Digital Orientalism on Gaia.com

This paper analyzes capitalist spirituality and digital orientalism on Gaia.com's subscription-based streaming video service. Gaia's content creators primarily map East and West onto three dualities: intuition versus rationality, present in their fraught portrayal of science; spiritual versus material, present in their discussions of financial self-help; and collective versus individual, present in their descriptions of social crisis and imminent upheaval. To resolve the contradictions created by their circular logic of capitalist spirituality, Gaia’s writers draw from orientalist tropes to show that capitalist individualism can be redeemed by Eastern spirituality, and need not be challenged. On Gaia.com East redeems West, transforming it into something more sacred, more moral, more aligned, and allows spiritually receptive viewers to transcend the fears associated with capitalism while participating in it. Gaia.com is a rich archive for observing online religion, Carrette and King's concept of capitalist spirituality, and the aspirational, affective orientalism described by Jane Iwamura.