The Earth is Superflat
Thomas Friedman may have been too early to tell, but the Earth is Superflat.
We’re about a decade past the height of the Brony phenomenon—a subculture in which young Western boys and men rejected masculinity in favor of My Little Pony. At the time, it was dismissed as internet cringe content fodder, but in hindsight, it offered a more telling look into our collective, prolonged adolescence.
Takahashi Murakami’s art has been popular in the West for a while—but it feels like his vision of a traumatized society turning to cuteness to assuage anxiety is only beginning to be realized outside of Japan.
Japan has been a great predictor of what life may look like in a post-scarce post-industrialized world. Ten years ago, we were bombarded with articles from publications like the BBC about Japan’s “disaster level” fertility rates. Britain and much of the rest of the post-industrialized world have fallen to similar numbers.
From the Vatican’s unveiling of their official anime mascot to the US military’s anime recruitment videos, it’s clear that in our socially balkanized, frenetic reality, we’ve stopped caring about conflicts in Eurasia or wars in Eastasia.
Instead, we’ve succumbed to a super flat, hedonistic existence.
I am curious how you'd describe Superflat in this context - I'm reading about the art movement, but I'm having a really hard time pulling out any specific aesthetic in it; so far it feels more...noisy than anything.
Cause like on one hand I'd call the Vatican thing super cringe, but it's interesting why - it's cringe in a way the BART anime mascots (BART is the train system in the Bay Area for those who dont know) are not.
And I think the reason is, well, a train having anime mascots makes perfect sense, and the gulf the mascots are trying to cross isn't that wide, so the ladder they represent fits across the gap.
Whereas the Vatican, its like someone bringing a 10 foot ladder to try crossing the Grand Canyon - of course it will be laughed at, it's woefully inadequate for bridging the chasm that actually exists.
To me, loving all this isn't childish or adolescent, its...being authentic. And what has changed, first in Japan, but now increasingly everywhere, is that being authentic no longer means you die of starvation or worse.
Go back 100 years ago, and well, you had to meld enough to at least have food. And those who couldn't...well, look at how many authors in Japan especially have their tales end with suicide - those who couldn't meld at all were likely to not survive, one way or another.
The reason I think it happened first in Japan was density - once prosperity was achieved as the country rose from the ashes of World War 2, it became that much more possible for the weirdos and eccentrics to find each other and make community. When you have a solid transit system in the biggest city on the planet, if there's only 1 of you for every 100,000 people? Well, that's still ~200-something in a single city if that city is Tokyo - and that's enough to build the beginnings of a subculture and start drawing converts.
And then the internet happened, and suddenly that became possible everywhere, to an even greater degree, with language as the only real barrier - and now even that barrier is starting to fall as machine translation becomes increasingly good.
Which is to say...to me, what we're really seeing is an awakening, as people en masse embrace their personal truths instead of giving them up in the name of being 'mature' and 'adult' and 'pragmatic'.
Also, of course, its capitalism - Japan broke first because the bubble popped there first, but now its everywhere. People arent having kids because they fuckin' can't afford it.
The Vatican could use better PR, or maybe not!