EXCERPT Around twenty years ago, I wrote a long article entitled ‘Why Is Cyberspace Called Cyberspace [Saibāsupeesu wa naze sō yobareru ka]?’ (hereafter referred to as ‘theory of cyberspace’). Although it was serialised in a magazine devoted to media theory, it was originally planned as a part of a larger book that would incorporate the articles ‘The Overvisibles [Kashiteki na monotachi]’, then being serialised in a different magazine, and ‘On Information and Freedom [Jōhō jiyūron]’, which I would serialise in an opinion magazine a few years later. The working title for this projected book was The Cultural Logic of the Postmodern. Part One would deal with theory, while Part Two would combine my theory of cyberspace with ‘On Information and Freedom’ through a discussion of technology, and Part Three would feature ‘The Overvisibles’, constituting a section on what we might call aesthetics. Mobilising a completely new theory of the postmodern, the plan was to explore how the subject of cyberspace links to information technology and, in ‘On Information and Freedom’, to discuss the relation between this subject and politics, and finally to consider cultural changes in ‘The Overvisibles’. However, this plan was never realised, and my attempt to build a grand theory of postmodern society based on a philosophical interpretation of information technology ultimately never saw the light of day. In fact, the book that has now been published as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals was produced by revising ‘The Overvisibles’ and reformatting it as a monograph. The theory of otaku presented in Otaku was actually meant to be part of a broader theory of information society. In a word, what I argued in that broader project was that the essence of information technology lies in the experience of the uncanny, and that the metaphor of ‘cyberspace’ popular in information society theory at the time was incapable of grasping this. …