I keep him safe so he can get better and stronger and achive great things. When I found him he was nothing. Just a scared little boy in the corner of an alley. The Mighty Nein 1.05: Little Spark
thinking again about how much I wish people who want to talk about anime analytically and in the greater cultural context of Japan would actually put their back into researching the economic and social context of literally anything but the atom bomb. because YES it was hugely influential on cultural anxieties and media and YES you can’t possibly understate its legacy but there’s also so many more things. defeat culture in the aftermath of the war. the fact that we’re currently a generation out from people who survived the war at all, and the distance of memory is a real and influential thing. the influence of the postwar treaty, the discourse surrounding it. the bubble economy. the lost decades even moreso. American-Japanese foreign relations. the sarin gas incident.
or if you want to look further back rather than looking immediately postwar—Japan’s legacy of colonization both internally (ryukyu kingdom) and externally. manchuria as a colonial construct. the meiji restoration following the last real civil war, western fever, the discourse about westernization in general. the treatment of communism and socialism as it evolved through the early part of the twentieth century. the hibiya park riots. there is soooo so much cultural context to the themes that anime grapples with but instead of engaging with any of it you get pretentious American teenagers on death note tumblr trying to argue that the modern Japanese legal code is enshrined in western religious principles. god
one of the really difficult things when talking about Japanese pop culture and the idea of “soft power” is that it’s largely mythical—the rise of anime’s popularity in the west and “thing japan good” hasn’t really correlated to significant economic or political gain on a national scale. but you do have to understand that this is a direct evolution of the malaise of the lost decades, which saw Japan’s economic dominance crash in favor of American economic interests; and you must also understand that while this was the result of poor Japanese financial policy decisions, America had a vested and Very Outspoken (racist) interest in tearing down Japan on a global stage.
and you must understand American influence in Japan is as controversial today as it was in the initial days of the surrender and the new treaty post WWII, but that there was a very interesting period where America and Japan were, in fact, strong allies; and that this allyship began to fail when Japan’s economic success outstripped America’s. so you must also view Japan as both a former colonial power with the terrible legacy to match but also a state subordinate to American cultural pollination and political influence. this isn’t even going into the extremely complex political landscape of east and Southeast Asia which also influences Japanese pop culture. lmao. there’s a lot!! and I don’t think that someone who just wants to talk about anime needs to know All of It but god I think that you should perhaps know Some.
my non-nuanced and un-researched opinion is that if ai were actually so great, tech companies wouldn’t have to work so hard to convince us it’s literally the key to salvation
if it can’t speak for itself, why the fuck are you SCREAMING about it
My highly nuanced and extremely researched opinion is: yeah, correct, exactly this. AI is a powerful niche tool with great implications for SOME, SPECIFIC types of research, automation, communication, and data generation.
It is not some kind of superintelligent panacea for all industries, which is the big lie being pushed by tech bros.
They are screaming about it because they want to be the next Jeff Bezos, and they are idiots who will be proven wrong, but not before their burst bubble destroys millions of lives along the way.
It’s an old metaphor, but a good one:
AI is an electric blender. It makes a lot of difficult tasks fast and easy (whipping cream! Blended soups!), and a handful of impossible tasks possible (food pasting for liquid diets!).
Now imagine your boss coming to you and saying this blender is going to replace half your team.
Fucking unhinged behaviour! The blender is a great tool that is totally fucking irrelevant in 90% of places!!
AI is much the same.
It has valid, valuable, niche applications.
It is being used outside those applications to great misery and little effect.
guy who is more concerned about not using the scientific method than the actual killing people part (aka fanart of this post that made me laugh earlier)
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