Now that we've discovered what makes our fans tick, let's saturate the market with substandard product!

I love reading Seth Godin’s blog. I’ve been a fan ever since I watched his TED talk and read Tribes. Today he wrote a post about the evolution of every medium:

1. Technicians who invented it, run it
2. Technicians with taste, leverage it
3. Artists take over from the technicians
4. MBAs take over from the artists
5. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality

This happened to radio, TV, movies, and novels, and it’s happening to the Internet. Our local film studios and TV stations churn out formulaic content because the bureaucrats are in charge, looking to make a quick buck from media they can’t even begin to understand.

Right now otaku-culture magazines fill the newstands, and the trouble is that one can’t help but feel that they’re being mass-produced to pump circulation numbers in order to satisfy the real customers — the corporate sponsors. Now in my opinion corporate sponsorship is not evil in and of itself, despite my obvious libertarian leanings. It becomes a destructive influence when it becomes the main focus instead of actually serving the fans.

This applies to cosplay, too. I think that many of the earlier ‘purist’ cosplayers sense this corrosive tendency, which is why they’re so vehemently opposed to it. Of course, since corporate sponsorship makes most of the local events possible in the first place, there seems to be an element of self-loathing in play.

Let’s face it. Profit-seeking eventually takes over every medium whose caretakers stop caring about actually using it to uplift, enlighten, and entertain. Commercials become louder and flashier than the shows they sponsor. The key, I think, isn’t to abandon the medium to the hyenas, or to whine that it was better ‘in the good old days’. The key is to make sure someone continues to raise the flag for true fans.

Besides, otaku can tell when love and care has been poured into something. No one does dedication and attention like otaku.

My web hosting has been down for the better part of the day. So I have just enough time to put up an Omake today, but instead of the usual funny or entertaining clip, I wanted to post a talk from one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin. It’ll explain why I’m such a passionate otaku, why I want to be Otaking, and maybe even inspire you to start your own tribe.

“It’s not money or politics but TRIBES that will change our world.”

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So who would win in a fistfight: Malcolm Gladwell or Chris Anderson? Is Free the Price of the Future, or will goods and services still be Priced to Sell?

The ACME Company of the classic Strong Bad email universe (you’ll notice I don’t call it the Homestarrunner Universe), Cheap As Free is famous throughout Strongbadia for products of dubious quality, ranging from action figures to children’s books to this opening credits sequence.

This reflects the prevailing belief that “you get what you pay for”. Well, maybe not prevailing for too long. Two of my favorite authors appear to be having a bit of an intellectual disagreement over the concept of Free.

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So far all I’ve talked about are the strange niche interests I’m into, and I haven’t given more than a passing mention for all the things I ‘ought’ to be into as a member of the greater otaku community. I haven’t talked about Heroes, which I am told should be right up my alley. I haven’t said anything about World of Warcraft, which I haven’t played past the first newbie quest. I haven’t discussed Blackest Night or Civil War. I haven’t watched Naruto or Bleach. I am a poor representative of the cross-section of otaku, and therefore have no right to prescribe what people should or shouldn’t watch or read or listen to.

Boy, it’s a good thing I’m not doing that.

I’m not claiming to be the final arbiter on otaku tastes. I’m just claiming to be an otaku who happens to have tastes. You’re not going to see me call something a must-see or must-read or must-have. Conversely, I’m not going to tell you not to see something I didn’t like.

The book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson contains a discussion about two kinds of filters: pre-filters and post-filters. Pre-filters are predictive in nature and act as a gateway. Think of talent scouts who try to guess which musical acts are going to be hits and which are going to flop. Same thing goes for movies, or tv shows, or books. In each of these cases there are limited resources — limited radio airtime, limited theaters, limited programming slots, limited shelf space. The pre-filters allocate these limited resources to acts or shows or movies or books that they predict will be ‘hits’, that is, widely popular to a large segment of the population.

Go to your local bookstore and note how much shelf space is allocated to Twilight and its sequels. You’ll see what I mean.

Post-filters, on the other hand, are recommendatory in nature. As opposed to pre-filters, which determine what makes it into the market and what doesn’t, post-filters like blogs and search engines and review sites go through the stuff that is already there. They are descriptive and recommendatory, rather than prescriptive and predictive.

Unfortunately people confuse the two types of filters. Notice how some people won’t even watch anything that doesn’t get at least a 75% Fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com or 4 stars on THEM Anime Reviews, or won’t listen to a band that ‘nobody’ has heard of, meaning that they’ve never hit the Billboard Top 100. There is safety in numbers, and the safest opinion you can hold is an opinion held by the most number of people.

This is the exact opposite of what this rambling manifesto is about.

None of us match the image of the ‘ideal’ otaku. Being the otaking isn’t about attaining some abstract idea of perfection. I have a girl friend who is quirky, hyper, and just a little bit neurotic. These little foibles makes her extremely appealing to many men, and yet she is obsessed with attaining a ‘normal life’, whatever the heck that is, because she is afraid of being called ‘weird’, which is the most cruel indictment people who strive for normalcy can level against you. She seems completely unaware of the fact that if she ever attains normalcy, she would lose the unique traits that make her attractive in the first place.

Everybody knows the saying ‘You can’t please everybody’, but no one seems to follow it. Our hit-driven culture has convinced us that the best we can do is make sure we appeal to everybody. We shoehorn ourselves into normal-shaped pigeonholes. We sand off our rough edges to make of ourselves round pegs for round holes. One lawyer sitting in front of me as I write this just made a joke about how there is a thin line between genius and insanity. This seems to imply that it’s better to be stupid than to be thought of as weird.

Like lost ants wandering around in a never-ending loop we follow the circular mill until we drop dead, without ever reaching the normal, average ideal we’ve spent our lives trying to attain. So finally we arrive at the point of this manifesto:

To my fellow weirdos of the world: Wake up!

Following the leader only works when someone is striving to lead. The very definition of leadership means walking ahead of everyone else, treading paths you blaze yourself. Never apologize for being interested in things other people consider weird or unpopular or stupid. Wear your strangeness like a badge of honor!

As Douglas Rushkoff declared at Disinfocon: “Find the others!” This is the Internet Age after all! Just because no one in your neighborhood or your school or your workplace is into ball-jointed dolls or existentialist philosophy or cosplay is no reason to give up your passion! We are no longer limited by geography, by the small social groups forced on us by the circumstances of where we live, where we study, where we work. The Internet has removed the obstacles to finding that one person in Finland, in Slovakia, in Argentina, who’s into the same weird crap you’re into. Find the others, because they’re out there! And if no one is leading the tribe when you finally find them, then lead them out of darkness yourself, as Seth Godin would say.

The idea of society as an undifferentiated lump of averages is obsolete. This is the age of the long tail, the age of the heretic, the age of the niche, the age of the independent enthusiast, the age of the otaku! The Dream of the Homogenous Normal is over!

To my fellow otaku of the world: Wake up!