Spam: The Otaku-Angel of Future

The storm of progress propels the Angel of History into the future while they face towards the past. Looking back at the past, the Angel sees endless whirlwind of blood and debris. They protest against this violence. All the while, their back is turned away from the future.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), has become a well-known allegory for the turbulence of the modern era. Sporting beady eyes, chicken-feet, and yellowed wonky teeth, Walter Benjamin wrote and mythologised this drawing as The Angel of History. This angel rejects what Benjamin calls the “Historicist”, a universalising singular voice who tells the past "as it were". The angel sees that history is not just about grand conquests, but also about countless individual narratives that are lost and supressed in the storm of progress.

Benjamin wrote this in the context of the Nazi regime, lamenting progress as a warring cycle of past-despairs and consequent revolutions. The Angel of History is trapped in this storm, mourning the past, and the dizzying amount of blood needed to fuel progress.

This cycle continues today. Modern disciplinary societies –­ institutions such as workplaces, schools, or prisons – use power to police behaviour and thought. The static walls of these enclosures allow us to find and hold powerful people and organisations accountable. However, power in contemporary societies modulate through the constellations of ever-growing networks between our phones, social media, and databases.[1] The internet that was once believed to decentralise authority and power with its seemingly endless networks of connections, has instead evolved (non)invasive ways in which modulations of control ubiquitously tendril out to surveil and violently oppress through those same networks.[2]

The whirlwind of rubble that the Angel of History gazes upon now is not merely violence and bodies, but also digital stories/images, personal data, scams, and spam that seethes in alt-right goblin caves, to Facebook, and then all the way to illegal anime-streaming websites.

Spam pushes in line, nibbling madly and yelling.

Stirring up this debris and history is important to inform and trigger emancipatory protests. It is also important, however, to manifest the worlds we want to live in, rather than react against worlds that we do not. Creating worlds are thus generative acts of (re)organising the consensus. Laying out new ways of being-together is not merely a mode of resistant politics, but a passionate coming-together in an era of melancholic (dis)connection.

Unlike Benjamin’s vision of The Angel who is stuck looking at the past, Hito Steyerl notices that they look slightly to the right as if caught in the moment of turning around.[3] Is it perhaps interested by something behind it?

The Angel of History emerges into the digital future, clawing their way through the clutter of viruses and Viagra advertisements that litter the illegal anime streaming website. The angel’s virtual citizenship to this illegal cyberspace is affirmed when they pass the captcha. There is no need for identification or documents.


Low-res images of super-horny singles welcome the angel in this dark space, popping up with big eyes and even bigger smiles. These creatures of spam shove the angel into a hot potluck of weight loss pills and Viagra. Viral data sensuously seep out of the pills and tablets and into the angel, hijacking their body, mind, and their vision.

Spam is canned meat, a metal-meat-technology hybrid made of enhanced yet degraded flesh. [4]

The angel senses with its updated body and eyes. Slowly out from the dark corners of the illegal anime web-browser and under the layers of spam creeps out a colourful bunch of pixelated hands of various resolutions. These hands resemble spam-meatballs, their meats are mangled with mouse cursors.

Spam is us; contemporary bodies are no longer purely human but an odd mishmash of cultures, stories, data, and technologies. They are as cyborg and commoditised as the tins of pink meat.

The hands realise that the angel is one of them, and jump up and down, chattering and clattering. These hands recklessly grasp at each other, forming bizarre links that fumble and twirl outwards in a playful act of out pouring. It is a jamboree. And in this chaos, the assemblage of ever-growing links latch onto the angel, taking it on a wild ride through the mess of anime cyberspace.

As they venture deep into anime-discussion forums to browsing doujinshi sites, cosplaying-otakus join in on the journey one-by-one. A motley crew of nakama[5] slowly forms through the angel’s wild travels. As they passionately text and chat about anime under the glow of computer screen, the pixels of light ripple over their garish costumes and glisten their rainbow hairstyles.

Spam is about spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. We spam.

The proliferation of digital media has not only mediated perception of the real world but reconfigured the grounds on which politics is felt and mobilised, and who is included or left out. News channels, Tik Toks, and social media posts make a spectacle out of politics, turning real events into dramas. Politicians, activists, everyday people are selectively casted for these dramas to fuel its proliferation. There is intrinsically a battleground of aesthetics and stories at the core of politics – they are not separate. [6]

Spam is a goblin of chaos; it is not the norm. It runs, sometimes dies, but always tries against anti-virus and cleaning software.

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) is a group of anti-authoritarian left-wing activists who use aesthetics to generate attention through such media. Wearing dollar store wigs, red noses, and face paint, these activists are a non-violent militia of playful clowns who are against globalisation, war, and other issues. They blow kisses and shoot cars with small plastic water guns, making police laugh to defuse the situation.

Spam is also digital images of human flesh. Vicariously handled as globules of data nodes, spam virally splutters outwards, and occupies cyber-space.

It is important to not glamourise and exaggerate the effectiveness of CIRCA. However, by using the subversive power of humour to clown around, they defy categories imposed by systems which normalise behaviour.[7] These attention-grabbing movements gain virality. The spam of clown images generated from the protest creates an active image event that circulates through the internet, resonating and moving others out onto the streets. Indeed, CIRCA and protestors in clown outfits have popped up globally to various political movements since they first started in 2003.

Steyerl asks the Angel of History, “[are you going to] join in with [this] new scene instead of being torn between mourning past demise and a violently displaced future?” The angel of history should not merely look at the past, but also create their own future that breaks from the status quo. Futures can be fictional, but they are not un-scientific falsehoods or discursive ideologies. They have political and dissident functions as they undermine the dominant social configurations in society. Futures are projections of truths structured as fictions,[8] real constructs that break down norms and offer lines of flight towards new and better futures.

CIRCA offers a line of flight for Otakus who enjoy bringing stories out from the screens and into the material world. These otakus are cosplayers who, out of passion, spend vast sums of money and time to manifest their favourite characters from anime. Poses, dialogues, costumes, aesthetics, personalities are replicated from the stories of anime and brought into reality. Cosplaying otakus are seriously social. At big conventions, large numbers of cosplayers gather, occupy, role-play, and perform.  Why not out on the streets?

This is the foundation of radical politics, whereby people commit to the real possibility of generative fictions to pave the way for true utopias. True utopias are expressed as a matter of urgency where one is must imagine as there is no other way out. The stretching out of pessimism, beyond what is tolerable, rips open radical gaps which open the way for messier forms of serious political anime (cos)play.

One of the cosplayers steps forward from the crowd. She is dressed as Akame, the titular character from Akame ga Kill. She has knee-length black hair and is wearing a schoolgirl's uniform, holding a katana that seethes with demonic magic at her side. She appraises the Angel of History with a piercing stare.

"Dry off your body and prepare yourself," She tells the Angel of History in Japanese. "We're going to bring down the government."

Spam is kneaded and pulled like slime. Its gooiness seeps between the hands drooling outwards in a viral discharge that sticks and shimmers[9] on bodies.

Anime affects and aligns bodies together in shared non-sovereign spaces of otaku passion. However, conflating stories and politics is a double-edged katana like Akame’s cursed weapon that she keeps by her hip. Once the blade flashes and cuts the skin, snake-like patterns and markings that originate from the wound spread across and mask the surface of the body, leading to death.

This power is a familiar one among far-right fascist demagogues, who dazzle crowds with charisma. The bodies in these crowds chant for a pure colour, identity, philosophy, promising unity, and strength in sameness against an imagined enemy-Other. By using stories, images, and aesthetics to shape the pliable spam-body of the Other for political gains, demagogues paint bodies into objects of hate.[10] The Other is no longer a complex human, but reduced to a stereotype. As these stereotyped objects of hate circulate, it fuels the imagination of far-right fascists, forming their thoughts and organising their actions against the Other. It is what Benjamin calls the aestheticization of politics, and it is a weapon of fascism.  However, Akame is not afraid of her power. She uses it to overthrow the corrupt.

Spam decentralises the authority of a single history, voice, and story. It opens up constellations of cyberspaces through which countless people can madly shout and enact their incongruous narratives through a carnivalesque of spam.

Spamming stories have the political potential for reclaiming back representation, and moving others. The reality of politics is not merely limited to protests and governments, but also to having control of aesthetics that excite the public, stirring their e-motions and moving their bodies onto the streets. The same technologies, which are used to scam, spam, and radicalise, can be used to bring about different modes of socio-political organisation. As such, radical otaku-cosplayers can live a fuller political-reality that takes back hold of the fiery potential of stories to affect and move otakus and the world.

Politics are lengthy processes; they compose an art of staying with others in thick trouble, punctuated not by historical turning points, but insignificant, catalytic, and political happenings. But they can also be artful, spammy, passionate, fun. The Otaku-angel, for instance, has defined a space of passion on foundations that are not formed on the bloodied debris of history, but with kin who share the same (political) interests and hobbies.

The Angel of History stands up to face the Akame Cosplayer.

"I understand now, Senpai :3," says The Angel of History, "We lack a central leader, yet we are connected by the constellations of bonds between each otaku and cosplayer in the darkest corners of cyberspace all the way to the sweaty halls of anime conventions.”

“Sōda ne, Angel-san”, Akame replies.

“We renounce the face of a charismatic leader, in favour of the faces in the crowds at anime convention or non-sovereign figures occupying and brooding on illegal anime-streaming websites"

The newly formed Otaku-Angel cannot tell the difference between realities and fantasies, online and offline, images, and bodies. They unapologetically flourish their cursed katana in the air, playfully cosplaying their way through the internet, out on the streets, and into the future.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

[2] See Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

[3] Hito Steyerl, “Digital Debris : Spam and Scam” October 13, no. Fall 2011 (2011), 80.

[4] Hito Steyerl, “Digital Debris : Spam and Scam” October 13, no. Fall 2011 (2011), 75.

[5] Nakama is a reference to the anime, One Piece. Here, it means crewmate, friend, comrade.

[6] See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. (London: Continuum, 2006).

[7] Paul Routledge, “Sensuous Solidarities: Emotion, Politics and Performance in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” Antipode 44, no. 2 (2012): 428–52, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00862.x.

[8] See Lacan, Jacques, and Bruce Fink. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006, 451.

[9] See Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[10] Sara. Ahmed, “The Organisation of Hate,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004.

Victor Guan Yi Zhou (21) is an undergraduate at the University of Sydney, and likes to spam on Instagram @smallcave.