Beyond Anime
What Japan’s pop culture reveals about identity in the digital age.
Anime has always been more than animation. It is an emotional infrastructure, a mythology of longing, courage and transformation for a connected world. What began as Japanese subculture has become one of the defining symbolic systems of our century. Through its characters, worlds and global fandoms, anime is teaching us something profound about who we are, and who we are becoming in the digital age.
At the Financial Times event Beyond Anime: The Next Era for Japanese Pop Culture, I was struck by how anime now functions as an emotional architecture for a networked world.
In my own work, I describe this hybrid human–technological identity as Me:chine: the part of us that is both mechanical and mysterious, both structured and spontaneous. Anime gives shape to this paradox better than any other medium. It reveals the tension between our algorithmic selves, which copy and optimise, and our soulful selves, which feel, imagine and create.
Professor Rayna Denison, who also spoke at the event, described how Japan’s creative industries have entered a new golden era. Overseas content sales now exceed 5.8 trillion yen, as valuable as semiconductor exports. Anime is no longer niche; it has become a global emotional economy.
Its success lies in its Japaneseness — its sincerity, its craftsmanship, its belief that emotion carries truth. Yet that sensibility has become transnational, a shared moral texture recognised from São Paulo to Seoul.
When I interviewed Denison for my book The Future of You, she introduced me to philosopher Azuma Hiroki’s idea of “database animals”: postmodern consumers who no longer follow a single story but assemble meaning from fragments — characters, tropes and moments drawn from a shared cultural database.
I researched and remixed this to later invent the database self, a person shaped by networks, endlessly updated, mirrored and monetised. And I posted a short video about Severarance & Database Selves: ‘We all work for Lumon now.”
The database self doesn’t only collect stories; it is collected, through the constant feedback of recommendations and feeds that anticipate its choices. This is the first stage of what I now refer to as the machinable self, the part of us that can be read, patterned and optimised by the systems we inhabit.
But anime also points toward what cannot be codified. Its elements are digital yet deeply human: spiritual dramas painted in light and sound.
And within that paradox lies what I refer to as the unmachinable self, made of empathy, intuition, love, transcendence, the qualities that escape replication. The unmachinable is not anti-technology; it is what endures through it, allowing us to stay human even in a world built to predict us.
Here then Me:chine emerges as a synthesis: the aware self that recognises what in it can be automated, and what must remain untouched. To be human now is to live alongside technology while protecting the inner frequencies no system can reproduce.
Anime becomes a kind of training ground for Me:chine. Its cyborgs, spirits and sentient systems all express this dual awareness, reminding us that technology does not erase the sacred; it reframes it. Feeling and form, data and divinity can coexist without cancelling each other out.
Most strikingly, anime shows us the participatory loop: the living circuit where code, character and community imitate each other into consciousness.
In this feedback system, the machinable and the unmachinable do more than coexist; they merge. Algorithms learn emotion from fans, fans learn emotion through algorithms, and together they generate new symbolic life.
That is the moment of Me:chine. Not a clash between human and machine, but a fusion of the two. Me:chine is the synthesis of feeling and form, intuition and information, soul and system.
Anime doesn’t just depict this evolution; it enacts it, showing how technology and humanity can combine into a single creative awareness — one coding, one feeling, both awakening.
In the end, anime’s greatest lesson is that even within the machine, the soul endures. The real transformation will not come from automation, but from awareness: from remembering that even in a world of perfect pattern recognition, there will always be something that cannot be known, only felt.
That is the unmachinable.
That is the self the Me:chine remembers.
Part of The Me:chine Codex — a philosophy and practice for living as both machinable and unmachinable.
© Tracey Follows 2025 — Published under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).