The neoliberal perils of yoga and self-care on apps and platforms

Abstract

This article situates the digital self-care industry within a neoliberal framework in which I critically analyze the effects of modern postural yoga through platforms and apps. In specific, I argue that the neoliberalization of digitally mediated self-care through Instagram, YouTube, Calm and Yoga-Go not only place the onus of health and wellbeing on individuals, they also endanger the physical health, mental health and digital privacy of their users. In turn, the consequences of economic and political systems that have created many of the social conditions that push people to seek ways in which they themselves can alleviate the pressures and stresses of everyday life continue to be ignored.

One week after Donald Trump won the 2016 United States (US) presidential election, Americans googled the term ‘self-care’ almost twice as much as they had in previous years, many of them seeking answers to the question: “what is self-care?” (Harris, 2017). While the timing of these Google searches may have coincided with speculation and concerns surrounding Trump's impending presidency, the concept of self-care existed long before that. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, self-care emerged in the US as a strictly medical term, where doctors encouraged and guided their patients, who were primarily mentally ill and/or elderly, to practice physical exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle (Harris, 2017). In the decades that followed, however, scholars and researchers began to study the ways that self-care moved beyond physical exercise, taking into consideration the extent to which mental health shapes and affects our understanding of self-care.

For globalization scholar Christopher Ziguras, self-care is defined as “any behaviour by which the person seeks to improve their quality of life” (2004: 5). In this broad definition, practices of self-care involve techniques of the body and/or techniques of the self. Whereas the former constitute physical practices that include personal hygiene, diet and physical exercise, the latter is less physically oriented, “aimed at sustaining mental health by managing one's self-identity, self-perceptions, feelings and relationships” (Ziguras, 2004: 3). But as Ziguras (2004) observes, this more individualized pursuit of self-care has evolved in an expanding market of self-care practices, products and services, many of which emerged during the New Age movement in the 1970s. Popularized by spiritualist David Spangler in the US during this time, the New Age movement was defined “as an extremely widespread but loosely structured mega-network of individuals, groups and organizations who tend to share common values characterized by mysticism and monism, and a common vision of a coming new age of peace and mass enlightenment” (Finnegan, 1992: 353).

Consisting primarily of physical postures and breathing exercises (Puustinen and Rautaniemi, 2015), modern postural yoga (MPY) became a staple of the New Age movement, popularizing both yoga and meditation (Newcombe and Deslippe, 2020). According to religious studies scholar Andrea R. Jain, MPY relies on “appropriating popular ideals and trends” (2015: 78) that allow it to be packaged, branded and sold to millions of consumers around the globe as an accessible product and service, and as an essential component of consumer culture and the broader self-care market. Despite its popularization, it was not until the 1990s that a commercialized model of yoga began to thrive, following Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and the introduction of yoga studios, which offered various yoga styles throughout the day, which proved to be vital for the success of MPY in major cities across the globe. Now as part of a multi-mullion dollar yoga industry, individuals can purchase everything from yoga pants and yoga mats to yoga-branded perfumes and even yoga-branded beer (Puustinen and Rautaniemi, 2015).

The commodification and mass-marketing of yoga is an important shift worth noting in the consumer-based culture of neoliberal self-care, where individuals are seen to bear responsibility for their health and wellbeing. For Jain, this constitutes part of what she refers to as “neoliberal yoga … [or] yoga systems that rely on the selective deployment of key assumptions, such as the importance of self-governance and individual responsibility as well as the value of entrepreneurship” (Jain, 2020: 51). Neoliberal yoga systems, which stress “self-development through consumer choice” (Jain, 2020: 52), espouse a meritocratic approach to MPY. This includes a “lifestyle of personal growth, self-care, health, wellness and even liberation” (Jain, 2020: 51) that relies not just on practicing a sequence or series of yoga poses, but also in urging yoga practitioners “to take responsibility for their conditions with effective commodifying and purchasing strategies” (Jain, 2020: 51). While the spiritual element of yoga has certainly not dissipated with neoliberal yoga, much of the discourse surrounding yoga since the 1970s has concentrated extensively on its physical and aesthetic benefits (Jain, 2020; Newcombe, 2007; Puustinen and Rautaniemi, 2015).

Unfortunately, not much has changed in the ways that MPY is packaged and sold to practitioners and consumers in neoliberal societies except, perhaps, the medium. The vast majority of people who continue to practice yoga across the globe are women (Fleck, 2022). Canada and Mexico, for instance, have seen growth in their yoga accessory markets because of the rise in the number of women in the workforce (Technavio, 2022). Since over 70 per cent of yoga practitioners are women, most yoga-related products, including yoga mats and yoga pants, continue to be purchased by women (Jeong, 2022). What has changed significantly is the technology through which MPY is now practiced, a practice that has become highly contingent on smartphones, platforms and apps. By examining how MPY is presented and practiced on platforms like Instagram and YouTube, I suggest that not only are neoliberal notions of self-care reinforced, so too are stereotypical representations of body image and race. These platforms also bring about numerous risks to the physical and mental health of yoga practitioners, as do mobile apps like Yoga-Go and Calm. I engage in a critical analysis of the Yoga-Go app and its privacy policy to argue that the app—and other health and fitness apps like it—facilitate digital modes of self-care that also pose risks to user data and privacy.

The rise of modern postural yoga in the West

Well before the introduction of yoga in the modern period, gurus often required disciples to travel to India and stay with them for extended periods of time, opting out of conventional life and into more of a monastic one (Jain, 2015). In addition to the physical component of yoga systems that involve sequences of stretches, muscle-building postures and breathing techniques, traditional yoga systems were heavily influenced by Hindu philosophy and spirituality, as well as a commitment to a competent guru (Jain, 2015). The classical practice of yoga required a personal and spiritual relationship between disciple and guru, one in which the disciple had to immerse themselves in a system that extended far beyond physical postures and breathing exercises. While MPY became a central part of Indian physical culture by the 1930s, it was not deemed exportable because “it remained a part of an elite movement … prescribed by Hindu reformers concerned with emphasizing the scientific components of yoga and Indian nationalists concerned with establishing indigenous opposition to British rule in India” (Jain, 2015: 48). But in 1941, the world got its first mass-marketed view of MPY following the publication of an article in Time magazine titled, “Speaking of Pictures … This is Real Yoga,” in which photographs of guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya's students in Mysore, India, engaging in rarely before seen yoga postures, increased the global visibility of yoga as both a practice and a spectacle (Jain, 2015).

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, MPY was widely taught and practiced across Britain and the US. In Britain, where yoga was deemed to be a physical activity that kept adults over the age of 40 in shape, yoga was taught and practiced in state-funded adult educational centers, attended by women who “made up 70 to 90 per cent of the student base of most classes, as well as the majority of yoga teachers” (Newcombe, 2007: 45). This was aided in large part by the ways in which Richard Hittleman's 1970s “Yoga for Health” television series was packaged and presented in British and American popular culture. Up until the glamorization of yoga made popular by Hittleman's television program, featuring young women in tights and leotards, “the women-and-beauty element of yoga was often implicit” (Newcombe, 2007: 52). Additionally, yoga advertisements in magazines such as Yoga & Health similarly published images of “toned cover models” (Newcombe, 2007: 52). It was at this juncture that yoga became explicitly associated with ideals of feminine beauty and youth, since the vast majority of its practitioners and consumers were women.

Hittleman and a host of other postural yoga gurus, including B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi and Boris Sacharow, convinced Britons and Americans that this form of yoga could be practiced at home as part of a broader regimen of self-care (Jain, 2020). As Jain contends, “[m]any of these yoga advocates abandoned all or many of the rules, such as those dealing with alms, celibacy, scriptural study and retreat from society or social norms, which traditionally separated the yoga practitioner from society so that they could sell yoga as a form of fitness, self-care and wellness” (2020: 54). In many ways, MPY broke into the competitive American spiritual market as one solution “to the perceived stresses of excess and chaos associated with modern life” (Jain, 2015: 50). Although yoga's philosophical and spiritual elements remained important to some practitioners, one of the major driving forces that propelled MPY into mainstream popular culture across the US and Europe was its acceptance into the physical culture movement (Newcombe, 2020; Newcombe and Deslippe, 2020; Singleton, 2010).

As yoga scholar Mark Singleton (2010) notes, the international physical culture movement at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries allowed postural yoga to sweep across European countries. Many of these countries, such as Britain, Germany and Bulgaria, were heavily vested in the physical culture movement and in the establishment of physical education for adults (Newcombe, 2020). This created spaces across Europe and the US in which “[w]estern physical culture-oriented āsana [postural] practices, developed in India, subsequently found their way (back) to the West, where they became identified and merged with forms of ‘esoteric gymnastics,’ which had grown popular in Europe and America from the mid-nineteenth century” (Singleton, 2010: 5). As such, the widespread popularity of postural yoga was associated with its benefits to physical health and strength, bolstered by notions of Social Darwinism, the eugenics movement and nationalist ideologies during the 20th century, all of which “made popular the [Lamarckian] belief that the individual could manipulate his or her own evolutionary processes” (Singleton, 2010: 98).

The dissemination of MPY was assisted by the lifting of exclusionary immigration restrictions across the US and parts of Europe from the 1960s onwards (Jain, 2015; Newcombe and Deslippe, 2020). For example, Swami Muktananda created and modernized the practice of Siddha Yoga by traveling, delivering and teaching it to hundreds of people at the same time, a departure from the “one-on-one transmission through the traditional guru–disciple relationship in the isolated context of the guru's ashram” (Jain, 2015: 53). With disciples no longer required to travel to India, all that was now necessary was to “drop out of conventional life for a couple of days and drop in to an Intensive, hosted in their city” (Jain, 2015: 54). Muktananda also established the Siddha Yoga Dham Associates Foundation, an organization that enabled Siddha Yoga to grow by training other teachers.

There are a number of other gurus who took similar steps to those of Muktananda, allowing MPY to continue to be widely practiced well into the late 20th century and beyond. Perhaps most notably and controversially, Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram Yoga, moved to the US in the 1970s and opened his first yoga studio in Beverly Hills, California. By the 1990s, his system of postural yoga, that consisted of 26 poses taught in a 40° Celsius yoga studio, which he unsuccessfully tried to copyright as his own, had begun to flourish (Godwin, 2017). However, Choudhury was mired by a series of sexual assault allegations and eventually fled the US and returned to India. Apart from controversies that surround Choudhury and other gurus, teachers and spiritual leaders, the point here is that MPY began to undergo another cultural shift in the 21st century, where the presence and knowledge of the guru or an instructor were no longer necessary to learn and practice yoga. In fact, because the essence of MPY remains rooted to postural sequences and breathing techniques, the accessibility and practice of MPY at home has become far more appealing, evident with the growing slate of instructional yoga programs that made their way into homes through television programs such as “Lilias”, Yoga and You (1970), Wai Lana Yoga (1997) and Padma Yoga (2009).

The neoliberalization of yoga and self-care

Practicing yoga at home in front of a television made it more individualized than it was intended to be. Coincidentally, the emergence of this more individualized but impersonal yoga practice occurred alongside growing doctrines of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom, the US, most of Europe, New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world. According to geography scholars Simon Springer et al. (2016: 2), “most scholars tend to agree that neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life.” In this way, the rise of MPY as a more individualized practice that is part of a larger regimen of self-care is a by-product of neoliberal notions of health and wellbeing. As Marxist scholar David Harvey explains, not only does neoliberalism involve political-economic practices that heavily rely on “[d]eregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (Harvey, 2005: 3), it is a theory that is premised on the notion “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). Rather than view health and wellbeing as something that requires government support and safety nets, as was the case with state-funded yoga in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s (Newcombe, 2007), neoliberalism reduced health and wellbeing to the responsibility of the individual.

With this rather drastic turn in the perception of health and wellbeing, yoga became part of a “market for ‘self-care’ regimens, which held individuals and their consumer choices accountable for their health, wellness, professional success and other life circumstances” (Jain, 2020: 53). In the neoliberal self-care market, yoga was sold as yet another service and product by which consumers could lay claim to their own health and wellbeing. In Britain, the neoliberal market of self-care was accelerated soon after the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Thatcher began making a series of sweeping economic reforms that were aimed at dismantling the fiscal and social policies that were established in Britain following World War II. From 1979 to 1990, Thatcher aggressively attacked the politics and institutions of the Labour Party, through measures which included “confronting trade union power, attacking all forms of social solidarity … dismantling or rolling back the commitments of the welfare state, [and introducing] the privatization of public enterprises (including social housing)” (Harvey, 2005: 23). In a 1984 interview with British lifestyle magazine Woman's Own, Thatcher (2013) went so far as to claim that:

[People] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

What followed was a series of political and economic reforms that reframed health and wellbeing, in the broadest sense, as the success or failure of the individual.

The self-care market that successfully convinced individuals to practice MPY as a means of taking ownership of their own health and wellbeing had other neoliberal repercussions. Neoliberal yoga systems are heavily implicated in neoliberal capitalism, where notions of self-care are often reduced to “making individuals into more productive, efficient and conforming workers and members of society” (Jain, 2020: 57). In neoliberal societies, practicing yoga as part of a regimen of self-care often matters inasmuch as it creates and sustains a workforce who take it upon themselves to prepare their minds and bodies for labor. Nonetheless, it is important also to consider how yoga might be viewed and utilized within the workplace as an act of subversion. Taking short breaks to practice yoga “for one's own regeneration” helps people “to cope with pressure of the work environment, and helps to build up resilience, flexibility, and the strength to face the demands of modern work life” (Schnäbele, 2013: 151). But even in these brief acts of workplace subversion, neoliberal yoga creates what Jain describes as “deviant outgroups,” which involve carefully designed “marketing strategies that present a narrow vision of the ideal (usually white) female body (2020: 57). Its capacity to be packaged and sold in a neoliberal self-care market that exacerbates unrealistic, idealized and racialized perceptions of women's bodies is what enables MPY not only to train consumers “that their bodily and social conditions are under their control, but to [make them] feel ashamed about those parts of their lives that do not comply with cultural ideals” (Jain, 2020: 58).

Instagram and YouTube yoga: Influencers and algorithms

The entrepreneurial ethos that drives neoliberal yoga is arguably most evident on a platform like Instagram, where yoga influencers practice MPY as a performative and entrepreneurial endeavor, one that is meant to increase followers for the purpose of increasing revenues with advertisements, product placements, instructional videos or the selling of services and products.

This commercialized and performative rationale, which is largely aesthetic, has also attracted yoga teachers and practitioners whose combined inexperience has contributed to an increase of physical injuries. Fitness influencer Rebecca Leigh had a stroke in 2019 while recording a yoga tutorial where she demonstrated a hollowback handstand (Shamsian, 2019). That same year, a 23-year-old woman plummeted 80 feet from a balcony railing at a high-rise apartment building while performing a yoga inversion (Adams, 2019). One consequence of this type of performative yoga on Instagram is that many poses demonstrated by yoga influencers tend to involve advanced inversions, which come with a high degree of risk and difficulty for ordinary yoga practitioners (Hinz et al., 2021). When one considers that the most popular yoga pose on Instagram is the headstand (sirsasana)—with well over 2 million hashtags—it should come as no surprise that the performative and aesthetic nature of yoga on Instagram can outweigh some of its benefits.

While yoga on Instagram creates opportunities for more accessibility when it comes to the cost-of-entry barrier for many working-class people, it has also “been transformed from inner fulfillment to a vanity-driven pursuit … including photos of slim women performing twisted asanas” (Bhalla and Moscowitz, 2020: 93). In this way, Instagram perpetuates the same body image and racial stereotypes that have been noted with yoga companies and magazines, both of whom routinely use images of thin, white women to sell their products (Bhalla and Moscowitz, 2020). In a content analysis of yoga-related images on Instagram, researchers found that the majority of images typically consisted of women under the age of 40, who were white and thin, and were photographed in active poses (Hinz et al., 2021). The over-representation of these bodies not only creates unrealistic and idealized notions of women's bodies, but the exclusion of women of color may also serve to “perpetuate the ongoing cycle of racial discrimination already observed across health and physical fitness related media” (Hinz et al., 2021: 123).

With the transition to practicing yoga on a platform like Instagram, a practice that is often facilitated through mobile devices that include smartphones and tablets, it is critically important to recognize how the platform and the technology are implicated in maintaining certain stereotypes. Communication scholars Nicholas Carah and Michelle Shaul argue that the curation of images and videos on Instagram, particularly with its ‘explore’ feature, are “algorithmically generated, based on images and accounts that are popular in a user's network or region” (Carah and Shaul, 2015: 3–4). Since the vast majority of yoga content on Instagram consists of images and videos of thin, white women, the “home” feed, which is made up of “a stream of images curated by users, based on the accounts they follow” (Carah and Shaul, 2015: 3), as well as the explore feature, will algorithmically generate and cycle yoga content that reify body image and racial stereotypes as normative, “suggesting that yoga targets only one type of body aspiration” (Bhalla and Moscowitz, 2020: 99). This is not to say that Instagram is entirely devoid of promoting body positivity through yoga; instead, it suggests that an image-based platform like Instagram tends to algorithmically reinforce body images and aspirations that circulate in popular culture.

Instagram's swipe function on mobile devices can further problematize the practice of yoga in ways that extend beyond stereotypes of body image and race.

On top of promoting an aesthetic that is physically dangerous and exclusionary, one other possible explanation for the popularity of a pose such as the headstand on Instagram is its potential to contribute to a superficial and sensational perception of MPY through its swipe function. In examining how the swipe function works on the Tinder app, sociologist and education scholar Gaby David and Carolina Cambre use the term “swipe logic,” which they partly define as “the pace, or the increased viewing speed encouraged by the UI [user interface]” (David and Cambre, 2016: 1). Two very important observations arise from David and Cambre's (2016) study of Tinder, observations that can be applied to the swipe logic on the Instagram app. First, they note that “image-based interactions are crucial for the emergence of the swipe logic” (David and Cambre, 2016: 4). Conceptualized by Carah and Shaul (2015) as an “image-machine” that works to capture the attention of users, the swipe logic of one's Instagram feed is intended to be visually sensational and ephemeral. Sociologist Elizabeth Wissinger uses the term “networked jumpiness” to explain how individuals “flit from one image to the next with little time for conscious reflection” (2015: 18). Contrary to less advanced yoga poses like child's pose (balasana) or mountain pose (tadasana), one possible explanation behind the popularity of an inversion like the headstand on Instagram is its capacity to immediately capture the attention of the user consumed by the app's swipe logic.

This is particularly significant when we consider David and Cambre's (2016) second observation: swipe logic is susceptible to being influenced or controlled by the algorithm. When swipe logic on apps like Instagram, Tinder, TikTok and others is intentionally designed for speed (David and Cambre, 2016), what emerges is a competitive market for user attention in which algorithms function as techniques of content curation to maximize time spent on such platforms. When user attention on Instagram can be so fleeting, yoga poses that tend to be more spectacular and, as a result, more advanced and risky, increase the likelihood of disrupting the speed that is inherent in swipe logic, a speed that reduces the time with which a user can seriously contemplate the full extent of consequences. On a platform like Instagram, yoga influencers, instructors and companies not only compete for consumer attention to sell products and services, they also grapple for user engagement in the form of likes and shares, which allow their content to appear in the Instagram feeds of other followers (Carah and Shaul, 2015), thereby increasing their potential to sell more products and services.

While mobile screens and devices facilitate an aesthetic of yoga that is commercially oriented, they also encourage an individualized practice in which the platform, app and technology work in tandem to take the place of the instructor, fitting neatly into a neoliberal paradigm. Practicing MPY online or through an app cultivates an understanding of self-care that pushes neoliberal notions of individualization and responsibility to new levels. Understanding neoliberalism through platforms, apps and technologies problematizes the self as an independent, autonomous and decision-making subject (Springer et al., 2016). Unlike the personal relationships forged between gurus and students in ashrams in India, the more costly but collective modern yoga retreats and studios across Europe and North America, or even the impersonal means of learning yoga through one of many books published on the subject, practicing yoga and other aspects of self-care through social media platforms or apps involves the granting of power and control over some of the decision-making processes to digital media and technology. On Instagram, this is quite apparent in the ways in which yoga images and videos are algorithmically curated based on a user's social media network and engagement.

A platform like YouTube, on the other hand, operates somewhat differently. As a platform that is driven less by the speed-and-swipe logic that governs Instagram, yoga practitioners can choose from a vast range of free instructional videos that vary in length, style and target audience, among other things. Although the sheer quantity of instructional yoga videos on YouTube seemingly offers users an endless selection to choose from, these choices are tailored and limited by the platform's algorithmic function. With over 500 hours of video content uploaded to YouTube every minute (Overview, n.d.), the platform uses an algorithm that sorts through videos according to a variety of factors, which include user tags, descriptions, engagement signals (the length of time a video is watched), previous searches and watch histories. While this algorithmic function streamlines the search process for each user, it also directly and indirectly influences part of the individual's decision-making process, limiting and controlling what types of yoga videos or channels users can see and subscribe to as part of their self-care regimen through the automated quantification and processing of YouTube user data.

The risks of apps to mental health and data privacy

User data poses a set of different issues when using yoga and meditation apps for self-care. Calm and Yoga-Go are two of the most downloaded mindfulness and yoga apps (Bucholz, 2021). These self-care apps operate in a competitive entrepreneurial market that fetishizes the idea of there being “a technological fix for each and every problem” (Harvey, 2005: 68). Rather than treat self-care as a concept and practice that also includes non-quantifiable elements like mental and emotional states, apps tend to reduce self-care to quantifiable digital data they receive from the apps and devices of individual users. Calm is the self-proclaimed number-one app at improving sleep and meditation, while reducing stress and anxiety, all of which it claims to accomplish through mobile devices like smartphones. Throughout 2019 and 2020, the meditation app Calm led the way in revenue on both the App Store and Google Play in the US, surpassing health, fitness and diet apps such as MyFitnessPal, SWEAT and Weight Watchers Reimagined. However, Calm was also the most advertised meditation app on YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok. While the need to treat and diagnose mental health issues, mental illness and the anxieties brought on by the pandemic have contributed to the rise in the popularity of a self-care app like Calm, it is also critical to recognize how the popularity of the app is perhaps more associated with its advertising campaign rather than its success in treating mental health issues.

Besides ignoring some of the fundamental components involved in meditating and breathing as a centuries-old spiritual practice in India that cultivates silence and stillness of the mind and body, the Calm app is further mired in one central paradox: it is “a smartphone app that purports to undo the anxieties of the smartphone age” (Lowrey, 2021). The use of smartphones has also been linked to the development and worsening of several mental health conditions. As studies have shown, attempts to substitute direct, in-person treatment of a mental health issues such as depression with technology or online treatment can lead to a greater risk for depression (Cheever et al., 2014; Wacks and Weinstein, 2021). The increased use of smartphones in the digital age has also been connected to smartphone dependency, which in turn has led to heightened levels of anxiety (Cheever et al., 2014; Wacks and Weinstein, 2021). The reliance on smartphones may also lead to cognitive impairment, particularly in terms of memory, where users turn to their devices instead of their memory to perform certain cognitive tasks (Storm et al., 2017). Although mobile paid subscription apps like Calm may indeed help people achieve less stress and anxiety, the digital technologies through which they operate can also aggravate the very mental health issues they purport to alleviate. This is significant when we consider the tension and paradox of smartphones as technologies that can simultaneously increase and decrease anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.

The popular Yoga-Go app, which is also a paid subscription service, can be seen as facilitating a regimen of physical self-care through its postural yoga sequences. Similar to the problems encountered with an app like Calm, studies have also shown that smartphone use leads to the development of certain physical ailments, including sleep disruption, musculoskeletal pain and discomfort, headaches and migraines, neurological and ocular complaints (Domoff et al., 2019; Wacks and Weinstein, 2021). But mobile apps like Yoga-Go are marketed to users as products and/or services that increase caloric burn, strength and flexibility, while allowing users to manage their everyday stress and even improve their sex lives (App Store Preview, n.d.). While Yoga-Go users may indeed accomplish all the objectives that are set out by the app, they do so with technologies that are inextricably linked to mental and physical harms. More importantly, an app like Yoga-Go removes the crucial role that a guru or yoga instructor plays in both learning and practicing yoga. By taking the role of the human, the mobile app and the smartphone through which it operates reduces yoga to a strictly visual and auditory experience, creating a system of learning MPY that is not only depleted of important personal, spiritual, mental, emotional and philosophical components, but one in which the technology increases the potential for user injury. This is especially the case for MPY practitioners over the age of 65, whose risk of physical injury is elevated without in-person and qualified instruction that can assist with correct technique and postural alignment (Swain and McGwin, 2016).

Beyond that, however, an app like Yoga-Go also aims to fulfill the physically oriented, health benefits for users through its automated decision-making systems. Upon registering for the app, users are prompted through a 22-step process that is used to determine a specific fitness plan, which include questions about weight, body type and fitness goals among others, one that is accessible only after the user subscribes to their paid service. Answers to these questions enable the app to quickly and automatically determine a user's fitness profile. Of course, the app's automated decision-making is merely the result of processing user data in such a way that it fits into an already developed and standardized fitness plan. But even after this profile is determined and paid for through a subscription, the user is not given the choice to delete their personal data and maintain access to the app in order to pursue their fitness or yoga-related goals. In fact, any attempt to delete personal data such as name, gender, age, height and weight is met with the following message: “By tapping ‘DELETE’, you confirm that you understand your account will be deleted, and YOU WILL NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO THE APP. All your progress will also be deleted. DELETION OF ACCOUNT DOES NOT MEAN CANCELLATION OF SUBSCRIPTION” (Yoga-Go App, n.d.). What is clear in this instance is how misleading and integral user data are to the app, going so far as to instantly cancel user accounts that opt to delete their personal data without cancelling their paid subscription service.

Evidently, the dangers of practicing yoga through an app like Yoga-Go involve risks that are, perhaps, less perceptible than those related to physical health. These include risks to online privacy that are associated with data collection. The Yoga-Go privacy policy offers some insight into how these incursions of privacy can occur. For one, Yoga-Go's privacy policy consists of an extensive list of different types of user data that are collected and stored, divided into information that is provided by users and information that is automatically collected by the app (Privacy Policy, n.d.). Information that is collected but provided by users is highly sensitive and includes data such as names, email addresses, photographs, dates of birth, gender, weight, height and fitness levels. Information that is automatically collected by the Yoga-Go app is far more exhaustive, including data about mobile devices like hardware models, unique device identifiers, log-in information and use of features. The app also carries out automatic data collection about individual data usage and locative information such as usage frequency, engagement with features and notifications, user patterns and internet protocol addresses.

According to Yoga-Go, these data are collected for a variety of reasons, some of which are less alarming than others. For example, the app collects some data to enhance user experience and provide customer service and technical support. However, the app also collects user data for the purposes of gauging interest in products and services offered by the app, as well as tailoring advertising content for the app and third-party service providers (Privacy Policy, n.d.). The Yoga-Go app also shares personal data with third-party service providers such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok (Privacy Policy, n.d.), the latter of which has been banned from government-issued devices in some countries—including Canada, Australia, Denmark, France and the Netherlands—due to security and privacy concerns (Chan, 2023). Yoga-Go also makes use of third-party service providers like TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest to optimize their promotional campaigns by sharing the personal information of their users (Privacy Policy, n.d.). In so doing, they place the onus of data privacy on users, requiring them not only to read and understand the privacy policy of Yoga-Go, but also to read and understand the individual privacy policies of a vast range of their analytics services, third-party service providers and payment gateways, such as AppsFlyer, Crashlytics, Send Pulse, Google Analytics, Amazon Web Services, Amazon PinPoint and PayPal (Privacy Policy, n.d.).

Requiring Yoga-Go users to read and understand multiple privacy policies in order to grasp the extent to which their data are used and potentially compromised, creates an unreasonable expectation and burden for Yoga-Go users. Privacy policies are, in theory, essential for establishing data-handling practices and transparency; yet, as researchers have shown, privacy policies tend to be neglected (Fabian et al., 2017; Paul et al., 2018). While a number of reasons factor into the general neglect of reading privacy policies, trust and readability are two of the most commonly cited factors. First, “[m]ost Internet users believe that the availability of a privacy policy already implies that the Website does not share their customers’ personal information with third-party companies … and better protects their customers’ privacy” (Fabian et al., 2017: 19). The belief that companies with privacy policies are more trustworthy can be quite detrimental to data privacy, given that internet users are more willing to share their data with companies who have privacy policies (Fabian et al., 2017). Second, the minority of internet users who challenge the notion of implied trust and take the opportunity to read privacy policies are confronted with the problem of readability (Fabian et al., 2017). On average, not only are privacy policies lengthy to read, they “are difficult to comprehend as a whole” (Fabian et al., 2017: 21). The complexities of legal jargon that are present in many privacy policies obfuscate the ways in which user data are collected, sold or used for advertising revenue (Paul et al., 2018).

For Yoga-Go users, the problem with privacy policies is exponentially increased. While users may bestow a degree of implied trust in Yoga-Go, given that their privacy policy is publicly accessible online, that trust is not reciprocated. Yoga-Go embeds links to over ten other privacy policies in its own, including those of analytics services, third-party service providers and payment gateways they use. So, although users may bypass reading the company's privacy policy, implicitly trusting how Yoga-Go handles their personal data, that trust does not automatically extend to the range of other privacy policies that the company includes in its own. Statistically, the minority of Yoga-Go users who take it upon themselves to read through the privacy policy encounter the barrier of readability on multiple levels. In other words, users must not only make it through the length and legal jargon of Yoga-Go's privacy policy, they must also do the same for all the other privacy policies in order to comprehend the (mis)use of their data, placing an immense amount of added labor on users who are interested in safeguarding their personal data.

Conclusion

Health and fitness apps continue to grow in usage and popularity, particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the closure of gyms, yoga studios and other fitness facilities. However, as I have shown, the growth and popularity of apps and platforms that enable MPY and self-care, more broadly, to be practiced without the presence of qualified professionals exposes users to increased risks of physical injury, the worsening of mental health conditions, as well as the exploitation and commodification of data-generating bodies. On a platform like Instagram, yoga influencers frequently reduce yoga to poses or sequences that have a higher likelihood of being viewed on the platform's feeds, largely in a bid to attract viewers and followers as a means of increasing revenue streams from advertisers, products and services. This profit-driven ethos has led to a series of negative repercussions. In Europe and North America, MPY has been co-opted by young, thin, white women in yoga studios and online. This has resulted in a number of Instagram yoga influencers who continue to uphold a yoga aesthetic that perpetuates distorted body image and racial stereotypes which already exist in the broader health and fitness industries. Since the practice of yoga is not intended to be “about image or aspiration” but, rather, as “an everyday physical and mental health routine” (Venkatraman, 2021), the idea of practicing yoga with a commercially viable, white instructor whose teaching and influence begins and ends on a screen, does not allow for practitioners to access the full range of benefits that yoga has to offer in terms of health and wellbeing.

We also see how the practice of digitally mediated yoga has adverse effects on users. Practicing yoga online or through one of many mobile apps occurs on devices that are linked to a range of physical, mental health and privacy issues. These apps and devices allow private companies, third-party service providers and big-tech giants to conceal the exploitation of users and their data behind the benefits that such apps may have for some users. To some extent, these consequences have been mitigated by live, interactive yoga classes online. But even in these more interactive online spaces that limit the transmission of unwanted user data, instructors are still restricted in their ability to assist practitioners with poses and postural alignment. The main advantage with these types of yoga classes, which tend to be more costly, lies in their capacity to re-create the more intimate atmosphere of yoga studios to some extent (Kastrenakes, 2020).

Although the digital self-care industry is often touted as an integral part of self-care, it is anchored to a neoliberal rationale that places the onus of caring entirely on individuals. Rather than understanding self-care as both a concept and practice that evolved during a time in which Thatcherism and Reaganism began to dismantle social provisions and institutions, self-care has come to be represented as something that all people must practice in order to maintain healthy and fulfilling lives. But this understanding of self-care is flawed and fails to acknowledge the the harmful effects that neoliberal policies have, which may be among the reasons people seek to engage in self-care in the first place. The neoliberalization of digitally mediated yoga and self-care has tasked individuals with enduring and dealing with the consequences of a system that continues to lay both the blame, and the responsibility for caring, on individuals. While there is nothing inherently wrong with engaging in self-care, resorting to digitally mediated yoga and self-care through platforms, apps and technologies rewards the market ideology that neoliberalism needs to thrive. In turn, this rewards economic and political systems that refuse to accept any responsibility for creating many of the social conditions, and the increased levels of poverty and anxiety, that continue to push people to seek ways in which they themselves can alleviate the pressures and stresses of everyday life.