Whether in Japan or elsewhere, the otaku is, above all, networked and computerised. And the distributive layering of the anime image affords a multiplex interface with other media. Oddly, however, while the otaku is always in touch (with the computer), he or she is always out of touch (with the actual world). What does detachment mean in what looks more and more like a regime of all-connectedness? Paradoxically, the otaku lays bare the non-relation at the heart of the all-relatedness of information. Potentially then, being otaku means to assert the right to noncommunication at the very centre of the communications revolution, to inscribe refusal in the heart of work—which may involve a different sense of how one’s labour pays off. Is the otaku relation to anime a refusal to work at the heart of new media and technologies? That otaku movement is already underway in global media transformations, and in realms of activity that are not thought of when otaku and anime are imagined in terms of fixed social or historical identities.