OTAKUMAXXING: A MANIFESTO FOR THE MACHINIC OTAKU

Or, “An Otakuology for the 21st Century.”

Recently, I’ve been in a bit of a slump. I’m having trouble watching anime, playing games, reading books, and most importantly, writing. It makes things hard, knowing that there are many things I should be doing, what I could be listening to, what I could be learning about, but instead making the choice—these choices are always preconditioned—to sit down and stare at a blank wall. The reason? There’s plenty of them. This condition isn’t specific to me, so I’ll lay out potential reasons in our age of modernity. Maybe it’s about how much time you have after work, or maybe even the amount of time you spend looking for work. Maybe you lack the proper headspace required for engaging with entertainment. Or, maybe, you just need some sort of ideal to continue your becoming of whatever. Sounds about right? Then, you’ve come to the right place. Otakumaxxing is born from this lack as an antidote from the broken salience of burn out. It is my answer after years of mental anguish and discovery. Let’s think about this and unpack this incredibly stupid image board neologism (parlance has use, so let’s continue with it).

-maxxing is a shorthanded suffix for total and utter optimization. Minimax traces the common usage of the phrase within academic game theory, being used predominantly in chess dating all the way back to the 1960s. Here the term finds use within a computer algorithm with the sole purpose of finding the best possible moves based on the pieces surrounding it (similar to the topological space of structuralism, as a fun aside). Eventually, this term, now minmax, finds suitable use in RPG/Gaming culture, where the act of minmaxxing produces a unit or a stat-line propagated towards a goal of absolute optimization. An example of this could be in speedrunning, where the teleology hence gives the stats meaning beyond casual play. Consider, let’s say Fire Emblem, in the context of speedrunning—though, any game could work as an example, but games with proper stats are easier to account for—the series returns with yet another nature. Units are chosen for their optimal bases and growth rates, stat boosting items are given to the supreme units, and maps are of course completed at the fastest possible route, wholly dependent on the AI or the RNG of the units given. 

First, there are the nerds but we mustn't forget about the incels; The social game of marginalized chuds. The vast online movement of Looksmaxxing, a group of people that focus on formal tactics to maximize attractiveness within a self-isolated criteria. Some of these tactics are centered on /fa/ clothing chemistry, relating to color theory and silhouette. If you want something more body oriented, take a look at skin care general, instead focusing on the textures of the face. These things are more or less attainable to the average person, well, up until you meet with the more extreme variations of the scene, with bonesmashing and related body-hacking techniques. There are limits, of course, and anything more than the generalized knowledge on a subject requires a sense of obsessive spirituality. But what can we recognize in the looksmaxxers? Varying degrees of obsessional, goal-oriented radicalism. The onlooker may be able to take in some of the useful tips in reducing eye-bags and such, but what separates the onlooker from the radial other? Knowledge. This is the ultimate goal of anyone half interested, a systematic hysterics towards complete informational supremacy. This comes naturally in the age of “new media”, but I think the otaku denotes this ethos from the beginning. It’s more than just a faux-counter culture identity. The reading of Otaku no Video by an artist formerly known as digibro, only touched on a single node of the rhizome. And, it might be blasphemous to say, but I don’t think the otaku needs to be reclaimed from Tsutomu Miyazaki.

Before I delve more on the otaku prefix, William Gibson sets the stage for what I believe otaku is:

“Otaku seem to me(...) a very pure expression of hunger for information, even if the information is essentially meaningless.”

William Gibson (1994)

Otaku persist within trepidated debate about what this word entails, and I would argue that the word can only be regarded in the context of its use within a text. The common vernacular of past and present harkens to an essential nature of the otaku, or the belief the otaku’s era has passed and that it was only a specific generation. I find this silly to say the least, but it’s to no one’s surprise that the modern champions of twitter culture wars would hope to gatekeep the thinly veiled identity politics inherent in such discourse. It is no doubt removed from the spines of academic textbooks, but perhaps the dispersive quality of such language affects the “common sense” of the less culturally endowed. Perhaps, taking from the cyberpunk fiction writers of that time and those essays of Guattari during his many trips to Japan, we can see why otaku became significant. They are the first group stratified into discourse as recipients of new media.

I prefer the radically open interpretation, on the productive qualities we can recognize in the otaku, those being the key traits we can learn from, diagram a useful structure, and continue on with our day. I plan to write at length on what Otaku is to this website, but for the purposes of this essay, I would turn to the secondary title, Otakuology. Otakuology is a striking phrase, one that in its actual usage, i.e. that of Toshio Okada, means very little and does nothing to establish a theory of the otaku. Although, within his inaccurately titled (and somehow academically published) essay, An Introduction in Otakuology, Okada touches on an idea ordinary to the average otaku. “Otaku have perfectly acquired otaku knowledge to appreciate work.” This idea seemingly traces its lineage to artisan consumer culture within Japan, a global phenomenon in which the subject gains a refined access to knowledge by-use of off-kilter encounters with an object. This could be the reading of a particular text in which, a bystander might evaluate the level of sophistication of a series such as “Tamayura” as a simple narrative of cute girls and camera, the otaku would exegete a newfound interpretation. In my reading, Tamayura is heavily concerned with the death intrinsic to the camera as a coldly technical object that captures moments in stasis, thus weaving interest around such a thing, while also being propagated by the visual narrative of the Anime Machine.

In our current age, one that has seen conjunctive movements after the compounding “cool japan” era of Japan’s exporting of culture, with Murakami producing artwork for Kanye West and such, the genealogical study of the otaku can only find use within a historical text, one that tries to trace out a linear account for the often evasive nature of the word. Such attempts can only give continuity to the past otaku as seen in the Akihabara Geeks documentary. The geeks of that time had discernable characteristics operating like character designs that give way to a gaze to label them as such. A man or woman carrying around an itabag to a cafe with a few friends is one way to recognize an otaku out in the wild in our modern context. But today, it seems that they blend in, more or less, with the rest of society. Make no mistake, this is not due to “hiding your power level” or due to societal backlash, popular consumption is all the rage. For better or worse, all of the otaku’s traits have been adopted, maybe only by differences in the aesthetic strata can we proclaim a major difference.

The ending goal as well as the hidden project of the otaku would be for these purposes.

1. Reinterpret media.

2. Exalt enjoyment by the act of semiotic consumption.

3. Production of the new by use of citational reading.

4. Archive a reservoir of collected material, digital, physical, neurological.

These are the things I might refer to when describing the otaku. Of course, there are plenty of other angles to attack, and it may seem a bit loose. These endpoints consist of many traits in popular media: Return to old films with a different eye (maybe after watching film essays by those of Zizek). Shows in primetime—something like Family Guy—television promote a postmodern culture of references and elucidations to real things and people,  reification of artisan culture, processed into the new machine of consumption. Cultural auteurs weave a web of ideas and iconography, derivatively pulling from their mental reference database, to create a wholly new thing, the meaning being deferred into a metanarrative consumption. This all, of course, must be supplemented by a good accountant. Websites like Letterboxd and RateYourMusic are popular with otaku and riajuu alike. But these are the things that foreground the otaku, and we shouldn’t stilt the term and treat this as a mere result of the project. Again, the difference between the two, the otaku and the riajuu, is otakumaxxing. 

It is my belief that the project of the otaku is impossible, i.e. that of an identity formed around an adversity associated with animanga aesthetics. This is due to what I refer to as the “haunted otaku”, a thing devoted to the bubble economy of Japan, a love for the golden age, and the thought that we must return to the halcyon days. It is the underlying (as in the economic term) of the cultural zeitgeist, the digital auras that attract lonely ravers, a promise of the future that might have come. It is here, I must say, that there cannot be a return, especially not to the lost future of otaku as a fine art connoisseur, and for a world dominated by nippon-colored love.There’s something to learn from the anime in how the formal archetypes seem to progress in time. The canon epochs of otaku media has changed considerably throughout the years, you can see Okada’s weird antics in action:

This idea is formally infantile, and treats “otaku” as something almost mystic, in being differentiated by spirituality and faith rather than some quantitative evidence for something. There are otaku to speak of, McDonaldsJP continues to push out advertisements to capitalize on their NND roots, of hamafugu and Aiobahn visual references. The problem isn’t authenticity, I don’t think that has even been the main point of the otaku’s project, so you mustn't need a return to Lucky Star or Comic Party. The material practices are how the energy pulse hasn’t dissolved back into the soil, and was always the content of “otaku”, stripped away from the nostalgic lens. Thus, we are to become “machinic otaku”.

The machinic otaku a component of the assemblage. Human + database + network + archive = the machine itself. There is no authentic otaku identity to recover, no past to recover, nothing of the sort. We are already machinic; otakumaxxing is the recognition and optimization of this condition.

Otakumaxxing then is about exalting the qualities natural to the natives of the internet, intensifying them to such a degree that upon witnessing an otakumaxxed individual, you could only call out to them as such. It involves a high level of performativity, one where you lose yourself in favor of the performed self, operating through the memes downstreamed from Otakings and Madarames. The optimal path to the MAX is having it be involved in every facet of your being, reconfigure all original plans to orient themselves for the sake of the datastream. It is to continue the work of the ones who came before and all of their vast wealth of knowledge, learn from them, and use that information for productive measures.

Now, what good comes from Otakumaxxing? It isn’t enough to just enjoy beauty in artificial images, but something of use should be offered for any meaningful practice. So, I offer this, information is useful on its own. Governments take information from satellites, tapped phone lines, images, and human gathered intelligence to make choices for the state. This can include a wide number of things such as, what should government agents be allowed to say on news networks, how might international affairs affect the mission of operatives, what are the plans of other states, how can immediate actions of the state use the patterns of information to promote their own wellbeing. This is an extreme example, but one that is well cataloged in books such as Who Paid the Piper? and The Wretched of the Screen, but it can show itself in a plethora of other places. 

But let’s bring this closer to the ground. Otaku who follow Seiyuu, catalog an archive of various roles, production lineages, particular character traits attributed to their performances, this person has developed transferable cognitive infrastructure useful in universalist application (ie. inhabitable to every domain of knowledge, not one in particular). This could mean: pattern recognition within vast datasets (essential in any craft), taxonomic thinking (developing categorical systems), close reading under information overload (a useful skill in our age of artifice and alienation) and citationality (information circulating within vast spheres of discourse). Once you develop the capacity to process vast informational fields obsessively, you can turn that apparatus to whatever your cause demands.

Danbooru for an example is Azuma’s database made flesh, with over a million unique tags, each having their own detailed record of how they might appear or even a short clause about what the tag might actually mean symbolically. Otakumaxxing applies to just about anything, this informational condition is global, we're all subject to it. All that’s left is recognition and the intensification of this practice to hasten the growth you’d desire. I for one, Aim for The Top, meaning that I one day desire to be a beacon of otaku information, philosophy, art, and all of the various dominant cultural confluences to become worthy of my username, Moechiavellian.

ESP "Psychokinesis Endless"

We have been up all night, my cultural researching unit and I, laying aside boxes decorated by their various brand names. Kaiyodo, Mimeyoi, FREEing, GoodSmile, Volks, their plastic sheens illuminated by the soft glow of a curtain half revealed. Our hearts were filled by the items before us, the products surrounding us, all of the materials, production lines, and workers put into making these useless caricatures of the real world. We had been discussing the limits of the otaku and scrawled a mess of incomprehensible diagrams and romantic texts.

We discovered that the outside world was not to blame. Not the people walking around the streets, not even the uncultured philistines parading the floors of conventions. We had been trapped within ourselves, fighting a battle with enemy stars, so illusory and celestial, a battle that consumed our thirst for information. We realized in that moment, our identity, is merely one figurine in an infinite display case.

We were suddenly distracted by the pinging and panging of an overworked hard-drive, the lights that signal the still-in-use-machine flashed repeatedly in the rather dark room. The stuttering sounds of data being written or possibly extracted disturbs our speech and renders it enamored by the machine’s bare nature.

The silence was deafening. The data transmissions seem to have ended, our minds returned back into our discomforting bodies, a machinic drive, a literal drive, pulsating with such power. Fascinating, my comrades and I spoke.

"Come, my ideological warriors!’ I said. ‘Let us go!"
"Go where?’ ‘Yeah, the trains don’t run this late in the day. We’d have to take a cab and I just blew my last dime on this thing."

"Foolish! We don't NEED to travel! Movement…. movement is everywhere! Like that hard-drive, circuits streaming, ports connecting, information cascading from node to node! The revolution happens here, in this room, in these data flows! We are already moving at the speed of light! Just like that DJ Okawari song."

"That and... well, I'm not really sure why I got so excited, aha..."

"Hmmm, I think I know what you mean. Are you saying that what we do here, together, is already worthwhile? I thought you already knew that, seeing how you spend so much money decorating the room."

"What even are we?"

"The manager calls this a cultural research unit, but—"

"We are the vanguard!' 'Archivists of the immaterial! Curators of—"

"We buy plastic figures with corporate funding."

"...Yes. That too."

A single Slack notification appeared on the monitor. "Monthly report due tomorrow. Please justify Q3 expenditures."

We stared at the message. Then at our twelve thousand dollars in figures. Then at each other.

"What do we write?" 

“Should we lie? Or maybe we can make it sound more important than it is?”

The Sonico figure I'd knocked over earlier, her plastic face catching the monitor glow, and I understood. A simple reorientation was in the heart of the cards.

"We're building a database. We're creating knowledge infrastructure for the 21st century. We're mapping the territory of human desire made plastic and digital."

"That works too."

MANIFESTO OF OTAKUMAXXING

1. We want to sing the love of the machine, the eros of information and data excess. I Love My Computer.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be exposure, performativity, and individuation.

3. Old media has exalted a permanent immobility, romance and slumber. We want to exalt energy, reverence, the future to come, the database, the explosion with the radical new.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of the information highway.

5. We want to sing the man and woman at the keyboard, the ideal axis of which the human works with the machine to hurl themselves at the output of the collective information. 

6. The poet must spend themself with warmth, complicity, and healthy practices to increase the obsessional fervor for the love of the near future.

7. Beauty exists everywhere. All is a masterpiece waiting to be discovered, waiting to be created. Poetry must transduct all things known, subterranean, surface, and to the very heavens itself.

8. We have been on the extreme promontory since mass industrialization! What use is merely focusing on the future, of the predictions and preemptions, one must converge with the past to realize the future! The future is everpresent, we are already living in the future that was imagined.

9. We want to glorify the information highway - the only path to enlightenment - archivists, intellectuals, paraacademics, the progressive conjuncture of theory, the beautiful ideas which create, and digital love.

10. We want to build libraries and museums in the cybercity, fight reaction, and all opportunities to draw us away from our project.

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