For a long time now, I've been kinda self-experimenting on inducing these kinds of states in myself, without resorting to hardware or hard/scary drugs.
It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats.
Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary.
I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in).
Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state.
As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking.
Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.
FWIW, not every major site on the Internet is out to spy on you.
The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia, et al) bends over backwards to explicitly avoid harvesting and hoarding long-term analytic information that can clearly identify users and their patterns, even internally. Also, the (very minimal) level of co-operation with state actors (etc) is tracked and published at https://transparency.wikimedia.org/ .
Just to meta-meta this conversation and the article in new and confusing ways, Wikimedia also hosts a map server, using OSM's data, @ https://maps.wikimedia.org/ :)
The injection is currently for non-HTTPS only, but I can easily see this situation evolving for the worse as HTTPS becomes increasingly the default.
What will happen is someone at Comcast will notice that their injections aren't happening often enough anymore due to HTTPS adoption. Someone at Comcast will suggest implementing a MITM TLS proxy service to get things working again. Someone else at Comcast will note that wouldn't actually work because they can't install fake root certs on every client device...
Then Comcast will basically switch to a model where the HTTPS interception is "optional" (requiring the client-side use the proxy explicitly), but they'll start shipping some kind of "Comcast Setup" executable (or mobile app) users are supposed to run on their client laptops/phones so that they can get these important service notices, which turns on the client-side use of the proxy and installs the fake root certs. Geeks may not install it, but the bulk of their customers will, and everyone loses. I don't think broadband consumers are aware of the fact that they shouldn't trust software provided by their ISP...
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that supports and operates Wikipedia and the other free knowledge projects. All of our work is guided by our mission to share the sum of all knowledge with every person in the world. We keep the websites fast, secure, and available. We support the community of volunteers who contribute to the Wikimedia projects. We make free knowledge accessible wherever you are — on your phone or laptop, on a boat in the South Pacific, or in the hills of Nepal. We help bring new knowledge online, lower barriers to access, and make it easier for everyone to share what they know.
There's really no way to design a maintenance-free house. A typical house has a lot of parts slowly failing all the time, meaning you will eventually need expensive repairs on various timelines (sometimes many years, so it can be "ignored" for a while at your peril). Roofing, HVAC systems, sheetrock damage, repainting, replacing aging flooring/carpeting, replacing failing major appliances, etc.
You'd have to design and build a custom home way outside of the designs considered normal for the market to make it significantly more (but not completely!) maintenance-free in the long run, at a significant increase in construction cost. But then you've subjected yourself to another hidden downside: the more strange/custom/expensive a home is, the less liquid that home will be on the market if you decide to sell later. A home that's awesome to you but not-awesome to 95% of the market doesn't move. And if you're stuck with it and it's a significant chunk of your wealth, then you can't move cities for that new job or whatever.
While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western societies).
What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich and poor everywhere.
To go a little further, I suspect with CP cases like banks the real underlying problem is more fundamental. You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location. At least, not efficiently or quickly.
In other words, eventual consistency in the face of asynchronous remote actors never makes sense when your requirements dictate hard, consistent transactional ordering. You have to think of it as "the transactions happen in the order they arrive at the account's virtual location in New York". To think of them as globally-distributed in nature is always going to cause logical problems at some level. If your database was eventually-consistent, you'd have to build in some sort of after-the-fact safety checks that have the ability to abort the outer transaction, at which point you've wasted a lot of effort patching over the wrong model.
So either you have a need for strong consistency guarantees (order really matters), in which case you have to pin the transactions' locality down (where do they meet up at for their efficient strict ordering?) and CP is your model, or you don't (simpler things like social network updates) and you're better off with AP and eventual consistency to scale things out easier and make it faster for everyone, and really who cares if once in a great long while a user-visible race happens and some people see a couple of posts in a different order than someone else does for a few minutes until things snap back into sync?
SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering.
Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters.
Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users.
Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc).
Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.
It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats.
Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary.
I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in).
Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state.
As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking.
Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.