Weekly Retrospective #2
Japan's Presidential Assassin Finds Admirers; Taliban's White-Collar Boredom; A Statistic for the Century; India’s Legitimacy Test; and Big Tech Stagnation
Sometimes it so happens that an event blows open what’s hidden for all to see. In other cases, it may be a forewarning for the rest of the world.
Weekly Retrospective #2 focuses on a few global stories, each of which speaks to a greater idea or development. The first story I will be covering involves Japan and the fallout from the assassination last year.
Japan's Presidential Assassin Finds Admirers
On July 8, 2022, former President Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a lone gunman in an attack that seemed completely random. His motivations were personal, holding a grudge against the former president for his ties to the Unification Church—a religious cult that bankrupted his mother.
It was the first assassination of its kind in Japan since 1936. But unlike then, the assailant this time, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, was not ideologically motivated. The initial emptiness of the story and the fact that Yamagami acted alone made it more of a tragedy than anything else, not likely to provoke a shake-up within Japanese society.
This proved to be far from the truth. The motivation behind the assassination has gained a remarkable amount of interest since. As The Economist wrote, “Shinzo Abe’s assassin achieved his political goals.” A few months ago, a popular film documenting the assassination, Revolution+1 by Masao Adach, was released on the same day as Abe’s state funeral.
The film shows the extent to which Mr Yamagami, who said he murdered Abe because of his links to the church that ensnared his mother, has captured the Japanese imagination.
The killer is seen by some as a dark hero, a crusader for the country’s underclass. Online, he is sometimes referred to as Yamagami Resshi, or Yamagami the Martyr. Female fans who fawn over him are known as “Yamagami Girls”. The prison where he is being held has reportedly run out of space to store the gifts sent to him. Even denunciations of his deed are often only throat-clearing.
“Of course, it’s bad to kill people,” a female viewer of “Revolution+1” mused after a recent screening in Yokohama. “But for Yamagami murder was the only way to achieve his goal.”
The ambiguous and complex story behind the assassination can be likened to something out of a Dostoevsky novel.1 Yamagami was entangled in a web of social dependencies from which he knew no way out — his mother’s extreme indebtedness, familial suicide, illnesses that were fatal due to poverty, social alienation, and persistent underemployment.
Yamagami’s experiences provide us with a panorama of Japanese society. And from it all came the nihilistic desire to commit the act that he believed would render this all visible. The target he ultimately decided upon was former President Shinzo Abe, whose ties to the Unification Church made him a symbol of all the predatory cults that underpin Japanese politics.
The long history of cults and their relationship with the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LBD), which has ruled Japan almost uninterrupted since 1955, is recounted in a recent piece by Dylan Levi King in Palladium Magazine. He writes:
The simple version of the story is that of an unhinged man taking revenge on a politician. But the events that led up to it were set in motion two generations earlier by Abe’s own family, and were bound up in the very foundations of the new Japanese political order imposed by the U.S. after the Second World War.
Japan’s peculiar arrangement was that of a powerful state run by an organizationally weak party that was heavily restricted by the postwar legal system. That arrangement meant that other powers had to be tapped by the LDP to get certain things done. [They] needed the Unification Church for the same reason that they needed the Yakuza—to do things beyond the law.
King goes on to describe how the “cold, bureaucratic realpolitik” of the LBD needed spiritual guidance to make its rule palatable. Cults and other religious organizations exploded during the so-called “lost decades” after the financial crisis of 1991.
That collapse fueled spikes in membership and popularity for a number of the new religious movements—the same wave that Yamagami Tetsuya’s mother was caught up in.
For the Unification Church, the renewed demand for spiritual guidance meant door-to-door spiritual sales tactics […] For many Japanese who had the salaryman deal ripped away from them—and for a grieving widow like Yamagami’s mother [who recently lost her husband to suicide]—it seemed like a literal godsend.
On account of his mother, who sunk over $700,000 into the Church and began to lose touch with reality, Tetsuya Yamagami became despondent as his own future was ruined. He began to immerse himself in the belief that the cult animated all of Japanese politics, that which had destroyed his life.
The wreckage of his father’s death and his mother’s religion marked Yamagami deeply. The young man muddled through life. Without money for college, he did a brief stint with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, leaving in 2005 to begin drifting between short-term jobs. When his elder brother took his own life in 2015, the darkness seemed overwhelming.
In the midst of that abyss, he began to try and understand just how his mother’s church held such power over his life and Japanese society more broadly. He began accessing information posted online by activists among the children of Unification Church members. The search led him down a rabbit hole that unveiled just how deep the Unification Church’s ties with the Japanese state had become.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media in Japan was largely unwilling to run stories linking politicians to the Unification Church. When Yamagami and others wanted to find information, they were limited to informal networks gathering data online. Only after the killing would Japan’s tight-lipped leaders begin to murmur publicly about the Unification Church; one leading member of Abe’s LDP faction described the ties as “deep relations” extending back to “ancient times.”
[…]
If he couldn’t hit a member of the Unification Church directly, he decided, the next best option would be their political proxy. All of the thwarted ingenuity and hope found some kind of direction, and he went to work building bombs and guns.
By tracing Yamagami’s story, one sees a single thread passing through all of Japan’s contemporary ills, coming together as one burden and culminating in the murderous act.
While Yamagami has garnered unprecedented interest in Japan, King ends on a sobering note: that it will likely not change Japan’s foundations.
To the extent that Yamagami’s case generates sympathy, it is largely because he embodies the slow decay of the Japanese social order: the failed son of a despairing salaryman, his inheritance siphoned away by one of the nation’s most powerful organizations.
The blow Yamagami struck has served as little more than personal vengeance. But if he dodges the noose, it is likely that he will grow old in a society ever more governed by the new religious movements that ruined his life.
Taliban Experiences White-Collar Boredom
You might have seen this story circulating widely in the past week. The Afghanistan Analysts Network has published a collection of letters from members of the Taliban, now employed in the country’s capital, describing how they’ve grown bored of it all. It is a post-revolution hangover of sorts as modern ennui sets in.
The honesty of the letters is almost humorous because rarely do you see such sentiments expressed so candidly. Here are a few snippets.
Omar Mansur, 32 years old and head of a fighting group, writes:
Another thing I don’t like, not only about Kabul but broadly about life after the fatha, are the new restrictions. In the group, we had a great degree of freedom about where to go, where to stay, and whether to participate in the war.
However, these days, you have to go to the office before 8 AM and stay there till 4 PM. If you don’t go, you’re considered absent, and [the wage for] that day is cut from your salary. We’re now used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.
What I like most in Kabul is its relative cleanness and how facilities have been modernised and improved, the buildings, roads, electricity, internet connection, and so many other things.
Huzaifa, 24 years old and Taliban sniper, writes:
After we arrived in Kabul, we were stunned by its complexity, its expanse, its size. We didn’t know where to go. Everything was strange to us and of course, we were strange to the local people – to the extent that they were afraid of talking loudly to us.
What I don’t like about the city is that it’s like a closed society. People live cheek-by-jowl but don’t interact with each other. This is in part bad, as people don’t cooperate with each other, but also has a positive feature: unlike the village, no one bothers you about what you do, what you wear, who comes to your home and who leaves it. People don’t interfere in your life and don’t talk about you behind your back.
There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
Kamran, 27 years old and deputy commander, writes:
After the fatha, many of our friends abandoned the cause of jihad. Many others betrayed the blood of the martyrs on which foundation this nizam [the government] is built. Nowadays, people are fully busy gaining wealth and fame, more and more, in this worldly life. Previously, we were doing everything for the sake of Allah, but now it’s the opposite. The first priority of many is to fill their pockets and become famous.
If you ask me why I’m unhappy in the aftermath of the fatha, it’s that we immediately forgot our past. Then, we had only a motorcycle, a mukhabira, [a type of Walkie-Talkie] and a mosque or madrasa. Now, when someone’s nominated for a government job, he first asks whether that position has a car or not. We used to live among the people. Many of us have now caged ourselves in our offices and palaces, abandoning that simple life.
Abdul Nafi, 25 years old and fighter, writes:
I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had. Similarly, in the beginning, I yearned for the village, but I’ve now become accustomed to my new circumstances.
In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.
You can read more here.
In December, I wrote a piece that taps into this same feeling titled Maybe Modernity Has Only Just Started. I discussed the idea that “the feeling of modernity is [today] shared by more people than ever.” Many of the sentiments mentioned in these letters are to be expected of the new urban majority, who are projected to grow to 70% of the global population by 2050.
Still, the world’s new urban majority is undergirded by one major trend which brings me to the next story.
A Statistic for the Century
A few months ago, a finding was shared that made clear how much the world has changed in just the past few decades. It is a statistic I want to share here because I keep seeing it pop up.
For the first time in world history, the average person globally is now part of the middle class. The creation of a ‘global middle class’ is largely thanks to the rise of Asia, especially China, but also other parts of the world.
As economist Branko Milanovic writes:
New data on inequality show probably the greatest reshuffling of world incomes since the industrial revolution.
This new reality will determine the future, perhaps more than anything else. Since the 1800s, the world order has been centered primarily on the West because that is where a majority of global incomes were. With this now shifting for the first time, new possibilities open up. And with it also comes many unknowns over what this new global middle class will ask of the world.
Historically, such economic development begets new forms of civil society, novel ways of being, political ideologies, innovation, revolutions, war, great power competition, and many other historical dynamics. Headwinds will surely come as the U.S.-dominated world is forced to make ‘make room’ for the rest. I view this statistic as something of a bookend that begins a new story to be played out this century.
India’s Legitimacy Test
Most of the world’s democracies are dealing with a crisis of confidence these days. The problem has been ongoing since the 2010s as public trust in the state and its institutions has been steadily eroding. In the United States, such metrics are now at their lowest point since Gallup began measuring them.
India, however, has remarkably been spared this development and consistently boasts some of the highest levels of social trust in institutions. That’s what makes the fall of India’s formerly richest man all the more consequential.
In the past ten days, Gautam Adani has seen half of his fortune ($110 billion) wiped as his whole business empire unravels amid scandal. Now the contagion is spreading with protests spilling out into the streets. Much has been written about the economic fallout already, which will be felt for a long time.
But what is equally as interesting is how much the Indian state has linked its legitimacy to Adani’s business empire. Regardless of the state’s inadequacies, people could at least trust him to ‘build the roads.’ Adani was, after all, one of the largest investors in Indian infrastructure. He was the magnet that brought in foreign capital. The state’s competency, particularly for Prime Minister Modi, was therefore staked in his name.
His public face was an invention of politics amid a cynical time such as ours when such assurances are needed. As Mihir Sharma writes:
… talk of cronyism misses the point. If Adani didn’t exist, the Indian government would have had to invent him: The development model we have now chosen requires risk-taking “national champions” such as the Adani Group.
[Indian investors] have known for years that Adani Enterprises Ltd., the fulcrum of the Adani empire, is loaded down with debt, and that the ultimate source of its funding is remarkably opaque. Adani stock is generally thinly traded; few here will be willing to believe that Adani companies set out to defraud retail investors, even if both public sector banks and state-owned insurers have bet heavily on them.
No, Indians’ real fear is something else — that Gautam Adani and his companies simply cannot do what they say they will. Can they build the roads they have promised, improve the ports they have been given, maintain the airports they won in a bid? Until now, nobody else has been able to do so.
Given that political authority is so shaky nowadays, Adani-like figures provide the state with easy cover for demonstrating that “things actually work.”
India’s ongoing crisis therefore demonstrates the grave risks of transferring political competence onto business conglomerates. The country is now shaken enough that the high institutional trust it enjoys may start chipping away, perhaps even enough to erode Modi’s base of support.
The fallout is a crisis of confidence for the world’s largest democracy, and an omen for all other democratic states staking their competency through such dubious methods.
Big Tech Stagnation
Finally, the last story I would like to discuss is one I cannot confirm directly since such data is not public. Still, many people have been talking about it: social media engagement seems to be way down.
The conversation might have been provoked by Twitter having silly problems in the past week. For no explainable reason, it became known that private accounts are more visible on timelines than public ones. As a result, many people began absurdly locking their accounts to get that “engagement boost.”
I have no idea whether or not this was fixed, nor does it really matter. It just brought the engagement question front and center. Others have made similar observations about Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram. People are tuning out, and probably for good reason. In late 2022, much was written about how the social media era as we’ve known it is coming to an end. We’re potentially reaching the stagnation phase now.
But this isn’t just a trend for social media. The drop in quality is also true for Google, Amazon, and other platforms. The internet feels a whole lot smaller in a myopic way with far less quality. The trend has a name, and it was described recently by long-time blogger Cory Doctorow:
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification.
Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
The term “enshittification” has been catching on in the past week because it is painfully visible today — Instagram is no longer about sharing photos; Facebook’s timeline is rarely about friends; Google’s searches have become SEO-spammed and useless; YouTube gives you random suggestions you didn't ask for; and Amazon results are increasingly keyword-stuffed and shady.
Clearly, there is a life cycle for tech platforms and the current generation is nearing the tail-end of theirs. But will anything replace them? They may be too big to fail at this point, and we are stuck with enshittification-as-a-way-of-life. That’s why there’s recently been a visible tech-minimalist and luddite wave as people eschew online life altogether.
Amid Big Tech’s stagnation, AI has emerged as its possible saving grace. Still, it’s not likely that it will fundamentally reorganize the incentive structure that makes “enshittification” possible. Writer and technologist Rob Horning recently published an interesting short piece on the matter which I recommend reading.
Hilarious, Taliban already feeling like Edward Norton in Fight Club.
Hegemonic neo-liberalism and its dysfunctional responses: alienation, anomie, hedonism, nihilism.