Reading: Destroy and Revolution, by Kouji Mori (issues 1-10)

I've posted about this manga before on the project blog, after reading just the first issue. Now I'm up to #10 and have a better idea of the story.

The high concept: superhero terrorist bromance. Makoto has amazing superpowers he doesn't want anyone to know about. Yuuki is rich, handsome, and charismatic, but hates society and the entire system, which he identifies with his hated Corporate father. Together they set out to destroy society and replace it with a new order — of which, in classic terrorist fashion, they never get any kind of clear idea. (These are not religious terrorists, who do have a clear idea of what kind of order they want to impose: a totalitarian world Ordenstaat run by themselves.)

#10 is a significant issue because it brings us up to where the story began in #1 and thus serves as a natural end point for Book 1: they destroy a subsidized apartment building intended for Diet (Japanese parliament) members, who tend to be quite rich. On the way to this gambit against the Japanese state, we find out a few things. Apparently Yuuki hates Western values and the common people, both of which he seems to think are embodied in the state. He also wears his hair long to annoy his father, a straitlaced Corporate. And he jealously chases away the girl who likes Makoto. #6 made me shake my head: an old man who exists only in that issue appears to give Makoto a mystical experience of the oneness of all things, which Makoto passes on to Yuuki in #7. For Western secular radicals, this New Age (or, in the specific Japanese context, New Religion) thing is an unwanted intrusion into revolutionary theory. So is the Japanese nationalism, since there's no independence to be won like in, say, Iraq (successful) or Afghanistan (ongoing). And the contempt for the common people that is all too common among revolutionary elites will doom his revolution to mere personal tyranny, since classical revolutionary theory states that the common people are the ground of all revolution. Rebellion against the people invariable reduces to a lust for tyranny. How different, then, is Yuuki from his father, really, when his father is already a tyrant, the all-powerful CEO of a giant corporation? Here in America, class warfare against the people is the war cry of the Corporates. Yuuki isn't waging a social revolution, the only kind that can succeed in Japan or any other country with a mature economy. The French and Russian Revolutions succeeded only to the extent that they remained social, and failed when the revolutionaries turned against the people.

In America, with its tradition of superheroes and adventure strips, Destroy and Revolution would have been a rip-roaring action comic with shocking revelations in the tradition of cinematic political thrillers and expository scenes for the revolutionary theory. In fact, that's the way I originally planned my own Chaos Angel Spanner before I turned it from a webmanga concept into a novelized TV serial. In Japan, action stories tend to be age-limited to shounen (boys') manga. The Destroy and Revolution that author Mori created is less action-oriented and more thoughtful, thus more typical of seinen (young men's) manga.

In any case, the first book concerns itself mainly with the issue of "how we got here" to the act of destruction that kicks off the manga from the meeting of two high school malcontents in scene two. It's just setting up the confrontation between the terrorist heroes and the Japanese government. Japanese tradition actually has a higher opinion of terrorists than the moralistic West, since terrorists have purity of heart the ruling class lack. Purity of heart, or samurai spirit, serves the role that flaming Latin machismo has traditionally played among Latin American guerrillas. Western radicals would rather make the case that the side they're attacking is morally wrong — which leads to the paradox that purity of heart and ideology causes more evil than it solves and is thus one of the traditional banes of Western civilization since the medieval revolts of the antinomian Free Spirit sectarians. Al-Qaeda are very much in the Western tradition of moralistic evil. The showrunner of Serial Experiments Lain wanted to provoke different reactions between Eastern and Western viewers, but failed because he never guessed how Eastern the West has become since the British Empire conquered India in the 18th century. Because its heroes are terrorists, a class of vigilante universally demonized in the West, Destroy and Revolution would serve that intention far more effectively.

These are my impressions as of Book 1. Book 2 has also been fan translated, so there will be a follow-up.

Watching: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica was the biggest anime sensation and Japanese TV hit of 2011. Even the March 2011 earthquake that delayed the final episode couldn't ruin its popularity. However, this not-so-rich anime fan had to wait a year and a half to see it, even as the third movie, which continues the story from the end of the series (reanimated for the first two movies), is in production. Well, I finally saw it. In one five-hour session. And now I know why it got such rave reviews, and why it was Japan's hottest show of last year.

I'd heard this was the darkest take on the magical girl anime genre ever attempted, courtesy of head writer Gen Urobuchi, who's known for some really dark stuff and has even publicly admitted he's temperamentally unsuited for upbeat stories such as, naturally enough, the usual magical girl stuff. But unlike Neon Genesis Evangelion, Madoka Magica turns out not to be an allegory of the showrunner's mental breakdown disguised as a genre deconstruction. In fact, episode 12 contains the happiest ending of any Urobuchi story ever. But then I discovered exactly why it's supposed to be so awesome.

Madoka Magica isn't merely dark. In fact, it's utterly epic.

The deconstruction and grim darkness come from a strategy of taking certain magical girl tropes to such an extreme that they cancel out. The magical girls' motivation for destroying the monsters of the week (here called "witches"), for example, cancels out the standard "power of friendship" theme. In Episode 2, Mami explains to Madoka and Sayaka that magical girls' power comes from "soul gems", which grow darker as they use their power. They can only be replenished by killing witches for their "grief seeds", which are like soul gems only black and dangerous. But there's a limited supply of these grief seeds, forcing the magical girls to compete for them. Episode 5 shows they're perfectly willing to kill each other over them.

And then there's the "Faustian bargain" theme involving that sinister variation on the standard cute mascot, Kyubey — short for "Incubator". Certain witches' names (written in an alphabet of runes specially designed for the show) are references to Goethe's Faust.

The witches appear only in pocket dimensions which manifest only when they need to feed on humans or do battle with magical girls. Both the monstrous inhuman witches and their realms are depicted in flat, jerky, surreal animation right out of the 20th-century avant-garde. This was only the second thing that impressed me. The first was the conventional animation, surprisingly good for a TV show; parts of it are quite beautiful.

Madoka Magica is well known for its Wham Episodes that rival anything from J. Michael Straczynski himself (random Babylon 5 example: sorry, Commander Ivanova, but that presidential candidate you voted for? She's evil!). I won't reveal exactly what happens — that would blunt the shock — but I'll give a few clues:

• Episode 3: Something horrible happens that establishes the true dark tone of the story. This is followed by the first appearance of the true end credits, one of the darkest and most abstract manifestations of the Urobuchi style, to a J-metal soundtrack.
• Episode 6: we find out exactly what a magical girl is. It ain't pretty.
• Episode 8: we find out the exact connection between magical girls and the witches they battle. Uh-oh.
• Episode 10: the flashback episode was the one that struck me with the true brilliance of the show. We find out who the real hero of this story is (clue: her name isn't Madoka), the nature of her power, and just what kind of hell she had to go through to get to this point. And then it ends with the opening credits, to signal that the story begins where this episode ends.
• Episode 12: Madoka makes her wish. What she wishes for shocks even Kyubey. And then the show goes cosmic. Did I mention how epic it is?

Right now I can only wonder what the production team have in store for the third movie, the one that extends the story beyond episode 12 (and the second movie). Will it be as jam-packed with plot twists as anything I've written? If anything is certain, I will be sure to find out one way or another...

Listening: Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998)

In 2000, Massive Attack's Mezzanine and Tricky's Maxinquaye were the CDs I used to break in my Winamp visualizations and 3D audio processors. Now I'm using Mezzanine and the Prodigy's The Fat of the Land to break in my new Blu-Ray player. Turns out that hearing it on the home theatre system in Dolby Surround is different from what I remember... I noticed how deliciously sinister every track except the two named "Exchange" (based on a pretty riff from an Isaac Hayes song their record company licensed from his) are. But undistracted by the visual pyrotechnics of G-Force, Geiss, and MilkDrop, I couldn't help notice how languid the whole thing is, except for the end of penultimate track "Group Four", which sneaks up on you. "Group Four" is also the one that shows the surround sound function of my Blu-Ray player and home theatre receiver to their best advantage. It turns out to have been one of the first albums to be available in MP3 format and one of the last of the sample era before the record companies cracked down mercilessly. As such, it's a relic of a lost age (without sounding dated) and yet a forerunner of our current digital music era.

Watching: Prometheus

When I saw a couple of the trailers on YouTube a couple weeks ago, I knew this would be the movie my brother would be most likely to take me and Mom to see. And so it was. And so this is "the Space Jockey movie" (using the big guys' nickname from Alien; here they're called "Engineers"). I was warned (by online reviews, not my brother) that some people didn't like it. But I did, and I can see why it has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. My brother thought it was brilliant. I have different standards; I thought it was at least good enough, though not as brilliant as, say, Alien and Aliens. And even though I'd already read all the spoilers on the TV Tropes page, I still managed to find myself surprised by that last Space Jockey. There were a few predictable things. The guys who panic and flee being the first to die? Check. There were also some weak points, mostly involving characters carrying the "idiot ball" (there's a whole list on the TV Tropes Prometheus page under "Idiot Ball" At least Fifield and Milburn have an excuse (their panic robbed them of their reason). Weyland is similar in that he's a corporate "king" (the word is actually used, though not in any official sense) whose desire to defeat death overrides his reason. But Janek (the pilot) has no excuse but picks up the idiot ball anyway and runs with it. The unpredictable part involved Vickers, Shaw, and a certain director, but I won't spoil that one. There were some very clever reveals involving Vickers, Weyland, David (the android, whose nature this time is revealed almost immediately), the surviving Space Jockey, the nature of his Engineer faction's mission, and — the stinger at the end, right before the credits. I did notice they used the Alien Astronaut theory (as in Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin) as the movie's starting premise. Back to my opinion. I did enjoy it, enough that I plan to get the Blu-Ray to play on that 50+ inch TV I intend to get.

Thoughts While Reading: Can Society Be Run Like a Business? I Don't Think So.

Reading: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

I'm reading chapter 10, "Failure for Free", and a light comes on in my head when I read the passage about how a small Canadian laboratory beat a larger Chinese scientific community with more sophisticated technological infrastructure in sequencing the genome of the SARS virus. In recent months, the US Republicans have apparently been trying to repeal democratic politics in this country, and all the states under their control, so they can privatize the governments and run American society like a business. More efficient, they insist; besides, if you put power in the hands of the perfidious people, they'll make this country communist if they aren't stopped. Or so the official spin goes.

Here's the thing: China really is run like a business. A giant corporation whose holding company officially calls itself the Collective Property Party of China (with "Collective Property" usually translated "Communist", though under its current policy of state capitalism [though some would not call it "capitalist"] "Corporate" would probably be a better translation) but might as well be called the Chinese National Management Corporation. China, following the example of large American corporations known for their paranoia about their precious trade secrets, has a perpetual ban on horizontal communications; information can only legally be shared along the established hierarchical lines of authority. The small Canadian lab that beat it to the SARS genome, the Genome Sciences Centre, used all open-source software tools and took advantage of the Internet and the public database of genetic sequences called GenBank. That is, all its information sharing outside the organization was horizontal. In the end, this proved to be GSC's unfair advantage. China ended up acting like a large, unwieldy conglomerate top-heavy with management. Like, say, AT&T.

China is what the Republicans want to turn America into. That is, they want to abolish "politics" and replace it with "business". Run government as a business! Yeah, right. Run it like Ma Bell, especially before she got broken up into several regional telephone companies back in the day. Since the most militant corporatists in America today are the brothers Koch, the better comparison would be less AT&T and more Standard Oil (that is, the oil monopoly J.D. Rockefeller built), as they seem bent on consolidating the oil industry into a colossus that can overthrow the American government. Looking at China, what would America be like if it came under corporate management? Heavy restrictions on information sharing, of course. Also, considering that the Kochs are trying to force their employees to vote for what they tell them to vote for Or Else, any criticism of national management would be ruthlessly punished, as in China. Already the Republicans are trying to shout down all the liberals and even claim that dissent is by definition treason. Just as in China!

Meanwhile, smaller companies tend to clump in big cities where the social and business ecologies are structured like internets (as explained by the Small World theory of social networking). It is in these environments that the real free markets thrive, where new companies and new ideas proliferate. Giant corporations like Koch Industries, however, strive to destroy such ecologies by consolidating them into monolithic hierarchical structures of management. The Chinese government has structured the entire society of China that way, like a gigantic monopoly conglomerate. The thing about these corporate hierarchies is that they entail monster overhead, especially the bigger they get. On the other hand, open systems can have no businesses and no employees, and yet, amazingly enough, they can work a lot more efficiently than hierarchical control systems such as, say, the management of AT&T (as Shirky shows in a personal anecdote).

The reason is that open systems, such as the open-source software movement, reduce the cost of failure to almost nothing. In a traditional corporation, there's a high inherent cost to failure because the company invests a lot of money in paying professionals (IT specialists, R&D specialists, marketing specialists, etc.) and the extra overhead needed to maintain these employees. Because failure can be disastrous to the company, it needs to filter out potential failures beforehand. That's why companies (and bureaucratic governments) are so conservative. Now look at SourceForge, where the vast majority of the open-source software projects have precisely zero users. And yet since there's no business organization and no employees, this open system has all but eliminated the cost of failure, so filtering can occur after publishing rather than before it.

Now look at the difference between democratic and authoritarian societies. China may be prospering right now, but all power is in the hands of the holding company's management, and if Chinese Communist Enterprises management becomes incompetent, they can bring the whole company nation down with them. In America, even if the (at least nominally) democratic political infrastructure has long been corrupted by technocratic bureaucratism, it has a resiliency that no authoritarian system, corporate or political, has. If the Chinese workers launch a national strike against the nation's corporate management, the result will be devastating. The same thing, interestingly enough, is happening in Wisconsin, where a Republican government is trying to restrict voting rights along with worker rights and meeting mass resistance that is likely to spell a GOP rout in this and next year's elections. In a free democratic society, worker resistance may be bad for business, but it's part of the political landscape, and a traditional one at that. The Chinese Communist Corporation is determined to crush all democratic tendencies because a free market spells an end to its monopoly over politics and therefore the corporation itself.

And so I think it's a bad idea for a society to be run like a corporation. It's not just that society is structured much differently from any corporation. It's also because a managerial society is rigid and inflexible, and responds badly to both crisis and opportunity. Just look at Japan fumble after the Great East Japan Earthquake...

That's the thought that came to me while reading today. I realized right at that moment that I had to share it.