‘The Patriots”: How Japanese Otaku Culture Created the Modern Net

This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge

“What do you mean ‘the otaku holds the key?’”

With thanks to Fire Water

The web is not merely a tool of democracy: it’s a tool of radical democracy. Civilisation as a whole is designed to take us, with each developmental step, further and further away from the cruel and violent, resource-intensive lifestyle that is its antithesis and from whence civilisation itself came. Fittingly, the internet was designed for, and so promotes, the disinterested sharing of such resources. The old paradigm most universally damaged in the Early Digital era — ground almost to dust, beyond sandblasting and examination, while the likes of trade, elective security and democracy still stand a beleaguered, though firm, three-part Ozymandias — is property.

“Property”; the philosophical forefather of the nation state most responsible for the commercialisation of the web once said about it that “Where there is no property, there can be no justice”.

Regardless of one’s personal stance on notions of property and justice and their relation, then, it is a fact that the culture of the internet has functionally if not legislatively repealed/suspended one of the foremost liberal legal…