this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Yeah it's not about the Internet and virtual reality or fax machines etc, it was about overpopulation and ecological collapse among other things.
The song was inspired by a trip to an underground city in Sendai, Japan if you read Wikipedia. In the late 90s Japan was a gadget obsessed place with neon signs and screens packed into places like Sendai. Japan had industrialised rapidly over the 20th century and gave the impression of a thriving technology and manufacturing industry.
It was seen as a futuristic place by people from the rest of the world when they visited. Of course in reality Japan was in the first of its "lost decades" of stagnation that's run from the early 90s to now.
Underground city in Sendai? Did they get radicalised by visiting a shopping center connected to the subway?
Cheeba cheeba is a helluva drug
Maybe I'm gonna have to get high just to get by
Yeah, sure. I suppose next you're gonna say that The Return of the Space Cowboy is not about the movie Serenity.
Besides not meeting its capitalist expectations, how have Japan's "lost decades" impacted its people, and how does that impact differ from that within comparable nations that had continuous economic growth during that same time (e.g. the US, Europe, Australia, and South Korea)?
political radicalization. in the past 100 years Japan has seen:
and a lot of people want to know if there will ever be an end to everything being so damn extra all the time, or if Japan is simply expected to burn itself out working. and as is always the case when the people start askrng these questions, there's a rightwing reaction promising to restore Japan to the glory of an imagined past
Is hyperfascism like regular fascism with neon lights or what?
overt fascism. it contrasts itself from fascisms that hide themselves by claiming to be something they're not.
hyper fascist regimes:
covert fascist regimes:
You're not at all worried about the phenomenon of diluting definitions of powerful words until they lose their power, are you?
Honestly a lot of these terms are quite old and not great at describing current politics.
it's more like if we don't talk about how these schemes of oppression hand off to eachother, pass the baton, now, the knowledge becomes lost to everyone but the academics who study ur-fascism. i work to be very considered in how i phrase things because words have meaning. i also come at it from the angle that a lot of people living in the imperial cores of America, Russia, and China don't even recognize that they live in the hellscape outlined in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four and that talking about capitalism v communism is not the fight most of the world at large is having, they're talking about fascism v anarchy.
The problem is if everything becomes fascism, then nobody cares about it. I remember in high school people calling Obama a fascist. So now they have nowhere to go when Trump showed up.
That kind of vague academic language screams of "word salad", of people using big words to make themselves feel smart and feel like they've said and done a lot without doing anything at all. Like this Calvin and Hobbes comic:
https://i.imgur.com/XUZce4A.jpeg
You're not wrong. This is what anti-intellectualism gets us, and that goes double for the Hyper® versions.
Overworked, or refusing to work at all. No one's having sex. Their economy is further collapsing, their population is converging to the point of a death spiral. No one can afford to have a family.
They still like tech in Tokyo and pump out anime, though.
That just sounds like South Korea, which AFAIK is doing worse than Japan on most quality-of-life metrics - they work longer hours, have even less sex, population is shrinking even faster and AFAIK the common Koreans aren't exactly getting rich off it, either.
Look to Japan to see what's the future like in the West a decade for now.