To me, that "clearly established" narrative is an exercise in "begging the question". Starting from the "common knowledge" assumption that there is a through line between "write code", silicon valley / "tech bro" hustle culture, Joe Rogan, and psychedelics, the article's narrative is clear. But if you don't already have all those lines drawn in your mind coming into the article, then in my view, the article does a very poor job of drawing them itself.
Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but part of it is that I think there is an interesting story here, and I was disappointed not to find it in this article. I can easily imagine an article, like the kind they publish in the New Yorker for instance, that really does tease out all these connections, along with teasing out the places where the "common knowledge" is a distortion of reality, providing real insight. But this just wasn't that article, for me.
This is a book review, not a general article. The book the review is about covers the history of drug use, not current trends, which is why that is majority of the article talks about that. The final section does provide a reasonable about of links and arguments for a book review. While it isn't a anthropological study on that topic, that hardly justifies saying the author was tripping.
Yes, fair enough. I thought the book review portion was illuminating (and it sounds like an interesting book), but then the final section isn't about the book at all and, in my view, makes an argument that isn't well supported. And I think it does all that in service to being able to include this "write code" bit of cleverness in the headline, which is the only reason we're discussing an otherwise run-of-the-mill book review. So I think it's fair to point out that the section that brought this to our attention is pretty weak...
The final section setups up a contrast between the and now that is meant to help motivate you to read the book.
I don't see the section as particularly weak, it does exactly what it supposed to and it's argument is sufficiently strong for that purpose.
I would note that while you complained about the argument being weak, you didn't actually make any effort to edispute any of it.
If you found the topic interesting and wanted a deeper study of the topic, then thats great go do some research, I doubt nobody else has researched or written about it. Complaining that a book review isn't a scholarly article or a full essay isn't actually gonna get you any deeper understanding of the topic.
Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but part of it is that I think there is an interesting story here, and I was disappointed not to find it in this article. I can easily imagine an article, like the kind they publish in the New Yorker for instance, that really does tease out all these connections, along with teasing out the places where the "common knowledge" is a distortion of reality, providing real insight. But this just wasn't that article, for me.