Creator of Evangelion and Gackt launch their own social network
Just when we’d collectively agreed that Hideaki Anno had earned a well-deserved nap after wrapping up the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, the man goes and does something thoroughly unexpected. Not a new film. Not a retirement announcement. A social network.
Yes, you read that correctly.
A newly formed entity called Popopo has assembled what can only be described as the most improbable brain trust in Japanese pop culture history. A lineup so eccentric it feels like someone fed a trivia database into a slot machine and hit the jackpot.
The cast of characters
- Hideaki Anno – the existential dread-merchant who gave us Neon Genesis Evangelion
- Gackt – the visual kei icon who has remained an enigma for three decades
- Makoto Tezuka – son of Osamu Tezuka, the closest thing manga has to a founding deity
- Hiroyuki Nishimura – the architect behind 2channel, the internet’s original chaotic neutral zone
- Nobuo Kawakami – the founder of Niconico, the platform that taught otaku how to comment directly onto videos
These aren’t merely celebrities attaching their names to a vanity project. These are the people who built the infrastructure of modern Japanese internet culture.
Nishimura’s 2channel pioneered anonymous communication at scale. Kawakami’s Niconico reimagined how audiences interact with video content. Anno reshaped what animation could even be. And Gackt? He has spent decades perfecting the art of being Gackt, which frankly deserves its own academic discipline.
What we know so far
The group will officially unveil whatever Popopo actually is on . Until then, we’re left with marketing copy so pretentious it almost circles back around to being brilliant.
The platform is being billed as “the last human-made social network before the age of AI” and “a videophone that doesn’t need a camera,” designed for “the last era in which humans build applications.”
Anno, never one for understatement, has described the service as feeling like “a videophone from the future.”
What does that even mean? Your guess is genuinely as good as mine. A cameraless video calling system sounds like either a philosophical riddle or a technical impossibility. But these are the same minds that turned anonymous forum posting into a national institution and made depressive mecha pilots a cultural touchstone. Dismissing them outright feels unwise.
A history of collaboration
This isn’t their first collaboration. Kawakami, Anno, and Gackt have orbited each other’s projects for over two decades, appearing in bewildering commercial ventures and anime side-projects with the regularity of comets. There’s a chemistry here that predates this announcement.
The broader question hovering over all of this: does the internet need another social platform? whether the internet needs another social platform. The current landscape is bloated, algorithm-driven, and increasingly populated by synthetic accounts masquerading as genuine engagement.
If anyone might approach that problem from a genuinely human angle, it would be the people who built communities before engagement metrics became a religion.
The honest truth
Of course, it could also be an absolute disaster. You must remember that Evangelion’s original television ending was so cryptic it prompted death threats. 2channel became a breeding ground for some of the internet’s more toxic behaviours. Creative genius does not automatically translate to product sense.
Still. The audacity of the claim alone—that this might be the final platform built by humans, for humans, before machine generation becomes the default—is the kind of swagger you can’t help but admire. Even if you suspect it might be utter nonsense.
The reveal approaches. Bring popcorn.
- What would a social network actually look like if it were designed by people who understood subtext, atmosphere, and human emotion rather than engagement funnels?
- Is the “cameraless video call” a metaphor for something deeper, or are we about to see a genuinely strange technical innovation?
- Do you trust a team this eccentric to build something you’d actually want to use?
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