Look hard enough into a dystopia, and you’ll find an allegory of the here and now.
In The Time Machine, the barely human Elois and Morlocks are the result of class divisions from Victorian society, and they are destined to die out as casualties of a cold and uncaring universe. In Pixar’s film WALL-E, future humanity is portrayed as a race of obese couch potatoes controlled by a Walmart-esque corporation. It isn’t terribly hard to see what’s bothering them in each case.
So what about this season’s new science fiction show, Fractale? It stands out for being a science fiction anime that is neither cyberpunk nor set in space. In fact, like those examples I just cited, Fractale is in a subgenre of science fiction that deals with the implications of post-scarcity.
And the award for creepiest fractal image goes to...
In a post-scarcity world, society no longer structures itself around the value of physical goods. We usually assume that this would happen with the help of advanced technology, where the production of goods becomes so effortless that our old value systems collapse. After all, what is gold really worth if you can produce as much as you want at the touch of a button? But we haven’t quite gotten there yet, which is why this is usually treated as a distant future concept.
Or is it? We already live in a world where nearly any media, in principle, can be made into an infinite number of perfect copies and transmitted anywhere on the globe in seconds. And say what you will about the ethics of pirating, this has resulted in fascinating shifts of value. Now even identity is cheap; on screen, the only difference between a real user on Twitter and a spam bot is our fuzzy human instincts.
The Fractale system provides post-scarcity. And on the surface, Clain has everything taken care of: food, parental units, friends and hobbies. But the food is packaged nutrients, the parents and friends are phantasmal doppels/“doubles” dispersible at will, and the hobby is collecting fragments. There’s a disturbing lack of intimacy in this world, beneath the fantastical Da Vinci flying machines and rustic country surroundings.
However, it’s a kind of dissociation that we in the audience already know. For some of us it’s even on the same scale, where we talk to our friends on Skype, play games on PS3 and never actually have to interact with a human being in the flesh. If it weren’t for the bizarre Joan Miro-esque doppels and textbooks flat-out telling us that the Fractale system is amazing, I suspect we’d find Fractale’s setting only slightly fantastical.
Clain is simply an otaku in a postmodern otaku future, in a world of endless artifice. So far it doesn’t seem like such a bad dystopia to live in. But dystopia it is, for the heart and soul.
It's no wonder the poor boy has trouble dealing with a real girl.
Further reading
Aorii wonders if there’s even any reality under the fake god. Food for thought.
January 16, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Okay, my interest is piqued now – this is the kinda entry point I need for a sci-fi show. Thanks for a very incisive post on a show I was hitherto unsure about!
January 16, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Good to know! If you’re of an academic bent, it may interest you to know that the author of “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” is involved in this production. And in an interesting way, his influence shows.
Hope you enjoy it! Thanks for reading.
January 16, 2011 at 8:10 pm
It would be nice if you could explain how we can clearly see that influence.
January 16, 2011 at 9:48 pm
TheBigN: Sure. In the book, Azuma argues that otaku have created a kind of replacement for the old Japanese world view (whatever it was), which had been literally exploded and occupied by the west after World War II. There are two earlier phases in otaku history as he sees it, but more to the point, Azuma describes two concepts that he believes are central to contemporary otaku culture, the “database” and “hyperflatness.” They’re basically two ways in which computers and the man-machine interface have left their influence on otaku.
The Fractale System (without putting too fine a point on it, since we don’t know many details) is an ubiquitous digital-neural Internet that affects how people interact with the physical world. So I can see Azuma’s influence here, because the way Clain sees his interactions (“They’re just doppels”) and the world at large is like that of a contemporary otaku– an animal of the database.
Does that make sense? I’m doing this at 6 in the morning, so it feels like a bit of a doozy.
January 16, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Indeed, another interesting way to look at Fractale. Few folks realize just how many questions this show is asking us, the viewers, much like certain series did before.
Thanks for the link to Aorii’s too.
January 16, 2011 at 2:21 pm
It’s good sci-fi! Rather refreshing, in that light.
You’re very welcome.
Thanks for reading. I quite liked your new entry, too!
January 16, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Clain’s nervous behaviour around nude girls is actually at odds with a post-scarcity setting of this type.. unless the Fractale system manages the propagation of the race artificially and people get no sex ed. We’ll have to wait and see whether his nervous response was anything more than cutesy cliche.
January 16, 2011 at 2:23 pm
You think so? The level of porn consumption we have today doesn’t make our first experience with a real naked woman any less nerve-wracking, I think.
If anything, not to be crude, but I think the answer depends on whether you can physically touch a doppel or not.
January 16, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I suppose, and I’ll have to see more before I know how to respond. People who live like Clain in our time would not respond nervously to others only when they are nude.. yet that’s the only time he really seemed to get panicky.
And yes, crude or not, I agree that we’ll have to see whether physical contact with a doppel is possible, or if they’re just holograms that cannot look like anything remotely human.
January 16, 2011 at 2:16 pm
I think Phryne is still difficult to handle even if the guy’s used to real girls xD Haha!
January 16, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Yes, you know, she was a bit… much.
But it seems like there are legitimate reasons she’s so out-there, so I’m hoping she comes back soon.
Thanks for reading!
January 18, 2011 at 2:03 pm
So far she strikes me as “Manic Pixy Dream Girl”, of the mysterious-miko subspecies.
I didn’t react well to the show, too much of the structure felt like an imperfectly-accomplished journeyman aping master-work. If you’re going to dare to play Miyazaki, you’d better have the chops. Gainax did a better job than A-1, even if they did flame-out spectacularly after a half-dozen episodes of Nadia. Same goes, more recently, for BONES and Xam’d. A-1 just isn’t a particularly talented company. They can do “fun”, but they don’t seem capable of virtuosity.
January 16, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Mmmh, I think we’re still pretty far. I mean, “we talk to our friends on Skype, play games on PS3 and never actually have to interact with a human being in the flesh”, yes, but people today still treat netfriends and RLfriends hugely different, and always seek to meet their best friends physically whenever possible. Personal relations and business negotiations can only get down to its deeper levels when talking face-to-face, and frankly I doubt we’ll let go of it anytime soon…
January 16, 2011 at 2:31 pm
For me, it’s difficult to say, because the difference is getting blurry in my personal life. I’m not alone in Japan, but the level of closeness isn’t much. Meanwhile my close friends back home are now distant online figures, some of whom I have to construct from memory, it’s been so long since we’ve physically met.
We may disagree on this, but I think it’s only a matter of time. Not that that’s bad, if we figure out some way other than doppels.
January 19, 2011 at 5:12 pm
I get a lot of that too, especially highschool/college friends I haven’t seen in person since grad >o<, but…
I'm not sure. My parents always tell me that closeness and longing for physical contact with friends and the extended family grows with age. When one's young we're fine with running about trying to accomplish something. But whether people are *really* slowly disregarding the value of physical interaction or does it just seem that way with younger generations… imo, there's going to be a balancing point there inbetween and we're not doppel-ing ourselves quite as fast as many believe (shrug).
January 16, 2011 at 2:29 pm
It kills me that I missed this angle. Great post.
January 16, 2011 at 2:33 pm
On the other hand, it makes me really happy that this entry wasn’t as obvious and derivative as I was afraid it was going to be.
I mean, it’s Azuma, right? His touch had to be there somewhere.
Thanks for reading~
January 16, 2011 at 7:38 pm
My thoughts exactly. It’s obvious in retrospect, especially since, as Brian Ruh noted on ANN, Azuma is inspired by Huxley’s Brave New World.
And now, a race to see who will be the first to write about the similarities between Fractale and Brave New World. Ready? Go!
January 16, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Hmm. Looking at the two together, I can see some immediate similarities to the Fractale system and the role of soma in the world government… But you’re right, this merits a post on its own. Time’s ticking.
January 16, 2011 at 10:51 pm
haha having just read A Brave New World the similarities jumped out at me, too. For example, the phasing out of an emotionally balanced human existence. But i think I’ll leave the comparison at that…
January 18, 2011 at 2:09 pm
We need to give them enough time to get more pixels on harddisk to make that judgment. So far, Fractale is still both-feet-planted in shounen-manga-land. There’s no sense of “danger” which might suggest the sort of truly disturbing notions which a move towards Brave New World exploration might produce.
Right now, I’m getting more flavor from SHAFT’s new dark-magical-girls show (“Yuno Goes to Hell”) than Fractale, although I’ve only seen the first episodes of each.
January 16, 2011 at 3:08 pm
It’s a bit of a digression to make for what seemed like a side comment, buuuuuut…
I would argue that identity is not cheap but is actually quite the commodity these days. The “only difference between a real user and a spam bot” on any given social network is that the real user increases the social network’s value, where the spam bot’s presence actually decreases the social network’s value, by decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Real users contribute to the network’s topography both directly by adding their friendship graphs the network, and by luring more people to the network to do the same. All the while, these users are also contributing their personal data: what I like, who I like, where I am, what sort of media I consume, what sort of products I use. Additionally, some of the more creative users are also contributing their creative works to the network. Users at pixiv, deviantart, etc contribute their artwork. Users at soundcloud and its ilk contribute their audio works. One might joke that users at nicodouga or youtube contribute their inanity in the form of comments, but of course they’re filling both sites with videos of various sorts. Users of blog services like this one contribute their writing. These contributions attract people to the virtual host’s playground and ultimately result in more customers, in essence working as free advertising of a sort as they flesh out the service’s portfolio simply by using it.
In the end, companies like Facebook are worth quite a bit of money because identity has value. I think, if anything, this actually supports your position, as it seems like a preview of “things to come”. If/When society breaks the material scarcity barrier, what *will* have value, if not identity? If the creative products of the mind can be replicated ad infinitum with no practical cost, it may well be that a copy of the creative product itself might have no trade value to speak of, but the creation of the first copy of the work will be an act with great value, and certainly the mind(s) that performed such an act of creation will have even greater value.
…and we are already there.
(For bonus points, what if the creative minds themselves could be duplicated? Or engineered? This seems a good question for post-Singularity sci-fi. Maybe Fractale will have something interesting to say.)
January 16, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Interesting that you should home in on this subject. I just read an article about post-scarcity and the steps we might take to get there, and one of the more immediate intermediate steps (after gradually devaluing traditional luxury goods) is to commoditize ourselves. It seems strange and undesirable to us now, but that’s only because we mentally equate ourselves to the objects we currently value. Assuming those objects cease to have any value, what else is important, what else could have any value except ourselves and the things we can do?
Great thoughts. Cheers!
January 17, 2011 at 11:30 pm
I’m reminded of “The Dancers at the End of Time” series by Michael Moorcock.
It’s about an insanely distant future in which everyone is basically immortal due to the nearly magical rings they wear. The rings are ultra hi-tech items capable of finely orchestrating weather, reshaping the land to the users whim and bringing the dead back to life, among many other things.
In that far distant future, the ability to entertain is highly valued. But everyone has been alive for so long that they are very jaded. Consequently, ingenuity is the thing most valued.
The series itself is actually a good 30 or 40 years old and the concept is far more fantasy than science fiction. However, the basic premise seems fairly strongly related to the discussion of post-scarcity.
When all physical wants are satisfied, what more can we want than food for the brain?
January 16, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Actually Fracale’s setting is not revolutionary. I have already seen it in a lot of hard SF books, including Greg Egan one’s. But those works are quite difficult to apprehend to the non-techie. I don’t think you will agree with me but I personnaly think we would still be human if we our selves were simulated in a computer program, so it could provide could lead a post-scarcity world.
January 18, 2011 at 11:12 am
No, hardly revolutionary, you’re right. Post-scarcity is even something of a hot topic these days. But it’s interesting how it’s being portrayed here, in context of Azuma’s concerns about the fragmentation and animalization of otaku culture.
Thanks for reading! I’m afraid I’m not much of a sci-fi reader, let alone hard SF, but it sounds very interesting. I’ll give it a look.
January 18, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Egan’s pretty hard-SF, and is kind of an alpha-nerd’s writer. I haven’t read him in a while, because his books are all kind of a kind – you’ve read two or three, you’ve read the rest.
Karl Schroeder wrote a book recently, Lady of Mazes, which seems thematically similar to Fractale, albeit much more complicated for the nonce. His take-away theorem is “technologies are a choice”, the idea that techne implies culture, that the stuff a culture creates replicates and recapitulates the culture and defines it. You’d think that implies the cargo-cult fallacy, but not so much.
January 16, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Thanks for reminding me that we’re already living in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia.
January 18, 2011 at 11:12 am
Scary, huh? All we’re missing is the Soylent Green.
January 19, 2011 at 9:10 pm
We did have that, until Upton Sinclair said something about it.
January 16, 2011 at 7:02 pm
It’s interesting that Clain lives in a pretty, natural environment out in the country, but his life is tied down by something extremely unnatural (the Fractale system). It’s hard to make judgments about Fractale after just one episode, but it seems like it will be another story with a commentary about where our future is headed, kind of like Summer Wars (the countryside/technology juxtaposition is there too). In a way, I’m one of those people who can enjoy many things in life without a physical human companion, but there are times when I do desire such human contact. If the value of real human interactions were to disappear completely, like it seems to be in Fractale, that would indeed be scary.
I also like how you called Clain an otaku. Now that I think about it, would he be an old technology otaku?
January 18, 2011 at 11:26 am
There are already plenty of old tech otaku now. I see them in Den Den Town buying all sorts of strange and obscure things… Anyway, I’m an easily lonesome person, so the world of Fractale would be a nightmare for me.
Interesting observation re: Summer Wars!
January 16, 2011 at 8:14 pm
I definitely want to see more world-building out of Fractale, and definitely more of what makes Clain’s fascination with outdated technology so.
January 18, 2011 at 11:26 am
I get the sense that it’s almost common, his kind of digging for artifacts. At least the fair he was at seemed to have many of his kind there.
January 16, 2011 at 10:01 pm
This series made everything seem so unreal to me. I think it was one of the most enjoyable premiers of the season, and the technology in that world really caught my eye. Prior to this post, I wouldn’t have made the dystopian connect, but now that you mention it…it is a perfect-seeming world but with gaping flaws. The definition of a dystopian. And of course in this case, the flaws would be that people aren’t always people (the parents, his friend) and what does that mean for the world?
On another note, I laughed at the use of ‘parental units’ as it occurred to me that this show takes that term to a whole new level.
January 18, 2011 at 11:49 am
Oh, I’m so glad you caught that!
I try to choose my words carefully.
The “new god” angle that the digital textbook was pushing so hard also had me raising an eyebrow, as well as the daily prayer. What was supposed to happen if Clain hadn’t been interrupted by Phryne’s sudden appearance?
January 16, 2011 at 10:57 pm
Haven’t heard the term post-scarcity before, but i like it. Any good articles exploring the term in depth?
January 18, 2011 at 11:50 am
Like many things, Wikipedia and its works cited section is a great place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
January 17, 2011 at 1:11 am
Many would argue that communication online is inferior or less emotional than face-to-face communication. It is certainly true that many face-to-face communication techniques are no longer applicable online (e.g., gentle touch, concerned look). However, the online communication is developing new techniques (e.g. emoticons, lol, ect) that are increasingly effective in conveying the emotional quality of the message. What is problematic, is, of course, that one would need to be steeped in the internet culture to read these overtones. For instance, an older friend of mine had a terrible time interpreting one message he received as he did not understand the joking/playful undertone of a lol following a message. There, is, however, a backlash against using emoticons as they appear unprofessional. This is disappointing as these techniques would help to color internet messages — the exact criticism that people have against digital communication.
So I think Fractal system can be personal and emotional. However, one would need to know the specialized communication techniques and be able to interpret them. Kind of like how we learn to interpret a grimace as a sign of pain or a smile as a friendly gesture.
January 19, 2011 at 11:28 am
That’s an interesting point. Narratively, it makes sense for the unimportant characters to be abstracted doppels (ghostlightning mentions something along these lines), but on the level of emotional interaction, it seems like a recipe for madness.
Nice point you make about emoticons. Personally, I’m compelled to use them all the time.
Thanks for reading!
January 17, 2011 at 8:07 am
[...] http://2dteleidoscope.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/fractale-and-the-psychology-of-post-scarcity/ [...]
January 17, 2011 at 9:05 am
I’m still unwilling to make too many judgments on the world in Fractale. What we might be looking at is an isolated case of loneliness in a radically different world than what we know of.
January 19, 2011 at 11:28 am
This is true. I recently reflected on the fact that I’m basically doing first episode impressions posts here.
January 17, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Given your reading of the series, I am amused that the protagonist is named (C)Lain.
January 17, 2011 at 11:23 pm
Cain + Lain?
January 19, 2011 at 11:29 am
You don’t seem to understand. A shame; you seemed an honest man.
January 18, 2011 at 7:53 am
Fractale is still a big mystery to me.
January 19, 2011 at 11:30 am
To all of us, I think. But it’s fun to speculate. Thanks for reading!
January 18, 2011 at 10:49 am
Ironically, @krizzlybear, @Dez691, @Cr4zyDave & I discussed this very topic while watching the show simultaneously over Skype. We were discussing the somewhat fascistic elements of a completely managed life underneath the Fractale system that gave birth to a society of highly functioning hikkikomoris that have difficulty interacting with others in the flesh. The naked girl wasn’t the only person Clain felt uncomfortable around, if you see him in the junk market the other humans there also unnerve him to a degree.
The fact that we came to this conclusion during a #sccsav chat is weeeeeird. Time to go make some meatspace friends.
January 18, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Hmm, close, but “fascistic” implies a) some sort of radical racism or nationalism or group identity, and the Fractale world on first impression seems to lean towards deracinated social ubiquity and b) fascist societies require “group organization”: rallies, collective ritual, the heady narcotic of physical immersion in the crowd.
The Fractale system seems theocratic in a weirdly isolated fashion, individuals absorbed into the Eschaton on a daily basis without themselves participating in that godhead. It’s a sort of totalitarianism, but a peculiar one, like the techno-God is spiritually farming a world of shut-ins.
January 19, 2011 at 11:33 am
I remain unconvinced about that “techno-god” business. Though that one antagonist girl’s comment about Fractale telling her someone was injured (when she was pretending to be a nurse, but apparently it’s still possible) gives me some pause.
January 18, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Or is it? We already live in a world where nearly any media, in principle, can be made into an infinite number of perfect copies and transmitted anywhere on the globe in seconds.
First thought: it’ll be a world in which the endlessly entertained starve to death alone. Because in our current “post-scarcity” world, food riots are breaking out across the Maghreb, in Algeria, the Sudan, and Egypt, yes, but also in European-rich Tunisia.
Post-scarcity is not an inevitability, and the only things which are infinitely replicable is data, impressions, ideas and entertainment. This is the thing that always drives me nuts about future-art like Fractale: a fundamental disrespect by artists towards that which forms the sinews of reality. Logistical requirements, returns on investment, attention and effort. An artist can draw an apparently infinite urban landscape of Metropolis gone metastatic, but the energy, organization, and purpose required to drive those edifices of alloy and stone into the upper aether is dismissed as a conspiracy of brutal selfishness, villainy, or corruption, if it’s discussed at all.
Meanwhile, I was just watching the original Slayers TV season, and I couldn’t help but think that in a world with cheap and easy creation of massive golems & impressive magical energies, everyone lives in squalid little medieval hovel-clusters. Lina Inverse controls the energy-wealth of a small, post-modern industrial country, and all she uses it do is to randomly rearrange the landscape under trolls, fish-men, and bandits.
In short, energy is wealth, and energy is fundamentally scarce.
January 19, 2011 at 11:35 am
Mmm, well, as it stands now, we can’t have post-scarcity. The reason it’s sci-fi is because the concept usually implies automation and space mining of raw materials. The modern limitlessness of data is only useful as a comparison of how our value of media has changed.
But these are some good thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
January 19, 2011 at 3:39 am
[...] going on here than just nostalgia, perhaps hinted at by the main character being named (C)Lain (see what 2DT has to say). Since Link and TBN have talked about Azuma, I will, too. It looks as though this series is taking [...]
January 19, 2011 at 4:59 pm
I haven’t seen Fractale yet, but it very much reminds me of Brave New World, and its unique take on dystopia.
January 19, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Realized I’m way late to the party after scrolling up and reading the comments…
January 25, 2011 at 6:02 am
[...] been much discussion surrounding Fractale and its setting. 2DT over at 2D-Teleidoscope has postulated that Fractale falls into the sub-genre of science fiction that concerns itself with [...]
January 25, 2011 at 5:42 pm
[...] been much discussion surrounding Fractale and its setting. 2DT over at 2D-Teleidoscope has postulated that Fractale falls into the sub-genre of science fiction that concerns itself with [...]
January 27, 2011 at 4:24 am
[...] so far, Fractale is just another (genki) magical-girl-falls-into-boy’s-lap show, despite the post-scarcity science fiction setting. I’ve seen this show before. So have you. And we both know that it’s not something [...]
January 29, 2011 at 5:23 am
[...] 2D-Telescope looks at the post-scarcity and dysfunction in Fractale. All I can think about Fractale&… [...]