McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
Ronald E. Purser
Repeater Books: 2019
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In November 2018, the chief executive officer of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, went to Pyin Oo Lwin, a small hill town in central Myanmar, for his forty-second birthday. When Myanmar was under British rule, colonial officers flocked there to escape the punishing heat. Today tourists make the one-hour drive from Mandalay to catch a glimpse of the town’s historical charm, with horse-drawn carriages clopping past the faded grandeur of dilapidated Victorian homes. Dorsey had other plans: a ten-day silent meditation retreat.

Pyin Oo Lwin is also home to the Defence Services Academy, Myanmar’s equivalent of West Point. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief accused by UN investigators of overseeing genocide against Rohingya Muslims, graduated from the elite school in the 1970s. Statues of medieval Burmese warriors hover near the entrance. Soldiers walk briskly through town in bright-green uniforms clutching black briefcases. Real estate and several hotels are owned by Tay Za, a crony with close ties to the military. When I visited in 2014, I stayed in one of his properties with my partner. Feeling guilty, we decided to pick a more modest accommodation, only to learn after checking in that Tay Za’s company owned that place too.

Had Dorsey only ridden an air balloon over the temples in Bagan, taken some pictures and quietly departed the country, he might have been left in the same peaceful state that he sought through meditation. Facebook, not Twitter, is the main social media platform in Myanmar. Twitter has not been used to spread hate speech in the same way as Facebook. It was also a personal trip. But he stumbled into an unusual controversy, one that could have been avoided — ironically for the CEO of Twitter — had he not tweeted about it.

• Tags: Issue 17, Joe Freeman, Myanmar, Ronald E. Purser