If you can track down a copy of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Hiroki Azuma actually describes this process.
To summarize the book- he says that in our current postmodern landscape, what consumers want isn’t narrative (because stories are pointless). What they want is a database of their favourite things, and they want to selectively consume the things in the database based on their own tastes, just remixed forever (A Tsundere is a Tsundere is a Tsundere, it doesn’t matter what color is the waifu’s hair). In effect trading ‘humanity’ to become ‘animals’, just mindlessly consuming the same things over and over again.
The analysis is postmodern and not marxist tho, so he attributes all this to the death of grand narratives and not capital. Still, the book is interesting since you can see those processes happening right now, with the Marvelification/Disneyfication of media
If you can track down a copy of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Hiroki Azuma actually describes this process.
To summarize the book- he says that in our current postmodern landscape, what consumers want isn’t narrative (because stories are pointless). What they want is a database of their favourite things, and they want to selectively consume the things in the database based on their own tastes, just remixed forever (A Tsundere is a Tsundere is a Tsundere, it doesn’t matter what color is the waifu’s hair). In effect trading ‘humanity’ to become ‘animals’, just mindlessly consuming the same things over and over again.
The analysis is postmodern and not marxist tho, so he attributes all this to the death of grand narratives and not capital. Still, the book is interesting since you can see those processes happening right now, with the Marvelification/Disneyfication of media