Prayer in the Desert of Meaning: The Germination of Faith Economics in the Fandom Economy
- Masaya
- Jan 13
- 7 min read
I. Observations from Subculture Fandom economy
What unites us is emptiness. Walking through a desert of meaning, we thirst, tongues cleaving to our palates. Grains of nihilism cling to our skin, draining meaning from our bodies.
A world both affluent and meaningless. Marx tells us: "Money degrades all the gods of man and transforms them into commodities." Money collapses the world's many dimensions into the single dimension of price—the most refined dimensionality reduction for the sake of exchange.
Commodification is an institution that severs time, relationship, and context, reducing them to "immediate equivalence." The past is ignored, the future bracketed as mere prediction, relationships anonymized, context stripped away. Smooth-surfaced strangers of unknown provenance and makers fill the shelves. Modernity can be read as the era when this severance overwhelmed the dynamics of extension.
In a godless world, we—the alienated—wander a desert of meaning.
In this secular age, where is prayer? Has it vanished?
In the Far East of the internet, beyond the Silk Road, hope floats amid the torrent of internet drugs and memes—idols, VTubers, artists. The fandom economy forming within Japanese otaku subculture appears to be the apex of commodification. Kawaii culture, those girlish rooms suggesting adults who never grew up, this strange representation mixing emptiness with sadism. This culture takes on the aspect of a pandemonium of shamans who naively summon any god whatsoever. Here, personalities become objects of worship, emotions become objects of monetization; commodified and service-ized communication is displayed for sale. Viewed critically, here lies the perfection of alienation—the ultimate commodification of the self, one might say.
The terms "oshi-katsu" (supporting one's favorite) and "oshi-men" (one's favored member) appear to have become mainstream following the idol boom of the 2010s. "Oshi-katsu" is more recent, becoming a buzzword by 2021. It is surely no coincidence that idols and prayer emerge at the extremity of God's death and commodification.
Yet what are fans and otaku buying? What does their tipping pay for? What are they exchanging? What do collectors of merchandise seek to possess? Though this is the extremity of secularism, the principle of equivalent exchange suddenly falls silent here. Tipping is often cruelly "not worth it." Nothing returns. No guarantees. With high probability, nothing happens. At most, "one's name is called," "eyes meet for an instant," "existence continues." Yet people tip anyway—sometimes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, flowing one-way. Within this irrationality, a structure transcending exchange becomes visible. If exchange is "immediate completion," tipping appears to possess the dynamics of "relational extension." What fans are buying is not a product, but a relationship.
The resemblance to religious donations is no accident. When believers donate, they do not seek equivalent returns. Donations are offerings; rituals are regular streams, periodic concerts, seasonal events. Like worship and festivals, repetition and donation amplify faith. That "sacred site pilgrimages" function not as metaphor but as practice is because this structure already bears the character of religiosity and devotion. With community as cradle, actions and beliefs become kindling that feed each other.
"Oshi" saves the fan. However naively, "oshi" proclaims salvation as gods, angels, or saviors. The severed subject—stripped of time, relationship, and context, remade into a spectatorial consumer—recovers existential meaning through relationship with their oshi and community. Oshi-katsu appears as a new salvation in secular society. More precisely, it appears as a "technique of salvation"—a mechanism that partially re-sutures the time, relationship, and context that commodification severed. Community thickens relationships, shared narratives weave context, regenerating myth. Fans are not mere consumers. "Oshi" is simultaneously a commodity and not an object of comparison—not an optimal solution selected by price and utility. Fans, otaku, are not investors. When popularity falls, they do not cut their losses. Even when retreat is rational, they do not retreat. Even if their oshi violates ethics, their faith may not extinguish. They are "believers." Because they believe, value becomes visible; because value is visible, they believe.
Can we reposition this phenomenon not as "the residue of capitalism" but as a post-capitalist germination? At the point where severance reaches its extreme, extension resurfaces in new form. This is not a return to pre-modernity. While remaining within money and markets, faith is substituted into their logic. Borrowing the form of severance, extension—and faith as its ultimate expression—is simulated. In the Far Eastern niche of capitalism, there is a sprout of faith, as if human life were returning to prayer.
II. What Are Faith Securities?
The Dual Existence of Securities and Three Extensions
What makes this fandom-like phenomenon reproducible is the "faith security." Ordinary financial securities feel cold when held. Value lies outside. Revenue, assets, growth rates—only what can be calculated becomes soul. No matter who owns or who prays, value does not increase. Relationship is secondary, narrative is the myth of price and growth, and what remains is only the form of "prediction and expectation."
A security is a device that folds a claim on the future into the present, making it tradeable. Stocks are claims on future dividends and corporate value; bonds are claims on future interest and principal repayment. Securities bring the future into the present.
In faith-based securities, value lies inside—or rather, the inside creates value. Here, "who holds it" is part of the value. What can be resold is the shell of rights; faith itself does not transfer. If financial securities "do not change in valuation even when context is discarded," faith-based securities "collapse in valuation the moment context is discarded." Faith-based securities dwell outside price. Price can be touched only at the moment of transaction; the time of holding proliferates in another dimension. The denser the relationship, the deeper the immersion in narrative, the thicker the expectation, the more value rises. Holders are not interchangeable. When the hand that grips changes, the meaning of the security changes.
Extension appears in three forms. First: temporal value extension. Value is not killed immediately. It does not end now. It is sent to tomorrow, deposited into next year, wagered on works and achievements yet unseen. Securities institutionalize the act of believing in the future. It is the form of "waiting" in an instantaneous world. There is also relational extension. Securities generate bonds between issuers and purchasers. Shareholders are tied to corporations; communities find each other among those who grip the same slip of paper. What price anonymized, relationship names once again. Commodities exist as completion; securities exist as incompletion. The former needs no subject; the latter is completed by the subject. Finally: contextual extension. Narratives accumulate in securities. The myth of founding, the catharsis of failure, the succession of challenges, the trajectory of growth. A thickness of time that cannot be compressed into numbers adheres to the back of the paper.
Holders become not mere owners but narrators of myth. Commodities are devices for transaction, completed by price. But securities fatten in the time they are not traded. Securities are the form of what resists becoming a price tag in a world that wants everything to return to price tags. Yet the core of securities is not time alone. Securities exist dually. At the moment of transaction, securities collapse into price. Sellers and buyers can only shake hands through price. The content of temporal expectation, the density of relationship, the depth of participation in narrative—all are bracketed. Value is projected onto price.
Yet in the time of holding, securities become vessels of multiple dimensions. Here the three extensions arise.
The Dual Existence of Securities and Three Extensions
In financial securities, multidimensionality is effectively stripped away. Value is reduced to external fundamentals (revenue, assets, growth rates), and "who holds it" does not matter. Relationship and context are peeled from valuation. Even the time of holding is objectified as "expectation regarding external variables."
Then how do faith-based securities stabilize without relying on external fundamentals? Value cannot be supported by external grounds alone. It is established as a totality of relationship, narrative, and expectation. And what is decisive here is that the uniqueness of the holder contributes to value. Who believes, what kind of person believes, how much they believe, how much they participate, how much they share the narrative—this constitutes part of the value as the diversity of faith. Even if resold, what sells is "rights"; faith and relationship cannot be sold. At this point, the holder of securities is no longer a consumer but recovers subjectivity as a participant in both economy and faith.
Faith securities do not overthrow the market. The moment of transaction submits to the logic of money. There is no escape from this. But in the persistence of holding, they maintain value dimensions irreducible to money. This is a covert substitution, a suspension, a partial flight through horizontal deferral. Let us plant saplings of faith. Yearning for the sacred while living in a profane world—this has always been the distance between humanity and salvation. Faith securities are vessels for implementing this duality in economic form.
III. Tautology and Transcendence
The greatest difference between faith securities and securities lies in the tautology of value. "It has value because it has value."
God is worshipped because God is God; the sacred is sacred because it is sacred. There is no external reference here. To question the ground becomes a device of collapse. No external reference. This is not a logical defect but ontological sufficiency in the sense of not depending on external grounds. People sense transcendence there. Inexplicability becomes the condition of transcendence.
Secularization is not the disappearance of tautology. It is the migration of its seat. The self-sufficiency that once dwelt in God has migrated to nation, law, and money. Money, as the pure circulation "it has value because everyone recognizes its value," has become the sole tautology of the economic domain. After the gold standard was abandoned, money became a purer tautology—shedding material grounds, running on circulation of credit alone.
People sense transcendence in this self-sufficiency. The sublime arises from not measuring. Before infinity, we submit by becoming aware of our finitude.
To apply a measure makes the world portable. By measuring, comparison becomes possible. Comparison enables exchange and substitution. To be substitutable is to be peeled from context. This is the chain of severance. But here, relationship, narrative, and community entangle, supporting the circulation. Therefore collapse does not come from price. It collapses when relationships are severed, narratives torn, communities dismantled.
In an age without prayer, people seek prayer. I observed prayer in oshi-katsu and VTubers. It may be an oasis for one night. But in the age of God's death, the secular age, people must cope through action rather than revelation. Brush away the grains of nihilism and strain your eyes—even in the desert of meaning, stars flicker.
