The Yoga-to-Conspiracy Pipeline on Gaia.com

The next speaker in this fascinating AoIR 2023 session is Yvonne Eadon, whose interest is in the subscription-based streaming platform Gaia.com, the self-declared ‘Netflix of consciousness-raising media’. She describes this as a kind of conspirituality capitalism, which is perhaps accidentally encountered by people searching for life advice and spiritual content. It features plenty of ‘alternative spirituality’ and ‘unexplained phenomena’ content alongside material on yoga practice, and thus appears to deliberately create a yoga-to-conspiracy pipeline.

Gaia started as a yoga equipment retailer initiated by a Czech entrepreneur, but moved more and more into streaming content, including costly in-person live-streamed events; there have also been controversies about the company’s practices. Gaia received considerable press for unearthing the so-called ‘Nazca mummy’ of a purported alien (probably actually stitched together from the stolen remains of several Indigenous people), presented by a dubious scientific ‘expert’.

This also has an uncomfortable relationship to whiteness, attempting to claim white supremacy through religious exoticism that reclaims non-white spirituality under a white-led mantle. The delivery via streaming video tends to isolate such content from other, more critical voices, and helps draw viewers down the conspiritual rabbit hole. Influencers on its platform also claim to reject capitalism altogether, but in practice generate substantial revenue from this content.

Topic models of Gaia’s articles feature prominent themes like alternative archaeology, alternative medicine, UFOs, yoga, and related themes; in doing so it also extracts genuine non-western religious practices from their cultural contexts and thereby reclaims them for its white audience. There is also a strong presence of theosophical ufological content, which tends to present pseudo-religious content as handed down from visiting aliens that often privileges civilised white contactees.

Yvonne also conducted ethnographic work at two Gaia-organised conferences; here, speakers were 60% white and male, and 90% over 50; audiences were more likely to be younger and female, however. Speakers often claimed academic credentials, yet had few genuine credentials. Participants felt a sense of community at such conferences, and spoke a common language of alternative spirituality and pseudoscience that was deeply rooted in American esotericism – this was perceived as liberating by participants, all for the low price of $13 per month…