Cozyweb Animals

Cozyweb as collective self-regulation in the permaweird

This is the third installment in a series on Archival Time, where I investigate the new cultural temporality introduced by LLMs.

Previously, In Archival Time, I wrote about the carnivalesque nature of internet vs archival slice nature of LLMs.

In Prophetic Soft Technologies, I wrote about prediction markets as response to loss of narrative.

---

Two pieces of media caught my attention this week. The first was a gonzo-ethnography of the subculture of gooners—men who spend a lot of time in Discords collecting and tagging various types of pornography. The subculture seems removed from the activity of watching porn. There is no desire or simulation of desire; instead, it seems like a need to categorize porn consumption and share it with other people. The second piece of media that caught my attention was a video of Bryan Johnson, the world’s foremost longevity influencer on a visit to Mumbai. In the video, Bryan pauses an interview to put on an N95 mask, citing the city’s poor air quality. He eventually leaves the interview early.

Both Bryan Johnson and the gooners inhabit online communities that regulate themselves by cataloging their consumption. The former does this by broadcasting and meticulously documenting health regimens, the latter by cataloging porn. What separates them from earlier forms of consumer culture is the absence of desire in the Hegelian sense as a struggle to be recognized by the other, combined with an embrace of cynicism as ideology. They recognize the lack of desire but see no grand narrative capable of reigniting it, so they lean into purposelessness as an aesthetic, often caricaturizing themselves in the process.

These two subcultures are not isolated exceptions. People often categorize cozyweb communities—those that exist on Telegram, Discord, or other group chats—as safe havens away from the noise of the social web. But the most popular of these communities serve the same function: they regulate and soothe emotions, worldviews, and habits through others. Spending time in them is less about the desire to learn or transform through others and more about the need to regulate the self. The Hegelian struggle for recognition that once defined subcultures—mediated by risk, conflict, and symbolic exchange—has been replaced by the maintenance of needs within a digital habitat.

Database to Habitat

In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, published in the 1990s, Hiroki Azuma conducts an ethnography of the anime culture of the 1980s. In practice, the otaku collect, classify, and recombine ‘moe’ elements across media— cataloging traits and characters, building personal archives, buying merch, attending cons, and producing/consuming dōjinshi that remix these fragments into small, self-contained scenarios rather than following long-form plots. Azuma argues that members of the otaku subculture do not consume stories, but instead consumed a database of character traits, subgenres, and aesthetic details removed from narrative. For Azuma, the otaku—or “database animals,” as he calls them—represent what remains in the wake of Japan’s collapse of grand narratives of nation, modernity, and progress.

Azuma links this to French Philosopher Alexander Kojève’s reading of Hegel: at the “end of history,” human desire—which once sought recognition and transformation—devolves into need, the satisfaction of appetites without reference to others or to meaning. The database animal thus lives post-historically: an intelligent, technologically equipped creature for whom cultural life is no longer narrative but combinatorial, and for whom emotion is managed through cataloging information.

Around the time I moved to the United States, someone told me that Japanese social acceleration often foreshadowed American acceleration. They had Hikikomori before we had NEETs, they had rentable girlfriends and family members before we had AI companions. One could argue that social acceleration in the United States is otaku sociality combined with vastly more compute power.

Database consumption of otaku culture has been replaced by the consumption of entire digital environments. The otaku had to archive their world and share it through slower mediums of communication, while we can now live our entire lives inside the stream of feeds, servers, and group chats.

One of the visual motifs that stood out in Azuma’s book was the description otaku as ferrying around a “shell of their selves”. Describing the origin of the term otaku, Azuma writes:

The term ‘otaku’ was born in the period from the 1970s to the 1980s when the otaku would refer to each other as ‘otaku.’ Critic **Nakajima Azusa** in his __Communication Deficiency Syndrome__ argues that the essence of otaku is expressed in this alias. She notes: __‘What the word “otaku” (meaning “your home” or “your family”) points to is the assertion that one is identified, not by personal relations but by a relationship to the home unit and one’s own territory.’__ ... The reason the otaku, ‘no matter where they go, cart around tons of books, magazines, fanzines, and scraps stuffed into huge paper bags like hermit crabs’ is that, if they do not ferry around ‘the shell of their selves’—namely their fantasies of group affiliation—they cannot be mentally stable.

If the otaku’s shells had physical embodiments, the cozyweb animal’s shell is secured inside a digital terrarium like Discord, Telegram, or Signal: a networked shell that maintains psychic stability when grand narratives and stable identities no longer exist. Bryan Johnson and longevity is an example of a online community that also has an extended physical shell in the form of esoteric health habits.

At first glance, it might seem unfair to compare Bryan Johnson to this model. After all, he does have a stated grand narrative—“Don’t die.” But if you examine the habits through which that narrative expresses itself—thousands of supplements, cold plunges, perfect sleep, nighttime erections—it becomes clear that this is yet another regime of self-regulation. None of these are habits that by themselves would increase the longevity of human life by a great margin like say invention of antibiotics or vaccination did. Longevity community is essentially the purest expression of a cozyweb animal, where on top of relying on self regulation by other people who agree with you, you are regulated by sensors and measurements that constantly assure you are that you are going to live longer.

The same can be said for AI companionship. The current discourse often frames AI friends as substitutes for intimacy, but they are extensions of the cozyweb: mechanisms of self-regulation rather than transformation. Their psychological effects resemble those of conspiracy theory group chats because both are designed to reproduce affective homeostasis within enclosed systems.

Azuma’s notion of the “loss of grand narrative” parallels what

Venkatesh Rao

calls the permaweird: a state where the collapse of narratives which gives rise to infinite self-referential maintenance loops.

Cynical Detachment

My personal version of being a cozyweb animal consists of hanging out in menswear forums on Discord and Reddit. These communities revolve around the idea of “slow clothes”—artisan-made garments that cost a small fortune. While there is merit to the idea, “slow clothes” mostly functions as a justification for spending enormous amounts of time and money on clothing. One defining characteristic of these forums is their self-awareness reflected through memes that are some variation of should I buy pants or pay rent this month. But rather than discouraging the behavior, this irony reinforces it.

Azuma, quoting Kojève, describes this as “snobbery”: “Snobbish, cynical subjects do not believe in the material value of the world. However, it is exactly because of this that they cannot stop appearing to believe in the formal value of the world; so they do not mind sacrificing substance for appearance or form.” Žižek extends this to say that this reversal becomes compulsory: even knowing something is meaningless, people continue to do it.

Irony thus functions as a protective film over compulsion. By acknowledging the futility of the habit, one earns permission to continue it. “Yes, it’s ridiculous,” becomes indistinguishable from “Yes, I’ll keep doing it.” The forum’s memes, in-jokes, and self-aware affects are maintenance operations—emotional regulation mechanisms that keep the ecosystem balanced.

Cynicism, in this world, is no longer oppositional. It is the lubricant that allows the cozyweb to run smoothly after belief has burned out. It transforms absurdity into comfort, indulgence into routine. And that is the paradox of the cozyweb animal: everyone knows the system is hollow, but the shared acknowledgment of that hollowness becomes the very thing that holds the community together.

Peer Burden Instead of Good Taste

Pierre Bourdieu described taste as an instrument of distinction, honed through time, class, and cultivation. “Good taste” was a record of refinement accumulated through education, travel, and long acquaintance with scarcity.

But cozyweb animals live in post-history. Everyone references the same archive. The once-exclusive references of tastemakers now circulate as endlessly reposted content, divorced from the social distance that once made them meaningful. Hierarchies flatten. What emerges in their place is not distinction but peer burden: the obligation to maintain and stay responsive to one’s fellow cozyweb animals.

Peer burden means that value no longer comes from accumulation but from maintenance. The highest social skill is consistency—posting often, replying quickly, signaling recognition at the right tempo. Taste is no longer a matter of refined distance but of intimate proximity: the ability to demonstrate that you are present, synchronized with other cozyweb animals, and self-aware.

Irony becomes proof of belonging: we are all in on the joke, which is to say, we are all still here. In Bourdieu’s world, taste differentiated; in ours, it stabilizes. What began as cultural capital has become affective labor. To be tasteful now is simply to endure the feed without leaving it.

Cozyweb as Metabolic Adaptation

There is a theory in systems biology that life self-organizes at the edge of chaos, maintaining a precarious balance between rigidity and chaos. When individual cells approached the limits of stability, they began forming collective organisms as a way to distribute and regulate internal instability. According to this theory, multicellularity evolved as a coordination protocol, as a way to maintain equilibrium through shared regulation.

The cozyweb animal can be seen as the next iteration of that process, a collective nervous system of self-regulating individuals, banding together to preserve equilibrium in an overstimulated, uncertain informational environment. Each user is a cell maintaining its own homeostasis — regulating dopamine, stress, loneliness, etc. Discords, servers, and group chats act as intercellular tissues, distributing affective signals. The system as a whole hovers on the edge of chaos, remaining just active enough to sustain connection, and just regulated enough to avoid collapse. At least for now.

***

Diachronic vs. Synchronic Life

**This is an additional note connecting Cozyweb animals to Archival time**

In structural linguistics, synchrony and diachrony describe two ways of understanding systems in time. Synchrony is the view across the present: how the elements of a structure coexist and interact in a given moment. Diachrony is the view through time: how those elements evolve, decay, or accumulate. Every culture oscillates between these modes—the immediacy of the present and the depth of its unfolding. What has changed in the digital era is not that one has replaced the other, but that each web ecology now privileges a different temporal relation to itself.

The Social Web: Synchronic Time

The social web is synchronous to its core. It is built to display everything at once: millions of overlapping moments flattened into a single, continuous now. What looks and feels like acceleration is actually the compression of all times into one attention field. Its users exist in constant mutual visibility, performing in real time for one another. What matters is not continuity but co-presence—to remain in the field of perception. The result is a world organized around the temporality of trends: a regime of perpetual reaction that obliterates sequence.

The Cozy Web: Diachronic Time

By contrast, the cozy web—small Discords, private servers, niche forums—lives in diachronic time. Its rhythms are slower, cumulative, archival. A thread may stretch across months or years, layering jokes, references, and shared memory. Meaning is built not from simultaneity but from return—from inhabiting the same space long enough for sediment to form.

If the social web is a flattened present, the cozy web is a lived past. It carries its own lore: memes and rituals that accrue depth through repetition. Each participant contributes not just in the moment but to an ongoing story of the group—a small, self-contained history. This is why the cozy web feels both gentler and heavier: its temporality is durational. It builds continuity out of maintenance. Its culture doesn’t vanish after trending; it decays slowly, leaving behind traces—the digital equivalent of patina.

The LLM: Archival Diachrony

Large language models introduce a third temporality—what might be called archival diachrony. They are not synchronous like the social web, nor durational like the cozy web. Instead, they are trained on frozen slices of culture, each representing a total but temporary world. GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-5: each model is a snapshot of human expression at a particular moment, recombined into something that feels alive but is ontologically sealed.

These are diachronic epochs without continuity. Each new model replaces the last rather than evolving from it. Culture moves on, but the dataset stays still. In that sense, LLMs mimic the structure of memory but without experience. Their temporality is that of the archive: periodic, discontinuous, cumulative, but never alive in the present. What they store is history divorced from flow—a set of self-contained pasts endlessly reanimated in the now.

Each of these systems—the social web, the cozy web, and the LLM—teaches us a different way to live with time. The social web embodies synchronic speed: everything happening now, endlessly refreshing. The cozy web embodies diachronic depth: small continuities, shared memory, accumulated presence. LLMs embody archival diachrony: sealed cultural snapshots, recombined and replayed.

Together they form our current temporal triangle: the feed, the thread, and the archive—three overlapping but incompatible ways of inhabiting the present.

***

h/t

Venkatesh Rao

and

Yak Collective

for conversations that led to this piece

Created with Titles