instead of at each other—you know this has come to pass.

Still, the magnitude of what’s unfolded, and is unfolding at an ever-accelerating pace, was an incomprehensible outcome.

The systems we designed began to design us.

As soon as we began using the web, it began watching us. As its observation grew more sophisticated—instrumented to read and predict our desires—it began shaping, conforming, and narrowing the realms of possibility we encountered. Cookies, click-tracking, analytics, and more—an array of technologies emerged to monitor us. As this watching became increasingly fine-grained, emotional activation itself became a business model. Identity became malleable, marketable, extractable. Our “eyeballs” (remember when that was a term?) became monetized commodities—measured in page views, dwell time, and engagement. The feed began feeding us … emotional hijacks directly into our limbic brains. Awareness itself simply harvested.

The manipulation of perception—of attention, identity, and emotion—means that we no longer inhabit a shared reality. Instead, we are polarized, radicalized, disoriented, with a frayed and even ruptured social fabric. In the dominant digital paradigm, humans are seen as programmable, as reactive, as data points. Attention is a unit of monetization. Outrage is a feature. Disembodiment, one might say, is even desired. The future of the human-machine interface requires that we come into relationship as discerning and sovereign—not enslaved and reactive.

Making a choice.

For a long time, we didn’t notice what was happening. Like the old parable of the frog in gradually heated water, we adjusted to each incremental change—the nudges to check our phones first thing in the morning, the slight shortening of our attention spans, the normalization of surveillance, the constant low hum of urgency and comparison, the acceptance that we would press 1 for English or be willing to talk to a chatbot before a human. The shift was ambient, ambient enough to feel like progress

Maybe we didn't see that we were trading depth for speed, intimacy for visibility, sovereignty for convenience. Not all at once, but bit by bit, the temperature rose.

And then—for many of us, something cracked. A moment of stillness, of presence, of unbearable dissonance. For me personally, I looked up from the scroll, felt the ache of disconnection, and realized: this wasn’t the world I wanted to live in. That moment of awareness is a turning point, because once we see, we can’t unsee. And in that clarity, another current emerges—one that says: we can choose again.

Architectures of attention are architectures of reality.

Technology itself neither inherently liberates nor divides—it mirrors and amplifies the consciousness we bring to it. Where there is clarity, technology expands our vision. Where fragmentation exists, it deepens divides. Violence and manipulation have always been with us. Love amplified by technology becomes global illumination (and many movements online are helping to reweave the web), while fear is similarly magnified across all borders. What distinguishes this era is their speed and scale.

Our future hinges upon reclaiming innate human capacities foundational to true flourishing: clear perception and open-hearted connection to the web of life.

Bringing back ancient wisdom.

I have this sense that we’ve been distracted and largely undefended as these novel technologies have woven into our cultures and bodies. It’s time we rebalance the digital with our innate, potent magic—our siddhis and human gifts.

As one example, let’s look at the ancient wisdom of classical Tantra (and of course I am biased because this philosophy is a true love of mine, which I teach and invite people to practice- but it’s not the only path that would realive us)

. Tantra recognizes reality as a vibrant field of consciousness, pulsating with eros. It offers an enduring and deeply integrated way of knowing—one that embraces the body, honors desire, and holds paradox.

In Tantric cosmology, attention (dharana) is a sacred power: what we focus upon becomes the very field of our becoming. Tantra honors the individual’s proactive and creative movement—iccha shakti, or desire—as a fundamental current of consciousness itself. Tantra respects the body, the senses, and relationship as gateways into the heart of reality.

The architectures of consciousness can either support our unfolding wholeness or hasten our collapse. The outcome depends entirely upon the quality of consciousness we champion, practice, and embody.