Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how 'technodelics'—psychedelics, virtual reality, and neuro-wearables—engineer transcendent experiences at the confluence of New Age spiritualities and conspiracism, and its broader implications for democratic cultures.

Paper long abstract:

Consciousness Hacking is a San Francisco-based community of practice dedicated to the use of 'technodelics'—psychedelics, virtual reality, and neuro-wearables—for the engineering of transcendent experiences. Proponents of consciousness hacking include venture capitalists, neuroscientists, and Silicon Valley tech ethicists. Technodelics strive for the reliable induction of ego dissolution and transpersonal connection with the universe, which have been promoted by popular science writers as having remarkable therapeutic, spiritual, or creative effects. Like New Age cultures, consciousness hacking adheres to perennialism, which designates different beliefs as equally valid because they worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos. Just as New Age perennialism allows disparate spiritual ideas and noetic experiences to cohere into a movement, conspiratorial perennialism enables connections between online snippets and statistics to feed confirmation biases. In this context, 'conspirituality' refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—-connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. This paper presents an anthropologically-oriented meta-critique of the social meanings of mediated stories that connect technodelics and conspirituality through what consciousness hackers call 'inside-out change': transforming the social and physical world by shifting one's interior landscape, both individually and collectively. Examining five years of recorded talks by Consciousness Hackers, this paper critiques how the confluence between technodelics and conspirituality cultures the high-tech New Age into an interior experience that is beyond interpretation, verification, and deliberation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on a growing body of work that considers video games as sites for spirituality. By using ethnographic research from the r/trucksim Reddit community, this paper considers how Truck Simulator video games produce transcendental moments for players.

Paper long abstract:

On r/trucksim, a Reddit forum where users discuss the Truck Simulator video game series, players often report out of body experiences, meditational moments, and instances of beauty within the virtual world. In this light, the Truck Simulator games can be viewed as producing transcendental moments, where one feels outside their body and connected to something beyond the individual self. Considering Elizabeth Buie's definition for transcendental moments in HCI as “an individual experience of connection or unity with transcendence, whether sacred or secular, having a beginning and an end", this paper explores how the mechanisms of the game work to produce moments of transcendence. This paper draws from my research with the r/trucksim community to explore the ways players interact with the game space in regards to these transcendental moments. This research is broken into three categories — Highway Hypnosis, Simulated Nature, and Immersive Methods — which look at specific mechanisms of the game that produce these altered states. This paper builds on a growing body of work that considers video games as a site for spirituality, drawing from researchers such as Jayne Gackenbach, Robert Geraci, and Alenda Y. Chang.

Paper short abstract:

I examine the ethical narratives shaping the moral experimentations of self-made independent Japanese Virtual Youtubers. I draw my digital ethnography on the work of Lacanian theorist Mari Ruti and Julia Kristeva's intimate revolt, to delimitate what I call posthuman revolt of ethical singularities.

Paper long abstract:

In the novel "Exodus of the land of hope" by Murakami Ryu, published and set in 2001, Japanese youth abandon the nation following the words of a young leader: "There's nothing in Japan. That's a dead country." Meanwhile, outside fiction, the collapsed economy turned the image of Japan as a "hopeless country" an unbearable reality.

Two decades later, a new wave of hopeful transformation has emerged. The kind of change I am focusing here is minoritarian, machinic and nomadic (Briadotti, 2002). Among the 7 million middle-aged individuals included in the demographic group collectively humiliated under the label of "The Lost Generation", and the now adults scorned as "Yutori Generation", there are thousands of women and men who exiled to virtual territories to become Virtual Youtubers since 2017. They chose virtual horizons to escape from shameful unemployment and poverty. Nonetheless, only few self-made and independent Vtubers have developed singular ethical projects, challenging the existing ontological constrains they have suffered in the "real world", to define freedom in their own hands by opting out the human becoming-more-than digital avatars. In this paper, I examine the open-ended ethical narratives that shape the moral moods and ethical experimentation of independent Vtubers. I draw my digital ethnography on the work of Lacanian critical theorist Mari Ruti on existential lack, singularity and creativity, and Julia Kristeva's idea of intimate revolt, to shape the contours of what I call virtually situated posthuman revolt of ethical singularities, emerging in particular, in the ethical projects of self-proclaimed Babiniku Ojisan.