Where does digital wellness come from?

Let us turn to Peter Lunenfeld, Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA and founder of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA). He kick-started our The Digital Wellness Show with his insights on digital wellness. In the article below, he not only presents these insights but also his research into the origins of the term 'Digital Wellness', allowing you to further explore his perspectives.

If you look up ‘digital wellness’, you might encounter an animation of a denatured collection of urbanites using tech to check their pulses, eat right and meditate. All well and good, but there’s a rich, though largely invisible, history to how these two seemingly disparate words come together - a history worth exploring. As a media philosopher from California, I was intrigued to trace the origins of this concept far beyond the Golden State.

With 5.17 billion people worldwide on social media, when you think about the potential for human connection, it might seem logical that the concept of digital wellness is an extension of that reach. But what if writer Geert Lovink is correct in saying that these media are literally designed to make us sad, and even sick, because that’s what drives engagement, page views, and site stickiness? In that case, we would need to design a solution to escape the problem of the design of social media - that even Instagram’s own researchers acknowledge like depression, suicidal ideation, and self-esteem issues. Could digital wellness be the solution?

The paradox of modern wellness
So what is wellness today? We can boil its core beliefs down into three precepts: 1st) a distrust of scientific medicine, 2nd) the individual rather than the social is the locus of health, and 3rd) a laser-like focus on self-optimization. But what if contemporary wellness, as it encounters the digital, is crazy by design? Take actor turned guru Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous vaginal jade egg, offered on her wellness site GOOP—even though porous rocks should not be inserted into moist bodily parts.

As we move farther from the marketing-centricity of GOOP, we encounter people like the Liver King, who ludicrously claimed to his 6 million followers he got his radically-jacked body from eating raw organ meats (as opposed to injecting  €11,000 of steroids a month as he eventually admitted); his kind of viral content leads to followers developing body dysmorphisms like orthorexia and anorexia. 

Then, of course, there’s the political and social effects, as with the vaccine denialism that saw outbreaks of mumps and measles, not to mention that complicated global recovery from the COVID-19 virus. The ‘solution’ of wellness on the internet brings its own problems like denigration of expertise, skepticism oscillating with credulity, and the omnipresent commodification of cures that aren’t.

The foundations of digital wellness: Babbage and Blavatsky
To parse all of this, we need to turn to 19th century London, and two key figures, Charles Babbage, the inventor of our new machines, and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, whose philosophy known as ‘New Thought’ is the Rosetta Stone of today’s wellness culture. Babbage’s Difference Engine #1 went on display in 1862 in London, and though incomplete, it was the first realization of a computational device. Some of the programming for that device was developed by Lady Ada Lovelace, and as their innovations moved to the New World, analog processing began the process of the mass collection and sorting of information, creating the foundations of our contemporary data-driven society. It’s impossible to imagine the digital without Babbage.

Madame Blavatsky, as she was universally known, was a very different sort of thinker, and the English-speaking world’s foremost mystic and spiritualist. Among her many pronouncements: “Matter is spirit at its lowest level. Spirit is matter at its highest level”. Blavatsky’s so-called ‘New Thought’ blended spiritualism with the belief in the power of mind over matter, and inspired countless later seers, cranks, and crooks to proclaim that we can manifest our prayers for health and wealth by sheer force of will. It’s impossible to imagine wellness without Blavatsky.

The Lebensreform movement and American counterculture
At the same time as Blavatsky was moving ‘New Thought’ into the New World, a concept originating in Germany and Austria was also moving inexorably west. The 19th-century Lebensreform movement celebrated the natural body and nudism, adopting vegetarianism and other diets, eschewing pharmaceuticals for naturopathy and homeopathy, and streaming to the mountains. By the 1940s, these Germanic pioneers inspired the first American hippies, the Los Angeles-based Nature Boys, to grow their hair, camp out in caves and canyons, and use popular media like radio and television to get the word out about their own reformed lives. At the same time, up the coast, young Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard established a company now known as HP in their garage, a California Historical Landmark officially referred to as “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”.

Even though they started in Los Angeles as the Nature Boys, when people think of hippies they immediately conjure up 1967’s Summer of Love in San Francisco. That moment’s psychic effect was fed by multiple sources, including the synergies of New Thought as it encountered Eastern traditions like yoga and Buddhism. The Esalen Institute in Big Sur was home to the Human Potential movement, combining therapy, meditation, and encounter groups to enable human flourishing. Around the Bay Area, others wanted to transform not just the individual but the whole universe. They were certain the 1960s was the Age of Aquarius that Madame Blavatsky had prophesied a century before. All these ideas, practices and traditions were thrown into a blender, and leavened with lots of drugs to create the New Age.

Pioneers of digital wellness: Engelbart and Dunn
To historicize digital wellness, we have to account for two other towering figures. In Silicon Valley, at the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, Douglas Engelbart wanted to shift our emphasis from AI (artificial intelligence) to IA (intelligence amplification). When we discuss the emergence of our interfacial culture, we point to Engelbart’s 1969 demonstration of his NLS (oN-Line System). Engelbart set the whole computational world on its ass with what is now known as the ‘mother of all demos’ at SRI. Scalable windows, word processing, video teleconferencing, all of these, and even the mouse, came from his demonstration, and this was the exact moment when the computer shifted from shared mainframes to personal tools on a network.

Across the United States, near Washington D.C., Halbert L. Dunn, M.D., Ph.D., was giving a series of lectures at a Unitarian Church. He mashed together the words ‘wellbeing’ and ‘fitness’ to create a new concept that was linked to health but distinct from it. For Dunn, wellness was “a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning.” Dunn is a crucial fulcrum in this dialogue, as prior to coining wellness, he helped establish the field of medical statistics, which flourished as records were digitized. Yet his ideas and even the word ‘wellness’ sat dormant for almost a decade until they resurfaced in Northern California.

The intersection of New Age and digital culture
The New Agers who picked up Dunn’s ideas and the New Hackers inspired by Engelbart’s demo were mutually interested in developing a New World. They shared libertine attitudes towards morality and libertarian politics and, to be honest, an appreciation for mind-altering drugs. Engelbart took his lab to do acid trips, Steve Jobs studied Buddhism in India, and there were other crossovers as well. Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid, was obsessed with uploading his consciousness to a computer.

Their worlds meshed by 1973 when the Bay Area became a one-stop shop for digital and wellness. Dr. John Travis, an apostate from Western medicine who studied at Esalen, was so inspired by Dunn’s book that he moved to the foot of Mt. Talmapais, just above San Francisco, to found the first-ever Wellness Resource Center. It was, shall we say, relentlessly personal. Similarly, in that same year, just a few miles south, the first truly personal computer, the Xerox Alto, was released. The combination of these two Californian phenomena returns us to the start of our quest, with wellness and computation synergizing to create trillions of dollars in wealth, new technologies, beliefs, and strategies promising and often delivering remarkable solutions, but also creating the very problem sets that digital wellness both attempts to solve and contributes to.