research
What connects ideas about creativity to ideals of personhood in our use of media technologies for work and play? ​I research these connections—and their stratifications across race and class—in the Games Industry, High-Tech New Age Spiritualities, and Social Media Disconnection.

The labor of Gaming hobbies
The desire to “do what you love” energizes employment and engagement in creative industries such as digital gaming yet drains hobbyists and aspirants by normalizing expectations to sacrifice job security for passionate work. This article investigates how individuals regulate their aspirations through taken-for-granted trade-offs between vocational compromise and compensation. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with players at fan conventions and recruitment events in North America suggests a moral calculus of corruption and sublimation between passion and profit, which can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labor from recreation and its institution of hobbies as productive leisure. Building on existing research about waged labor’s imagined denigration of hobbies, this argument juxtaposes the passion that is corruptible by work and the passion that promises to sublimate work from drudgery. Interrogating this confounding logic cultivates counter-narratives for purposeful livelihoods beyond industrial-era notions of productivity and neoliberal notions of passion.
​

Technoliberal Affect
"Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games" uses the case of EVE Online to examine how the sandbox genre addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork at fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. This is key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments.
​

Consciousness Hacking
​In 2014, engineers and entrepreneurs began meeting up in San Francisco to explore how virtual reality and lucid dreaming headsets, transcranial magnetic stimulation and biofeedback meditation wearables stimulate mindfulness and altered mental states. They called these practices “consciousness hacking” and referred to the use and design of these wearables as a movement. Unlike Quantified Self enthusiasts who combine bodily self-tracking and population analytics to optimize health and productivity, these ‘hackers’ use data-driven stimulation of their bodies to gain immediacy to their consciousness. By turning perception inward, they attempt to transform their minds into the ultimate medium for purposeful dreams, flow states, positive emotions, and secular revelations about the self, unconscious, and nature of experience. This paper uses media archaeology to examine how discursive and material techno-spiritual practices around consciousness hacking reconciles New Age assumptions about the sacred essence of the self with biopolitical assumptions about the self as a database to be rationalized. By probing historical antecedents of datalogical fantasies, this project demonstrates the value of critical inquiry into data cultures, its models and mechanisms for the human sensorium, and its metaphors that we live by.

  • Neves, J., Chia, A., Paasonen, S., & Sundaram, R. (2022). TechnoPharmacology. In Search of Media Series. Meson/University of Minnesota Press.
  • Chia, A. (2020) "There are infinities within the mind": Isolation tanks and psychonautic capitalism." New Age Media. InMediaRes.
  • Chia, A. (2019) "Virtual Lucidity: A Media Archaeology of Dream Hacking Wearables." Communication +1. 7(2)​
SCMS Panel: Networks & Neuropolitics, March 20, 2021:

Social Media Disconnection

Once celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the “techlash,” journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices—from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use, to deleting apps and accounts—often reinforce rather than confront the ways social media organise attention, everyday life, and society. Reckoning with Social Media challenges the prevailing critique of social media that pits small gestures against big changes, that either celebrates personal transformation or champions structural reformation. This edited volume reframes evaluative claims about disconnection practices as either restorative or reformative of current social media systems by beginning where other studies conclude: the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity of separating from social media. 
​