 For decades, the moral imagination of Silicon Valley has been animated by one idea. Innovation is always good, and more is always better. No one's had to consciously believe it, because everybody's felt it. You can make powerful technologies, improve humanity, and bring home piles of money. All at once, no trade-offs. Yet today, lots of us aren't so sure. We thought we were buying convenience and connection. Then there was the Edward Snowden affair, cell phone addiction, Russian trolls, data breaches. What's becoming clear is that you can't have innovation without soul work. And you can't have soul work without embracing the shadow. Let me explain. Silicon Valley has always been a surprising tangle of innovation and spirituality. The personal computer industry was born not just of better engineering. It was also born of a potent Northern California mix of Christian individualism and Eastern metaphysics. This counter-cultural mix posits that when we experience the truest forms of ourselves, we discover a transcendent connection to all of reality and oceanic experience of self and world. This seems to be a world without limits, where the only constraints are ones we place on ourselves. It's a world where you never ask forgiveness, because failure is only an opportunity for new success. It is, in essence, a world without shadow. Think about holding your smartphone in your hand. It's your device, an extension of who you are. And yet it's also connected to everything, collective intelligence at your fingertips. It's built on the idea that information knows no limits, that technology is the key to abundance, and that the only constraint is failure of imagination. It's innovation without shadow. A few years ago, I moved to Arizona from Seattle. One of the first things you learn in the desert is that the sun can kill you, literally. In Seattle, if the sun shows its face, everyone emerges from their caves and engages in an active collective worship. Yet in the desert, you don't live your life in the sun. You live your life in the shadow, in the cleft of the rock, the shade of a canyon. Since moving to the desert, I've become captivated by the lively metaphors of darkness and shadow in the world's great spiritual traditions. Some are what you'd expect. Darkness is metaphor for loss, pain, brokenness. But some are about rebirth, new potential, transformation. These metaphors have important differences, but they point to what spiritual practitioners call soul work, facing up to the dark parts of ourselves, our brokenness and limitation. The intention is not to get rid of the shadow, to turn the darkness into light. It's to turn the darkness into growth. That work is hard enough, but it's even harder in cultures that always tell us to fly close to the sun, that incessantly push forward, that move fast and break things. Work on the shadow is slow. From the outside, it can look stuck, like it's not going anywhere. But the patient labor offers other rewards. The beauty of integrity, the quiet strength of moral realism, the creative potential of transformation. It remains to be seen whether our disillusion with big tech can become a revolution in the moral imagination of innovation. The limits of innovation without shadow are abundantly clear. The question is, where might a little darkness take us?