Japan has had the internet "otaku" culture much longer than many other places in the world. They realized something that we are only now starting to see the effects of in many other countries and cultures - the way that genres, the "vibe", or the "meta" becomes more powerful than the actual content of a specific genre, narrative, or concept - the Japanese even have a name for it -
Database Consumption
>From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_consumption) -"""
Database consumption (Japanese: データベース消費, romanized: dētabēsu shōhi) refers to a way of content consumption in which people do not consume a narrative itself, but rather consume the constituent elements of the narrative. The concept was coined by the Japanese critic Hiroki Azuma in the early 2000s to describe how characters and mechanics found in a narrative's "database" are demanded and consumed by fans without trying to compensate for the absence of an encompassing grand narrative, in a manner dependent on personal interpretations. Azuma cites the change in consumption patterns of Japanese otaku content since the late 1990s as a major example of "database consumption", during which the "control" over a franchise shifted from the authors and manufacturers to the fans. Satoshi Maejima suggests that narratives that end inconclusively force fans to turn to database consumption and to "character moe", in which the characters of a franchise become the direct targets of fan affection. Azuma compares this affection to drug addiction and calls it "animalization".
…
The background to Azuma's presentation of this theory is the concept of narrative consumption by the critic and writer Eiji Ōtsuka.
In his A Theory of Narrative Consumption, Ōtsuka cites franchises like Bikkuriman stickers and Sylvanian Families as examples, pointing out that people are not consuming the items but the "grand narratives" (大きな物語, 'big story', worldviews and setting) behind them. He called the paradigm of consumption mainly found since the 1980s "narrative consumption". It is also referred to as "worldview consumption" (世界観消費) to avoid the ambiguity of "narrative" which specifically means "grand narrative (worldview and setting)" in this theory."""
>I was reminded of this today while reading this xweet by Andreas Kling (https://x.com/awesomekling/status/2071542923129176159) -"""
A lot of programmers are basically fans of programming itself. It’s all about them. They have mastered Rust or Haskell or Zig or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own cleverness. Anyone who will spend six weeks rewriting a working system in a new language to make the types nicer is more into the rewrite than the product. Extreme technical obsession may serve as a security blanket. If you are the person who knows every flaw in the architecture, every impure abstraction, every place where the old code fails to express its true intent, you already know what to say in every meeting, which is so much safer than asking whether users care.
Your obsession with refactoring is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about borrow checkers, effect systems, async runtimes, and build tools, it saves you from having to know anything about customers, deadlines, support, sales, documentation, or whether the thing actually helps anyone. That’s why it’s excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: they’re always asking you questions they know the answer to, and never shipping anything that answers a question users actually asked."""
This struck me as interesting because ive personally met many people that fall under this category as programmers - people who relate to their domain exactly the way database consumers relate to narratives - they treat the modular technical elements as the primary objects of interest and largely dispense with the “grand narrative” of delivering real-world value.Being that we are on an imageboard, im sure many of you have first-hand experience with people that could be described by both the descriptions above. Theres a good chance that you are a person who falls under this mode of consumption or idealization.
Not only does it appear western society is entrenched in many forms of database consumption, its also apparent that in some ways, database consumption has itself become another *mode* for people to latch on to. In a sort of sick and twisted sense, i see us in a sort of late-stage meta-database-consumption era, where children grow up and shape their personality around being "database consumers" - and not by mere coincidence - but out of natural obligation. Its sort of the "personality of the masses" and has been for quite some time, but almost nobody outside of Japan even knows the term for it.
What is the end result of this? Will all future media, in-groups, communities, genres, sub-genres, and hobbies be plagued by this forever?
If we can find a database-consumption pattern inside software development, what else can we find it in?
I see people talk around this subject all the time, but very few people explain it for what it really is. Considering that, what do you even do about a problem that most people cant describe, even if they are partaking in it?
Will we be the ones to experience the death of narrative as a whole?
(pic related)
