Everyone cheered. Daedone was the charismatic founder of OneTaste, a business which hoped to provide “one billion orgasms” to women and believed the sexual force of orgasmic mediation would change the world. It was the same year they had launched the “Nicole Daedone Intensive”, a course that cost $36,000 and involved hearing some of Daedone’s advice and being given a few assignments. There was a tacit understanding that devotees would “do whatever” they could to pay. Daedone considered herself a sexual prophet, but there was a slow distrust building in her community. Based on the surrounding tactics of Silicon Valley, her start-up scaled, going global, and as her sales tactics grew more vicious, followers were leaving who felt violated and sexually exploited.

“When you can own your ultimate taboo,” she told the cheering crowd that day, “what can anybody do to you?” It was a line delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she was untouchable. Even after the FBI began investigating her and her face appeared in a scathing Netflix documentary, Daedone continued hosting public demonstrations in Los Angeles. But last June, the taboo couldn’t save her: she and her chief sales executive, Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges — found guilty of coercing followers into sex and work by exploiting their deepest vulnerabilities.

Such exploitation seems obvious in retrospect. Beyond the crazy amounts of money OneTaste asked for, there was the strangeness of the practice itself: women lying half-naked, legs butterfly-open, in a room full of strangers, while men, often strangers, stroked their clitorises according to a ritualized technique. Not only would this transform the energy of the receiving woman, but she was supposed to transmit that energy to whoever was watching. You were told off if people in the room didn’t feel you. Often these were rooms full of men, showing up for a free demo session. 

A new book, Empire of Orgasm, written by the Bloomberg reporter, Ellen Huet, who first exposed the company’s inner workings, reveals the depth of Daedone’s deeper philosophy towards sexual relationships. At times, the philosophy bordered on rape apologia. Men were encouraged towards the practice of “skillful violation” and women towards “aversion practice,” which means having sex with people you don’t want to for spiritual growth, or vice versa. Many of her followers were survivors of sexual abuse, as was Nicole, and she taught them that “arousal” was the cure for trauma. Nicole said once in a lecture, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100%. Because then there’s nothing to rape”. Physical violence and domestic abuse was encouraged because of the “yin” and “yang” of male and female energy. Whatever was needed to preserve your “Divine Feminine”.

A young lesbian couple at the center of the trial were split up, made essentially indentured servants, and forced to become the sexual “aides” of Reese Jones, the Silicon valley venture capitalist whose millions funded OneTaste. He was also Nicole’s boyfriend. This happened regularly to women who joined. Daily blowjobs were assigned to many women as “aversion therapy” to “help their spiritual growth”. When colleagues fell out, they were told to take off their trousers and receive “the practice”. Nicole persuaded a man in chronic agonizing pain to leave his girlfriend, a key witness who later sued OneTaste for sexual assault, by instructing him “to give his money to the feminine”. Devotees gave tens of thousands to pay for Daedone’s courses, often going into extreme debt and falling out with family members. Daedone told them money was a “scarcity hex”. Such grim stories are rife within the OneTaste universe.

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But not everyone is convinced of Daedone’s malevolence. A fervent group of followers — “Team Nicole” — remain steadfast in support of her. They showed up every day to the trial. In fact, the certain fans’ behavior, like harassing the judge, superimposing a swastika on the Justice Department’s logo, posting a witness’s bikini photos online, and making faces in court, was considered so zealous that it might have impacted the conviction itself.  They seem to have put this behind them, and continue to post to Daedone’s 40,000 followers on Instagram. This week alone they’ve posted five of Nicole’s teachings about erotic power, and a video where Nicole refers to “some very public, challenging, things happening in my life”.

They post advertisements for a new, more low-key iteration of orgasmic meditation called “women over dinner” and for the new OneTaste organization, “Eros platform”, which shares regular videos of Nicole and Rachel’s teachings. Women who “stand with Nicole” host podcasts on the page. They describe themselves as “erotic artists” and “erotic nuns”. Nicole is still front and center on the “Eros Platform” website; and they still host regular OM demos and courses. In their description of Nicole there is no mention of her conviction, but sometimes, on Instagram, they post direct dispatches from Nicole in prison. When Charlie Kirk died, Daedone wrote in praise of a man “tried by fire to purify his heart”. The caption had the hashtag #eroticjustice. 

Why do these people still believe nothing was wrong? Huet offers a compelling reading of the mechanisms of coercion; how intimacy, trauma, and longing were used to bind people to Daedone long after the harm had become undeniable. But there is another answer that feels harder to face: Big Tech has warped our idea of sex and freedom so completely that nothing about OneTaste seemed, to its believers, to cross a boundary. The cult logic didn’t feel like a cult logic; it felt like a natural extension of what the digital world had already taught them to expect from desire.

The arguments Daedone and Cherwitz offered in their defense were straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook. When arrested, they hired the same lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Keith Raniere; but unlike those men, Daedone and Cherwitz insisted they were being persecuted for innovating. They once sold themselves as sexual liberators, framing their orgasmic gospel as a kind of feminist therapy in the wake of Me Too — yet now they cried “cancel culture” and portrayed themselves as victims of a prudish, censorious state. Money from OneTaste loyalists funded sympathetic coverage in right-wing outlets lamenting the “criminalization of sex”, and their lawyers insisted to the New York Post that the government was punishing consensual acts because it feared female pleasure.

It was the same rhetorical maneuver deployed across the tech-sex economy whenever regulation or scrutiny arrives: any critique becomes moral panic; any boundary becomes censorship; any evidence of harm becomes an unfortunate side-effect of progress. And the unsettling parallel isn’t just rhetorical but literal: as Silicon Valley was building its world, OneTaste was building its own. They grew in tandem, in the same location, guided by the same ideological currents: frictionlessness, optimization, disruption, the belief that human attachment is a system that can be hacked. While tech platforms were reinventing connection and desire at scale, just a few miles downtown, OneTaste was constructing an embodied version of the same fantasy: that sexuality could be engineered and sold.

Many of OneTaste’s first joiners were Silicon Valley engineers. Huet points out that “in this spiritually optimized culture, it wasn’t weird to meditate; it was weird to have never tried it”. Non-monogamy was everywhere, and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone reading The Ethical Slut. “Against that backdrop”, she writes “a mindful clitoral -stroking practice wasn’t strange at all. Orgasmic mediation for a richer, more connected, happier life? Sure, why not?” 

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One journalist for Gawker, who went to OneTaste’s 2015 conference OMX realized as much. “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies,” she wrote “but the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley”. OneTaste turned orgasm into a subscription product, Silicon Valley investors treated it like another life hack, its followers believed they were buying transcendence. Tim Ferris, the king of the life hack, wrote a chapter about OM in his book, The Four Hour Body. Sex, in this form, could be both optimized and commercialized. For men and women alike, women’s bodies became tools for personal upgrade; the site where higher living might be extracted and optimized. Sex, in this formulation, wasn’t intimate or relational; even if it was spiritual, it was still a system that could be monetized. And once you start looking at sex in these economic terms, you realize OneTaste wasn’t an aberration at all. It was simply one branch of a much larger project: the slow remaking of desire by the ideology of tech.

Because if Daedone built a Silicon Valley for the female orgasm, the male counterpart has been growing in plain sight. The corruption isn’t confined to a single cult but runs through the entire tech-sex ecosystem: porn platforms built for infinite scroll, OnlyFans’ gig-ified intimacy, the roboticized fantasies of the consumer-sex industry, and the loneliness that digital life quietly enforces. All of it culminates, in its most grotesque form, in the world Harper’s recently reported on: the universe of gooning.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad” reveals a community of men whose lives revolve around masturbating to online porn in pursuit of “goonstate”: a condition of total psychic collapse, a kind of orgasmic ego-death, achieved only by edging for hours or days. It is, uncannily, the same promise that Daedone offered, transcendence and becoming more than human through orgasm — even if the route there is vastly different. One gooner porn producer told Harper’s, “we humiliate them for the fact that gooning… is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their lives spending money on femdom clips”. It is an unsavory annihilation. As OneTaste wraps its pursuit in the language of surrender and female empowerment; gooners frame theirs as a kind of spiritualized self-destruction. Both, however, are children of the same parent ideology: that the body is a machine whose ecstasies can be pushed to their furthest limit, and that the limit itself is the point.

Huet, wary of the word “cult,” offers a definition anyway: groups that “present an overarching belief system that proclaims itself the singular answer to all the big questions. Non-adherents are to be pitied, avoided, feared”. It is a neat description of OneTaste. It is an even neater description of Big Tech.

If Daedone’s conviction offers any clarity at all, it’s only that her empire was just a preview. A small, garish shard of the overwhelming technological machinery that now governs the world’s desires. We talk about OneTaste as if it were an outlier, a freakish aberration in the sexual landscape, but the truth is far harder to face. Daedone didn’t invent a new darkness, she made disturbingly visible what Silicon Valley had already been teaching us — that intimacy is a product, that bodies are interfaces, and that desire is a system to be optimized and scaled.

Gooners chasing ego-death through endless tabs of porn; influencers selling pseudo-intimacy on subscription; AI girlfriends engineered to be tireless, compliant, and always online; sex itself stripped of reciprocity and rebuilt as a productivity tool. All of it belongs to the same world that OneTaste was built on. Big Tech didn’t just corrupt our sense of privacy, or community, or attention. It corrupted our sense of what sex is for. 

Daedone’s downfall makes an easy morality tale: a manipulative guru, a predatory pseudo-feminist brand, a group of traumatized followers. But just as disturbing a story is the one Huet’s book gestures toward: that OneTaste wasn’t a deviation from the world Silicon Valley was building, but a mirror of it. A prototype of the future of sex. A reminder that the extremes we fear are often just the logical conclusions of norms we already live inside.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

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Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

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The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressive with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

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That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-center dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he traveled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-center his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

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As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

During the tech boom, Newsom ladled out subsidies to poorer Californians; indeed, the Golden State spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much as Texas, while it generally neglects basic infrastructure like roads and water supply. This sort of liberal welfarism recalls what Marx recognised in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletarian alms bag”.

Today, California’s economy is struggling, and progressive ideology increasingly clashes with reality and voter preferences. Newsom is clever enough to see the writing on the wall — in contrast to Kamala Harris, his possible gubernatorial successor and potential 2028 rival.

Bottom line: rather than frame Newsom as an ideologue, it is better to see him as a representative of the Bay Area tech oligarchy. To the titans of Silicon Valley, issues matter less than power and influence, as evinced in their recent genuflecting to Trump. If tactics need to be changed, if it’s necessary (for now) to learn the lessons of the 2024 MAGA triumph, so be it.

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This shift began to emerge even before the 2024 election. As it became clear that wind and solar couldn’t easily replace fossil fuels or nuclear power, particularly in light of the state’s draconian electric-vehicle mandate, Newsom signaled a growing flexibility. He reversed the proposed decommissioning of the state’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, as a means to prevent embarrassing blackouts.

This, along with natural-gas plants that account for close to half the state’s electricity, prevented politically damaging blackouts. He has even considered amending the state’s landmark environmental law. The green lobby’s ever harsher energy policies were recently dissed by a Newsom spokesperson as akin to “fantasy and fairy dust”.

Similar fault lines have pitted him against progressives when it comes to race. Newsom was an ostentatious promulgator of Leftist racial cant and racial policies, like reparations and quotas. Yet when reparations legislation suggested cash payments upwards of $640 billion dollars for the descendants of slaves, Newsom recoiled, upsetting the state’s hyperactive race hustlers. He now also expresses concerns about the injustice of transgender men competing in female sports programs, perhaps aware of the damage done to Harris by this issue.

Newsom has even backed away from his welfarist inclinations, recasting himself as a fiscally conscious moderate. He fended off proposals from Sacramento progressives, including their calls for a 32-hour workweek; raising the state’s income tax (already the nation’s highest); and adding new payroll taxes to cover universal health care.

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After the 2024 election, Newsom’s centrist shift has accelerated. This may still not be necessary in a state that went nearly 60% for Kamala Harris. But state politics are beside the point for the termed-out governor. For him, the prize is no longer in Sacramento — but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Newsom senses, correctly, that the best chance lies with embracing moderates reacting against the inevitable Trumpian excess. But the Democrats can only win the national vote if they shift away from progressive stances on climate, diversity, and gender — all widely unpopular east of the Sierra.

Ultimately Newsom’s biggest problem, particularly in a general election campaign, will be his miserable record. In a national campaign, he will be made to defend the state’s lousy education system: California’s students perform at among the lowest rates in the country, with nearly three of five Golden State high-schoolers unprepared for either college or a career; in most categories, the state scores below lower-spending places like Texas and Florida.

Nor can he boast of the state’s still massive economy. Once deemed to be the world’s fourth largest, the California economy is now among the weakest in the country and seems destined to fall to sixth place in the near future. His frequent pro-worker pronouncements don’t hold water in a state where unimaginable wealth coexists with the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Then there’s crime. In a recent referendum, Californians overwhelmingly ditched liberalized sentencing laws enacted by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Newsom. Sensing danger, he has moderated on some law-and-order issues. Newsom last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced his veto. But a GOP presidential nominee could slam him for his Johnny-come-lately rethink on social order and cohesion.

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Newsom also is vulnerable for the utter failure of the state’s climate-focused housing policies. By curtailing new suburban construction, state policies have hiked housing costs to the highest levels in the country, sparking a powerful out-migration trend. And that’s not to mention the state’s dismal performance in response to the horrific LA fires this year, a result of progressives ditching basic infrastructure in favor of boutique climate and “justice” causes.

Overall, whatever his media savvy, Newsom will have to run as former chief executive of a state repeatedly rated by Wallet Hub as among the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Newsom might be tempted to curtail regulations so he can appeal to business-oriented Democrats and independents. As a white male, Newsom seems ill-suited to compete for the diversity vote, particularly if Harris or some other “person of color” decides to run.

Whether this lurch to the center works or not, it is now the most viable path to the nomination. Of course, things may change in response to Trumpian overreach. The 45th and 47th president might just make progressivism great again. If that comes to pass, the Governor’s moderate rhetoric will no doubt change. In being willing to bend to any prevailing trend, at least, Newsom is almost perfectly consistent.