【リンク】
The concept of DIY as a countercultural practice has shaped a part of what is now known as “surveillance culture,” with the proliferation of social media playing a crucial role. However, in discussions of contemporary surveillance studies, the term “DIY” is often narrowly interpreted as merely “voluntary,” lacking a more nuanced analysis. At the same time, while technologies such as self-tracking have been associated with both surveillance culture and the global spread of sexual abstinence practices, little attention has been paid to the situated knowledge created by the practitioners themselves.
This study investigates the Japanese sexual abstinence (ona-kin) community in the 2000s to explore how early online DIY culture contributed to forms of bodily self-tracking that predate the rise of social media. Drawing on archived web resources, we trace the emergence of self-control practices through gamified systems originating on 2chan in the early 2000s. From the mid-2000s to early 2010s, users began creating and sharing their own websites and applications. These platforms not only enabled individuals to track the duration of their abstinence and progress through class-based rankings, but also facilitated peer-to-peer communication, knowledge exchange, and ongoing motivation.
These practices reflect a DIY ethos grounded in anti-consumerism and collective production, supported by bulletin board systems (BBS) that encouraged participation and content creation. At the same time, they foreshadow features commonly associated with surveillance culture—such as gamification, algorithmic regulation, and voluntary self-monitoring—that later became widespread through social media. We concluded that the concept of DIY culture has not only metaphorically but materially influenced the development of surveillance culture. However, this convergence also reveals a tension: while DIY-based self-surveillance promotes self-discipline and improvement, it can also lead to voluntary submission to monitoring norms.
