2002 JUL 01 FINALE OF THE (DIS)EQUILIBRIUM

"I spend my last night in Shinjuku with Coupland and a friend. It's hard to beat, these nameless neon streets swarming with every known form of electronic advertising, under a misting rain that softens the commercials playing on façade screens of quite surreal width and clarity. The Japanese know this about television: Make it big enough and anything looks cool.

"Those French Situationists, going on about the Society of the Spectacle, they didn't have a clue. This is it, right here, and I love it. Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world, and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.

"And tonight, watching the Japanese do what they do here, amid all this electric kitsch, all this randomly overlapped media, this chaotically stable neon storm of marketing hoopla, I've got my answer: Japan is still the future, and if the vertigo is gone, it really only means that they've made it out the far end of that tunnel of prematurely accelerated change. Here, in the first city to have this firmly and this comfortably arrived in this new century—the most truly contemporary city on earth—the center is holding.

"In a world of technologically driven exponential change, the Japanese have an acquired edge: They know how to live with it. Nobody legislates that kind of change into being, it just comes, and keeps coming, and the Japanese have been experiencing it for more than a hundred years.

"I see them poised here tonight, hanging out, life going on, in the glow of these very big televisions. Postgraduates at all of this.

"Home at last, in the 21st century."

—"My Own Private Tokyo" (excerpt), WIlliam Gibson, Wired 9.09 (September 2001)

Our world has lived through the biometriks, the red pockets and even the superplastics; a reboot plus after, we're still kicking for more. This time, it seems, we're going to tell a story about a (cylindrical) boy in a cylindrical world. Stay tuned.