And now, my heart will be hopping

The news, as has been suggested to me by civics lessons, informs a critical public. Technology instead has been thrust upon me in an information age that is past ripe. It is clear to me by now that ingesting a modern daily news, where images of community raids and poetic destruction are beamed directly as seizure, is more of a ritual that allows one to hallucinate a Fourth Estate than an enrichment. The amateur blend of news now found in true crime, Joe Rogan hang-ons, investigative reporting learned from Google Docs callouts, and live stream clips beamed from suburban bedrooms by influencers with ring lights, dizzies before one is allowed a thought that might focus them. The supposed professionals, as we hope to think, are not doing much better to distinguish themselves. The Grey Lady now sells their news on the side as a game publisher with a bonus of endless, pulsing, full color video. Democracy dies not in darkness, but with bankers boxes from editorial staff clearing the room so that the invisible hand can direct more salutes of business. Talking heads, evolved from grey hair dulls into slicked-back DUI hires, now have their clearest path to upwards mobility by sitting in the rotating chair on podcasts or skipping all standards to be confirmed as Chief of War Crimes. These acknowledgements are not comforts themselves, in a traditional way as you or I will understand a warm blanket or a tricot dakimakura cover, but a fun house comfort that allows one to believe they are able to parse the ruins of our media landscape with complete clarity. Wake up and smell the coffee: underneath the rubble, there is still a gaggle of men stuck in 2015, hugging their Kafuu Chino dakimakura and calling it media.

The iteration of media’s current forms did not arrive all at once, or without truths borrowed from the style guides and behaviors of mass broadcast. Dan Rather may be one of the most recognized of our grey hair dulls, as one of America’s “Big Three” evening news anchors for CBS, but he is no less an encapsulation of the thrust from technology. Most of the urgency of modern hurricane reporting is owed to Dan’s time at KHOU in Houston, where Hurricane Carla would be the first time satellite images of a storm were projected on a scale map, urging the largest evacuation performed during peacetime to this point. Telestar I, the first telecommunications satellite launched in 1962, was the first time live images were broadcast globally by satellite on CBS. The year after, in 1963, he was one of the first to screen and narrate the amateur Zapruder film out of Dallas. Any understanding of media or television is incomplete without also an understanding of Vietnam, where Dan was on the front lines for the living room war enabled by satellite and video tape; by his own account, he was ill-prepared for the gravity of the role. The highlight of this five year window is not necessarily to regale technological accomplishment, or to tour Dan’s presiding over major events in his tenure as an evening news anchor, but to bookend with where you will ultimately find Dan now: writing a Substack, swimming in the trash heap with the rest of us. The conveyors of technology, Dan’s words, have pushed him into the blogosphere, though only after experiencing a stint as a podcaster. His Substack equal has now been absorbed as the boss of news on the network where he first developed any authority at all.

Neil Postman, an already renowned media theorist during Reagan’s political star, would most pointedly express that serious television is not just worse than useless, but embarrassing. Dan would attempt to override this modality at his outset by inventing his own take on Walter Cronkite’s signoff, but lacked the courage to continue after one week. In reality, it is mostly the squabble between Dan and George HW Bush dissected by expert political analysts for form, not content, that became an emphasis on Postman’s core thesis that television encouraged tennis matches of picking winners, completing television news primarily as entertainment. The submission of news to technology is where Postman’s critique postures some of its strongest in a modern examination, not the least when Dan also attempted to pass off a proportionally-spaced Microsoft Word document as originating from a typewriter. The specifics of this episode are best revisited in broad strokes, recognizing attempts at sourcing, verification, and correction were gestured at more than ever really attempted. The cranks on the Free Republic forums, obsessed with exposing the liberal media bias, shattered the illusion minutes after they were first presented. A concise analysis posted there the day after should have been good enough to expedite a retraction. CBS instead moved at the speed of television, choosing to take twelve days to correct the record. Dan, rather, continues to defend the story in interview appearances years after his departure from the network. Thrown at once into the hurricane of an information age, there is not necessarily any assurance you will learn much when coming out bitter and confused on the other side, separated from an over 40 year career.

Similar embarrassments today have been worse than enduring. The outcomes and their expressions, however, are still not foregone either. Of the lawn chair media critics that do remain, most prefer to pose what past luminaries like Postman or Nam June Paik would make of our now accepted mediums in podcasts and short-burst social media. The atomization of news, disjointed into segments that arrest thought as they are chained back together, would be as clearly seen by Postman as the remote control was to Federico Fellini in interrupting an emotion. What, then, would Gochiusa News (ごちうさニュース) be to Postman, if not the ultimate embarrassment that our news deserves?

“Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the "Now... this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.”
_{— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death}

Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? (Gochiusa), when it was first broadcast during the spring of 2014, began when simulcasts were not a complete substitute. Depending on how much you can remember the anticipation of fansubs, it may be difficult to accept that in Japan it did not release on streaming services without a few days of broacast delay from its airing on Tokyo MX. Gochiusa was likely to have been a success without streaming, though a great deal of the fandom is still attributed to its attention on Niconico, where the participatory nature of layered comments remains attractive even today over better streaming options under the Kadokawa umbrella. A specific diehard audience, at scale, is imperative to it being an appealing option at all. Gochiusa, not necessarily uniquely but as one of the more prominent examples, had each new episode free to view for its first week on Nico. Operative to this recount, the first episode remained free to view through Gochiusa’s entire broadcast run and after it concluded for a stretch. Gochiusa’s first episode, it feels now, was predestined to become an informal meeting space for fans, creating conditions for the raucousness of a Rocky Horror Picture screening seasoned with otaku inventiveness.

The common Gochiusa fanatic here has more overlap with the average K-pop fan than they likely care to admit, as the initial goal of their attention was to push this episode to one million views and to run it further up the site’s ranking charts. On Nico, where view counts have always been protected for rankings rather than inflated exponentially, every view captures an active engagement that can’t be equated to YouTube or other global platforms. One million views continues to be an accomplishment of magnitude on the site, and especially so in the era before it stopped requiring user registration. While numbers-chasing is potentially enough of a carrot to snowball an audience, the fervor around Gochiusa has larger otaku recognition. With Comiket 86 (C86) as Gochiusa’s first debut, corporate booths from Houbunsha and RONDO ROBE were ready to lay out the proverbial otaku carpet with dakimakura, tapestries, and bed sheets. The result, as you can still find expressed on dives back into dusty blogs and profiles, was mayhem: each item’s stock sold out on the first day, though not without also forcing many to wait in lines until closing time that they had queued for in the early morning.

By the second and third days of C86, either from rationing what was left or having learned from the crowds in their first day of bumbling around, stocks at these booths were depleted within minutes. We know this today not because of my fastidiousness in combing old tweets declaring breaking news, but because Gochiusa fans on Nico were monitoring intel and have compiled a C86 merch table for posterity plastered with 完売 (sold out) labels, as if we are still gawking at the same merch advertisement boards affixed with stickers on each item. Communicating merch stock has long been considered an advanced tactic of Comiket information warfare, stretching back to Nanoha in 2006, and social media is the preferred theater for making things up as you go along. Nanoha’s sold out and war is cruel. Gochiusa fans are hopping in and out of line. Someone at the Garupan booth just collapsed to the floor pissing and shitting themselves. Gochiusa fans would feed on this potential prestige of earning title as the next Nanoha, when such title meant something. The invention of Gochiusa as news was therefore not modeled by any serious event, or even one rooted in any true reality with anecdotes meant to lightly smear respective fandoms, but an opportunity to stamp ごちうさ完売 (Gochiusa’s sold out) over Chino’s face on Nico as template as they declared themselves refugees from one of Comiket’s worst trials.

There’s too much fluff to pretend the newspaper is worth reading every morning. Gochiusa News, preferably, returns the fluff to its co-anchors. Gochiusa’s first episode becoming an informal wire service for otaku would only need a few danmaku repavings to overwrite the initial context of breathless Comiket reports, beginning with headlines front loaded in the first few seconds of playback. What did eventually develop this with the moniker “Gochiusa News”, as if to suggest it had secured a broadcasting license, was the 2014 snap election colliding with this episode also being on the precipice of two million views. Japan’s politics have been a prominent fixture of Nico’s democratic engagement since it adopted live streaming, but what intrigues here is not that the otaku have thoughts on politicians, but that the 2014 election would be, and remains, a low point in voter turnout. Syaro and Chino fans are not yet a political class, but still the headlines about Abenomics and the weakness of the democratic opposition are littered through the comment log during this time. It is frighteningly conceivable that someone could have extracted all of their news for the day from these headlines alone, but the posing of serious news over latte art could convey no more clearly that dooming headlines were undeserving of the grandeur that they tote. Gochiusa News became settled primarily, here, as performance. Most contemporary invokes of it would more sharply narrow it as breaking news (ごちうさ速報), except if you live in Oita prefecture, and there is perhaps no performance more enduring than news that never stops breaking. Even with comments posted at their largest font and their most urgent, they are immediately shoved under layers of more novel noise, pushed to the back as quickly as they were never seen or inspired thought about to begin with.

Even as a crowd, there is an editorial voice that applies to Gochiusa News in that of the daringly absurd. The nakedness of a deadly car crash being invoked next to Bitcoin price reports presents not so much a slice of life, taken in as nibbles coming from multiple sources, but as a dense pound cake of the ludicrous being shoved directly into your stupid face. The awe of this spectacle itself, where every headline can barely be discerned as visual content, is holistically the news. Tabloids exploded by a hydraulic press would retain more recognizable context. Tweets in a timeline collapsed into a single post container would still impress some average of attribution. Gochiusa News may elect to find more shared in a graffiti wall dedicated as community bulletin board, with a similar adherence to informal rules not established by committee but inferred from other participants. Unlike the rules that would be common to graffiti, where tagging over another another’s work where ample room was still available would be considered bad practice, the overwhelm toes vandalism as each comment can only be valuable to the performance in a whole. Gochiusa News does focus where informality must be sacredly respected: news should only flood the screen until Cocoa’s first line, starting at 35 seconds, so as not to cross-talk. The first user to specifically mention this phenomenon would invoke it as the 31 second rule (31秒ルール), a direction accounting for comments taking at most four seconds to clear the screen at their posted timestamp. As Postman would describe for the nibbles of televised interviews and news segments, there is never enough time for anything but the openers and the irreverence of time-keeping.

An assembled danmaku shares more with a supposedly serious news than we should be comfortable with. Comments scrolling from right to left, punchily condensed so as to catch the eye swimming among others, are evocative of the news tickers that dart around skyscrapers or sit with importance as chyrons below the faces of nightmare round tables. Tickers are undoubtedly the best characteristic of visual news, so much that they are globally recognized when performed for parody in blockbuster movies or by amateurs opening Windows Movie Maker. Everything one could hope to know about the world is promised within a ticker, not with enough patience to read it in full, but with a darting gaze back and forth over it searching for some end to an infinite. Does anyone truly expect to find enlightening news outlined here, enriching beyond school delays and closings, when the events described are churned through and atomized as a flurry of unconnected points? It seems difficult to emphatically answer “no” to this question when, for a large cohort of adults, a scroll at the bottom of news as entertainment may be their only brush with news at all. The danmaku, at least, has sense to not keep one waiting when it blasts as confetti. The heart does not hop with anticipation of a leap here, but with an arrhythmia stunned by a flash bang of infotainment.

A lone individual repeating the dignity of a news anchor projecting steadiness will always be difficult to achieve in a 500-channel universe. Gochiusa News, instead, tunes its expression as a mass hysteria. For some period during its most prolific years, searching for “1” alone on Google or Yahoo! Japan would present Gochiusa’s first episode and related pages on Nico as top results¹, a vote of endorsement in the ratings rat race against other first episodes. While cable news may have been antecedent as only a finite and closed universe, the web has certainly graduated ourselves to uncountable multiverses. Gochiusa News indeed is only one constituent element of a broader templating that applied to Gochiusa’s first episode with an exacting detail. Each second has been outlined in a timeline guide on the video’s Nicopedia article, returning some context and categorization to what would otherwise require an academic grant to compile. This is, obviously, a tremendously useful reference for anyone returning to parse the riddles today, but in its time would offer otaku mentorship matching the call guides distributed by fans at concerts for call and response. The revisions made regularly to this page during its peak run are a revealing supplement in that many of the citations are not just highly referential, but are meta to the act of templating itself, branching from comments vectoring as inquisitive reply to a prior template or from similar posts made to the guide’s bulletin board. The memetic value of otaku in-jokes is exposed as not exclusive to one video, or one website, but most entertaining when it is allowed to confuse new hosts. In distant galaxies of anonymous boards dedicated to posting Chino images as avatars, when someone will always undoubtedly query why Sxarp must be invoked that way, it remains appropriate to always volley your own question back: are you a virgin here, or do you kiss Hepburn with that romanization?

Many of the touchstones applicable to Gochiusa News were crowded to Nico’s silver age. If it were to have an emergent property, it is not as an authority for aggregated headlines, but as the rabbit hutch returned to as shelter. Whereas I have focused anonymous participation before as a creative destination, Gochiusa’s first episode qualifies itself as an event destination. Although people certainly do return to this video as regular ritual for news, enough that a Twitter bot began to capture the first thirty seconds each day, the ritualism most obvious in its pattern of activity is as meta participation tailing Gochiusa itself. As main example to this phenomenon, Gakkou Gurashi will always be most viscerally remembered for its bait and switch. Notwithstanding that Minase Inori voiced main characters in both shows, Gochiusa provided retreat for shell-shocked otaku in 2015, grounding itself to a reality where Chino will always make you a fresh blend and Rize will always be your mom. The serious news is, as result, incidental bedding. Everyone arriving to Gochiusa News already implicitly expects the stock market to crash today, or that 40 million people will lose access to food assistance next month. What they would really prefer to jockey is when Kemono Friends’ first episode rocketing to the top of Nico’s rankings, a phenomenon forever intertwined to Nico and Kadokawa’s meddling, would achieve parity with Gochiusa at an eye-popping 9.3 million views. The dressing of the fluffy and lighthearted with wildly divergent global chaos, a crisis that never seems to cease, authorizes a fiction that this is a five-alarm meltdown worth freaking the fuck out about. The news, it does appear, is always at its most entertaining when it is allowed to create the news.

It should not be discounted that many did derive some utility from Gochiusa News. At the peak of its recognition, when more eyes were on it as its danmaku were reposted outside of Nico, the most common refrain would be that it was faster than official sources, or even the early warning system of platforms used to brace earthquakes; it is, for example, one way you could have learned about Brexit. Nothing posted to Gochiusa News had to go through the gullet of being spotted and reposted, because no comment existed in any hierarchy or with any specific authority. Naturally, there is no fact-checking ombudsman accountable for anonymous comments, or sourcing concerns gumming them up from flying at anything faster than the speed limit of their own medium. The informal meeting as news is a more general quality that wreaths it, as students gathered to vent about shitty questions on the Center entrance exams, or fans popped champagne celebrating the Hiroshima Tokyo Carp advancing to a Japan Series championship for the first time in 25 years. Gochiusa News, in many ways more constructive than much the rest of Nico’s comment culture, mostly avoided devolving into fake news or vandal trolling. It is often improbable to consider that anonymity can deliver positive or even neutral outcomes online, when there are plenty of reasons to hark otherwise, but the localization of digital community often is a concern of probabilities as much as it is bending them into shape with moderation. Nothing is necessarily foregone about the character a medium does express: Kemono Friends did not break the Gochiusa News monopoly, and recent ascendants like Hiroshi Nohara returning viewers to Nico² have yet to show a convergent evolution as they also template danmaku over confusing food porn.

Gochiusa News is not hopping in many hearts and minds today, except when it is allowed to arrest them for reminisce. One needs spend only thirty seconds with the thought of it today to realize that most of the fluff is gone, now transplanted to mediums that push even closer to the speed of light, while a few diehards make vain attempts to replicate the magic. While I am tempted to close the book on its retreat as constituent to Nico’s broader decay, there is a hypnosis in its visual nature that I find myself gnawing on as artists and ghouls take to discovering representations of how our world will look with ceaseless horror and push notifications broadcast hovering in my retina. It is usually not that we are willing participants in our mediums, but that I find we are often first only bemused by them before being involuntarily attracted to their tuned expressions, now tabs and swipes away, or pushed to us without consent. Is there any wonder, as I stare into the eternity of scrolling feeds with voices barking at me teetering on the nonsensical, that I feel my eyeballs pulse with the caffeinated memories of Rabbit House?

Postman has had his mettle stretched in the four decades since he concluded we are amusing ourselves to death with television. The speed at which amusement does become terminal, rather than a chronic ache teetering on migraine, has not yet hit escape velocity on this treadmill. Postman’s books and lectures are now numbing parts painfully quaint and prescient of a technology that has, to align with his critiques, fogged our thoughts. He was too early to experience the web as we now know it, or to offer thoughts extending beyond the interrupt of electronic mail, telephones, and fax machines. The wrestle of old world technologies with a technological determinism seems as plucked from coverage today about generative AI, but the cultural references themselves are dated enough to require decent preface. A context of Reagan, Dan Rather, and the connective tissue of AM talk radio remain a useful grounding when dissecting why our modern media landscape looks like a Stormfront gathering in Breezewood, PA, but there is no singular Neil Postman of a similar critical renown that seems to offer as much modern clarity (Douglas Rushkoff could get there given enough time to hoist his influence on Lain and the psychedelic substrate), likely because so much of our energy is spent contesting platforms, as Cory Doctorow now wrestles with, rather than mediums themselves. Where Gochiusa News does provide some useful anchoring context of transforming mediums, the minutiae and specificity of its expression makes it improbable that a dissection of it will ever travel further than a few backlinks, or with enough recognition that it will resonate beyond an otaku already sinking deep into the swamp. Decades from now, when Americans are all otaku collecting NFT tokuten in virtual reality theaters, it is a horrifying invention of the imagination, one that lets itself write a historical recount of Gochiusa News to begin with, that it could ground as less embarrassing than whatever may follow in their ideas of media ecology.

So much of what was at once theoretical about the web no longer needs to be said in aggrandizing detail when it can be lived. So much of our digital information pummels the senses without distinguishing venue to its expressions, a pornographic convergence that oscillates between rage, entertainment, and lust. So much of this convergence is engineered and designed to strip away all nuance and importance until it is sufficiently naked for decorating spectacle. Registering these mediums may be like explaining to a fish that they are swimming in water, as McLuhan posits, but the shifting of currents still cannot go unnoticed to even the most naïve of participants. Otaku ー maximalists, consumerists, and technophiles in their most modern derivation ー we may learn with more time provided early warning with Gochiusa News of our current barrage in mediums created primarily by their participants. They had no time to concern themselves with the shame or embarrassment then, nor does it seem that many of us do now as we suck down the slop. This is the news, the entertainment we wanted ー what we chose. Perhaps, there was another way.