The tools marketed to heal us become the lens through which we see what wounded us.
In his critique of modern technology, Heidegger revealed how our technological orientation transforms beings of all kinds—natural entities, human activities, experiences, even time itself—into resources awaiting extraction and optimization. For Heidegger, this "enframing" reduced all beings to their utility. A forest becomes measurable timber. A river becomes hydroelectric potential. Human attention becomes engagement metrics.
This transformation occurs through subtle redefinition—presenting itself as progress while determining which aspects of reality are considered meaningful or relevant. The quantifiable, extractable dimensions become "real" while other dimensions fade from consideration. Wellness apps quantify our emotional states as data points. Algorithms reconstruct our social relationships as optimization problems. The technological gaze actively reconstructs reality according to extractive logic.
Today, the tech oligarchy openly claims seats of political privilege, completing the circle of domination that Heidegger anticipated. Tools presenting themselves as serving human needs now openly install humans as resources serving technological systems.
The so-called psychedelic renaissance follows this pattern exactly. Capital markets these substances as breakthrough innovations while continuing a colonial cycle—appropriating and patenting indigenous medicines, then selling them back as productivity solutions. These medicines now serve as tools to repair workers exhausted by the very economic systems extracting their labor and attention. The mental health industry itself becomes part of this exploitation—treating the psychological damage caused by capitalism while maintaining (or doing nothing about) the conditions that wounded people in the first place.
Yet these substances carry within them something that resists commodification: their fundamental power to dissolve our taken-for-granted reality. Through them, we see how our most intimate experiences—even our understanding of mental health and suffering—have been carefully constructed to serve market logics. They disrupt our experience of time and reveal how social conditions produce suffering that gets reframed as private neurochemical imbalances. In commodifying expanded consciousness, capital encounters its own destabilization—cracking the programming beneath our reified experience.
The tools marketed to heal us become the lens through which we see what wounded us.
