Kacie Kinzer‘s Tweenbots made the internet rounds earlier this month on sheer charm. Unlike the awkward double-jointed humanoids in mainstream robotics labs learning to gingerly pour cups of tea for the elderly, Kinzer’s Tweenbots are just boxes on wheels with stylized smiles and taped-on notes indicating a destination and asking for help in their quest to arrive there.

And most of the time, they get it. Kinzer claims that as “not one” Tweenbot got lost or damaged as it made its way through the city. As she puts it:

[T]his ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.

In other words, Tweenbots are masters of amae, the art of childish, irresistible dependency. This has intriguing implications for human-robot interaction even if the Tweenbots themselves are more art project than anything else.

It might seem surprising that this idea should come out of the US. Wasn’t Japan the country gradually filling up with roly-poly companions along the lines of those in Tezuka Osamu’s Astroboy and other manga, while the American market favors no-nonsense machines that are faceless, creepy, or both? (Relatively thoughtful example of this narrative: “Why Should We Be Friends?” in Newsweek last year.)

When you think about it, though, Japan’s superstar robots already rely on amae in a very deep and existential way. An AIBO isn’t quite as helpless as a Tweenbot, but it was very carefully designed to appear to be. (Even the sound design was contracted out to Takemura “Child & Magic” Nobukazu.) ASIMO speaks like a child, looks like a whimsical space elf, and acts like a clumsy servant. You could hire a human to do what the ASIMO does much more smoothly, and it would probably even be cheaper — but people forgive the ASIMO its failings because it seems to be trying its hardest to please.

A Roomba, on the other hand, relates to two things: furniture and dirt. It isn’t even designed to simulate awareness of humans, let alone deference. (You can imagine a Roomba doggedly cleaning a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Wall-E-style, but can you imagine an AIBO frolicking there?)

Tweenbots are closer to the Roomba pole than the ASIMO one. They, too, are insects blindly following one very simple algorithm: “move forward while looking cute”. They don’t interact with humans; humans act on them. That humans interpret this as an interaction is an artifact of the human programming to be suckers for cute, helpless creatures. People get attached to their Roombas, too, naming them and treating them like pets, despite the fact that a Roomba literally cannot distinguish a human from an end table.

An AIBO or an ASIMO performs amae, while a Tweenbot embodies it. In robotics, specialization usually increases efficiency, which means that a Tweenbot’s amae comes cheaper and easier. But it also makes them a developmental cul-de-sac: they are designed to need us more than we need them.

This is not the case for the ASIMOs and AIBOs of the world. The hope for them is that they will one day mature into new models dextrous and capable enough to allow us to indulge in amae. Let’s be brutally honest: the manga model for robot-assisted aged care is less Astroboy than Doraemon, the robo-amae fantasy par excellence. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an old man pleading for a takecopter — forever.

Until then, though, we indulge them like the children they are, indulging their weaknesses, applauding proudly when they manage to stand upright unsupported, and waiting patiently for them to grow up — something which Tweenbots, like Peter Pan, will never do.

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

Recently there has been a fascinating media circus over the referral to prosecutors (charged without being physically arrested) of 18 internet users on suspicion of making false accusations towards a fairly minor comedian. While this may be the first case of several individuals charged at once for so-called enjo (炎上) flame attacks, the case relies on the same-old “the internet is scary!” whining from mass media dinosaurs.

For almost a decade now, internet users have been falsely accusing comedian Smiley Kikuchi of involvement in the horrific “concrete girl” murder/burial in 1989 (I previously mentioned the murder case on MF here). His talent agency was forced in the past to shut down a “bulletin board site” due to the flood of misplaced malice directed toward the tarento.

Kikuchi was mistakenly accussed of being one of the murderers due to being a similar age to the criminals (born in 1972) and hailing from the slummy areas of Adachi-ku where the crime happened. According to Smiley himself, the rumors showed up verbatim in a “taboos of the entertainment industry” book, which his tormentors then used to back up their claims. It did not help Kikuchi that he has based his whole comedy career on being a jerk. His own jimusho bills him as “a suspicious person you’ll never forget once you’ve seen him,” and Wikipedia summarizes his comedic stylings as “getting laughs by saying mean things with a big smile on his face.” Not exactly a charmer.

Now after setting up a new blog with Usen-affiliated Ameblo earlier last year, Kikuchi enabled comments between January and April, using a system specially designed for celebrity bloggers. All comments appeared immediately on the site but were then subjected to moderation, usually resulting in harmful comments being deleted after 15 minutes. During this time Kikuchi was apparently still inundated with the age-old accusations in the comments section, until he finally suspended blogging in May (it is back up now). Though Ameba initiated a pre-clearance moderation system in May, typical of blogs for websites such as the New York Times, Kikuchi has explained that he filed a complaint with the police after he started receiving threats offline and began fearing for his life.

Before I start throwing around criticism, let me first express general support for the idea of holding people responsible for these obviously libelous comments (of course, this assumes that there is no chance these commenters are somehow right). And those arrested sound like they deserve the treatment they are getting: they acted like “net stalkers” who made it the mission of their extremely petty lives to torment a minor comedian with no regard to the facts.

By all appearances, the 18 flamers were fingered because Smiley went to the police for help with the general problem of death threats, and the comments section of his blog happened to be where this group of alleged idiots left behind clear evidence. In other words, these people were arrested not because of the internet, but because they were a core group of stalkers who caused real harm.

But because the words “internet”, “anonymous”, “defamation”, and “jimusho talent” appeared in the same sentence, the mainstream media has decided to indulge in willfully-ignorant paranoia. Right off the bat — possibly out of deference to the Ota Production, who represents top talent including girl-group AKB48 — major media acted in unison to refuse to even name the celebrity the 18 people had defamed. But the open secret became an open fact when Smiley himself admitted to being the one behind the charges and offered a detailed explanation on his blog, simultaneously posted on the top of the Ota Production website. As evidence of the mass media’s take on the issue, I present this Feb. 6 Asahi Shimbun editorial in its near entirety — a masterful example of the typical attitude:

What if you become a target of groundless defamation and are labeled “a murderer” on the internet?

The damage would probably spread beyond cyberspace. Perhaps others might eye you with suspicion in everyday life, and the situation could affect your work.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department decided to send papers to prosecutors on 18 people across the nation on suspicion of libel for posting messages on a male comedian’s internet blog wrongly calling him a murderer.

Apparently, the police move is meant as a warning against such serious slander.

Furthermore, police sent papers on a woman on suspicion of intimidation for posting a message threatening to kill the comedian.

It is extremely unusual for police to collectively target individuals over entries on a blog. The situation underscores the extent of malicious messages in cyberspace.

Some people start groundless rumors to abuse and defame others close to them. Others may attack a well-known personality on the internet because they don’t like what he or she has said. Sometimes, what starts out as fun escalates into hostile attacks. The situation is all the more troublesome because there are others who incite such action.

But the people targeted are helpless.

…

One disturbing trend is that a broader range of people are irresponsibly posting slanderous remarks. The 18 people facing charges this time include a female senior high school student and an employee of a national university.

In 2007, police across the nation received nearly 9,000 reports of Net-based defamation. In South Korea, an actress who was slandered on the internet committed suicide. The situation can no longer be overlooked.

Behind the trend is the characteristic of Net society in which people can easily say anything without identifying themselves. But it is an act of cowardice to hide oneself and make abusive or untrue statements one-sidedly without giving the targets a chance to defend themselves.

Of course, we wish to recognize in a positive way the role of the internet itself. Everyone can express his or her opinions to the world. Thanks to this medium, opportunities for expression and speech have opened up extensively. We must firmly protect such opportunities.

But that is all the more reason why we need to be responsible for our words. Abusing others without reason is different from properly expressing one’s opinion. If we want to criticize others, we must calmly state our ideas based on facts. Unfortunately, such a custom has yet to take root in the ever-expanding Net society.

This time, police moved in response to a complaint filed by the victim of abuse. But to create a sound Net society, the public as a whole must make an effort. It is time for both schools and homes to properly teach how to use the internet and drive home the responsibility of message writers.

There you have it — whenever someone says something mean on the internet, the target becomes a “helpless” victim, even when the cops step in and arrest 18 perpetrators. Most TV commentators expressed nearly identical views about where our sympathies should lie.

What might not be immediately clear to the middle-aged men at the editorial board who have never held employment outside their firm, vicious comments and abuse simply come with the territory. If we are going to have an internet, we have to deal with the bad eggs who want to muck things up. And without (1) discussing the particularly pernicious nature of this case and (2) mentioning that rowdy commenters are common and need to be moderated, you paint a picture of a completely unruly and incorrigible internet population, which just is not the case.

If blogs and the internet consisted of nothing but nasty comments and abuse, no one would enjoy reading it. Most people find their own most comfortable way to use the internet, even without blogging, but there always exists the risk of some unpleasantness, not too far from everyday life.

In addition, the operators of blogging tools work tirelessly to try and balance the desire for active and open discourse (and blog-based brand promotion) while managing the inevitable bad apples who spoil things for everyone else. Ameblo clearly messed up here, but they have been working to improve. But to fan fears of the internet without considering this balance is just short-sighted. With the growing importance of online ad revenue to the likes of Dentsu (who just announced it is taking on a 100% stake in its online ad subsidiary), I am sure it is only a matter of time before the mass media are asked to call off the dogs.

Some often claim that there is no “custom” of rational, fact-based argument on the internet, but I disagree. My Google Reader is full of great Japanese bloggers, and just about all the major Diet members are actively arguing their positions on their blogs (often with comments turned off). Quite the contrary, the mainstream media tends to report rumors and float politicians’ and bureaucrats’ trial balloons at a very marginal service to the public. Why should we sit here and listen to lectures from people who carry the water of the rich and powerful and actively aid a highly closed and non-transparent governance system?

Dealing with irresponsible anonymous commenters is one of the great challenges of the internet age, and in Japan the enormous forum site 2ch has been symbolic as a hotbed for this sort of behavior. The Japanese legal system’s flaws have been exposed as those harmed by 2ch have attempted to seek justice. Despite dozens of civil judgments against 2ch founder Hiroyuki, he has yet to pay one yen in damages or make any serious effort to stop the flow of libelous content. It has been recently rumored that Hiroyuki quietly shifted ownership of the site to a Singapore-based company to avoid future headaches. One area where 2ch has been cooperative is in open threats to commit murder or other serious crimes, but that’s about it. So considering the wide berth given to commenters on 2ch and similar sites, regulating comments can seem ineffective. In fact, police cooperation in prosecuting the most egregious cases of harassment is a positive sign that the internet is getting safer, but that’s a point that would likely fly over the heads of the mainstream media internet-phobes.

When editorial writers and TV commentators rush to criticize the internet at every turn without first stopping to understand, they are only trying to protect their own short-sighted business interests. Simplistic internet paranoia was behind Mainichi’s boneheaded reaction to the WaiWai scandal, and it’s this behavior that will further alienate their audience. While the internet has often been a negative development for the mainstream media institutions themselves, the free flow of information has undoubtedly positive influences on society as a whole. There may be unfortunate side effects such as the Smiley Kikuchi episode, but the day the TV stations and newspapers realize that the internet is their friend will be a major step forward.

(Thanks to J-CAST, which got this story spot-on, for most of the facts underlying this essay. Keep outperforming the mainstream media and one day the same people who disparaged the internet will be begging you for a job!)

This piece is published in collaboration with writer Nick Sylvester and his blog Riff Market. For those wanting more background on how we came to write this extremely long essay together, please read Nick’s more extensive introduction here.

Gregg Gillis, a 26-year-old college graduate who likes pop music and owns a laptop, became Girl Talk in the first year of the 21st century. Taking cues from Britney Spears’ self-positioning circa 2001 — when she was famously “Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman” — Gillis is not a DJ, but not a traditional musician either. With the aid of computer editing software, he creates danceable sound collages that often incorporate over 15-20 audio sources: namely, popular and less popular rock, rap, dance, and electronic songs, no era or genre excluded. The sources are mostly recognizable, and his songs — Gillis calls them “songs” — carry the force of nostalgia but are reconfigured and “mashed up” enough so as to sound fresh and new and free of the groan that collects when somebody insists on playing all four minutes and seventeen seconds of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” at the holiday party. With Girl Talk, we get that blissful moment of recognition without having to suffer through the next three minutes and thirty seconds remembering exactly why it hasn’t been Hammertime for more than a decade now.

Like many others before and after him, Gillis found his success after the indie music website Pitchfork Media bestowed positive reviews upon his third album, 2006′s Night Ripper. “Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up,” wrote reviewer Sean Fennessey. “As an illegal art form, it’s surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner.” The review came out on July 17 — so maybe the summer heat kept the typically spot-on Fennessey from remembering John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, the all-stolen-sample recording from 1985.

Either way, for Pitchfork and many others, Girl Talk raised the bastard-pop bar. He was not just playing two songs on top of each other like 2ManyDJs or Freelance Hellraiser, nor was he playing two songs next to each other in an anything-goes free-for-all DJ set a la Optimo or Erol Alkan. Instead Gillis is something of a surgeon, scalpeling out drum breaks from one song, vocal melodies from another, a guitar riff from another, and stitching them into some danceable semblance of a new song. These Frankensteins were emblematic of the indie-rockcentric Pitchfork’s growing appreciation for Southern rap, modern pop, and dance music too, so it was no surprise when the site took the opportunity to award Gillis’s album Best New Music, its highest honor — to celebrate Girl Talk was, in a way, to celebrate the site itself.

Around that time, Gillis hooked up with the Chicago-based Windish Agency. He quickly began touring the world with his sweaty dance parties. He had a well-blogged reputation for inviting people on stage to dance with him as he huddled over his computer, triggering his samples live, and soon he became a festival headliner. A career in music firmly established, soon Gillis quit his Pittsburgh day-job as a biomedical engineer. And now Gillis is at the point fame-wise where MTV News is more than happy to run a story about his last show, to take place on December 21, 2012. That date counts for the end of the Mayan calendar — believed by some to be the day the world will end. For a guy who plays others people’s music, more or less, Gillis is not doing so bad for himself.

I’LL BE YOUR WHATEVER YOU WANT

Girl Talk, to his immense credit, is an avatar of the most important musical-technological developments and music-industrial complications from the last decade: (illegal) music hyper-consumption in the face of record industry meltdown; the blurring of distinctions in major and indie labels; the plumbing of indie cool; an indie-rock about-face towards “selling out”; an unprecedented participatory music culture, a next-next-level fan club. (i.e.: It’s not enough just to go to the shows, or buy the t-shirts, or track down the seven-inches.) The mega-fans are remixing their favorite songs, lacing them with dance beats and synthesizer presets, posting their remixes on their blogs, commenting on those of others. Even if there were precedents for these complications, the 21st century form of mashups is a very palpable convergence: an internet-mediated, meta-pop moment.
Continued »

American tech company Texas Instruments produced one of the first working prototypes of a transistor radio, but it was Japanese company Sony that turned the concept into a marketable product and spread it across the world. Similarly, Japanese scientists did not discover the semiconductor, but Japanese companies dominated the market in the 1980s, until the reemergence of Intel. For most of the 20th century, the stereotype was “the West invents, Japan perfects.” With TVs and cars, this adage still holds true today: Japan owns the high-end television market, and Toyota is looking like it will easily outlive General Motors.

NTT was the first company in the world to market a mobile phone, so maybe the previously-explained industrial dynamic is not relevant to the world of keitai denwa. Almost a full year after it’s initial release, the American iPhone finally made its well-publicized Japanese debut in mid-2008 — to a relatively tepid response. A lot of techy customers lined up in front of Softbank stores to buy the gadget, but I would not say that the iPhone has made much of a dent in the broader mobile phone “culture.” There were some complaints that the iPhone ignored Japanese users’ favorite features, but now that the software added “emoji” characters and the ability to attach a 1seg TV tuner, perhaps the phone can entice more mainstream users. I do not believe that the normal mobile phone customer — read: the normal Japanese person — necessarily will ever jump on the iPhone train. I suspect, however, that enough mobile users have seen or played with a real-life iPhone to know that this is the most fancy, luxury offering in the market. Certainly, Softbank and Apple want you to believe that.

Take this in for a second: the idea that a non-Japanese phone would be the most impressive model in the Japanese market is pretty staggering. Until the iPhone’s debut, Japan and Korea produced the most highly-advanced and elegant phones on the planet, hands-down. Sure, Japan lost its total domination of video game systems and portable music devices in recent years, but they still had a two-year advantage on phone functionality. The iPhone leap-frogged out of Cupertino and ruined the whole game. 1seg is the last weapon in the Japanese arsenal, and you have to love watching daytime “wide-shows” to care about that.

Now if the old “copy-cat” narrative of Japan held, we would probably see Japanese companies all clamoring to put out their own iPhone clone. So far we see very little movement in this direction — especially compared to Korean phone makers LG and Samsung, who are clearly biting a few nice features from Apple. Softbank’s Touch Diamond X04HT steals a bit of the touch screen magic, and Docomo has its PRO series HT-02A that even features iPhone-esque little icons at the bottom of the screen. But these phones do not perfect the iPhone idea: they just tack the most obvious features onto the old paradigm. And this is after a full year of being able to reverse engineer the sucker and develop a copy. So are Japanese companies incapable of making a phone with both elegant industrial design and user interface? Isn’t this the country of “timeless craftsmanship” and Zen and beautiful gardens, and therefore, world-class engineering prowess?

I am sure there are more intelligent opinions on this topic, but my gut feeling is that there are two reasons for a lack of iPhone one-ups. First, there seems to be a prideful refusal to admit that the iPhone is such a big leap ahead. Sony refused to make an iPod-like device for several years, and even now, they are not really putting their heart into making a rival product. Japanese companies may have fallen under the weight of their own success: for the last twenty years, they have been the premier electronics giants — with no one to copy but themselves. Going back to the scrappy underdog “copying” of the 1950s feels a little… post-war.

Hubris, however, is more of a subjective judgment than a primary motivator. The main reason probably has more to do with the Japanese phone industry having a lot of entrenched interests in the current system. Let’s face it: a nation of iPhones would be a financial disaster to the monopoly powers. All that money poured into i-mode would just be wasted. Imagine if users could browse the normal web and not some proprietary network. Oh, the humanity! Instead of being charged ¥10 every time you look up some crappy text-only page on a tiny screen, you could borrow someone’s WiFi and look up things on real-deal Google — for free. And God, imagine the moral horror of downloading applications from a free market of independent developers.

Okay, okay, I am a sarcastic partisan, but I, like many, miss the days of being blown away by the Japanese tech lead. Going to Yodobashi Camera now is still visiting a alternate future, but not necessarily a brighter one.

Japanese companies had a good run as skilled copycats. They also had a good run as the global tech leaders. This current stage of making second-rate laggard products at high prices does not seem like a good long-term position. Sony is “entertaining the future,” but maybe they should start entertaining the present. I don’t really need a mp3 player that randomly rolls around on the ground, but I find my iPod Touch useful.