Chindogu: Every joke has a serious side

Chindogu are items like motorised spaghetti forks, spectacle frames with mini-wipers, beer holder hats, anything that appears on the surface to be a brilliant idea, yet will be in a landfill in no time. Chindogu is both cool and a joke. It has a small window of life, yet remains ironic immediately upon fashion-death.

Chindogu cannot be absurd. Inflatable dart boards, water-proof sponges and ash-trays for motorbikes do not count. A contradiction is subtly hidden within chindogu. It has to seem useful. Moreover, it must have appeal.

Obviously, objects of any genuine and lasting appeal or utility - medicines, vehicles, clocks - are not candidates, and neither are games, having no serious utility but offering enduring pleasure.

Chindogu makes you briefly excited to discover the ingenious invention your life has been sorely missing, only to simultaneously realise that it's absolutely pointless (the invention, that is).

Chindogu cannot be merely 'tat'. Porcelain kitten dioramas and singing fish have kitsch appeal, but offer no pretence at utility.

Finally, Eierlegende Wolfmilchsau ¹ things - merely incongruous compositions of other minor utility - like those multi-function wind-up alarm clock radio torches - do not count.

Chindogu may combine elements of all the above, but transcends their sum. Being neither absurd, nor truly useful Chindogu has a certain dark, tragic element to it. There is a (not immediately obvious) distance between its cute, pathetic attractiveness as an idea begging to be taken seriously, and the sad reality of its likely life. Chindogu is a misplaced reaction of humanity to its own technological power and co-existent self-abuse through technology.

Chindogu is on the edge of technology, but in a human dimension we see less of, since we are distracted counting the numbers on the other edge of progress.

Nobody is ever 'the first to buy' chindogu unless they are horribly drunk. Virality plays a big part in the phenomena. Once one person buys, and is seen with chindogu, sales of those items rapidly rise. Like hoola hoops or fidget spinners the objects are best worn as a badge of self-mocking pseudo-conformity.

Why is this Japanese art word so important? Because it lampoons modern technological thinking in a way that should make us think. It is a funnier, lighter, far less serious tool of technological critique than the eco-techne of Ellul, Postman, Meadows, McLuhan etc. Chindogu is a conceptual marker against which to judge other technologies.

The telemetry it returns is a measure of societal self respect. It is one of the few markers for dignity (adjacent to but often confused with privacy and control). It makes an axis between the humiliating demands a technology puts on its user and the apparent benefits, which may exist in marginal markets, for example, glasses with flashing LEDs are a great disposable party accessory. The same product ruggedised and sold in outdoors stores for mountain and caving is a lifesaving piece of kit.

Under strange quantum conditions objects can transition between the chindogu universe and our reality. The selfie stick is a real example of a joke object that made the leap. In 1995 the selfie stick seemed a joke because cameras were big. Cameras and cellphones were huge brick-like things once, but the idea of a camera stick for lightweight devices isn't so silly.

Since Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann created 'consumers' along with marketing to soak up excess production in the 1920s a significant volume of everything produced by western economies is Chindogu. It is the fat of the land from the a bountiful era of capitalism. Most of it is consigned to the landfill archaeology of future civilisations.

So chindogu is about the threshold between the real and the unreal. Things can cross the threshold if conditions are right. It's part of our collective conscious direction with technology.

Forget the idea that "spontaneous utilitarian consumer demand" drives markets. That mid 20^th century 'pull model' passed into the era of cynical manufacture where successful businesses care not about what people want (let alone need, or just what might sell) so much as about what people can be made to want.

Genuinely new inventions able to create wild, fresh markets, like in the golden age of nonlinear physics between 1940 and 1980, no longer happen. We've been in an incremental push economy for about 50 years now. Western capital economies manufacture demand by influence. We once used market research, but surveillance data now fills that need to shape markets.

How do consumer goods get pushed? Initially something fanciful, impossible, or apparently a prank appears from where art touches creative engineering. It gets everyone talking. These are mostly ideas that are beyond immediate practicality. While engineers push on with problems like new materials, marketers push at a boundary, within mass social media, spreading some acceptance of the values that the proposed product carries.

This is different from simple 'advertising' of extant utilities. Push markets tie-in with all of pop-culture, comics, films, events, prices, stories, availability of other products and so on to create a narrative of "where technology is going". At some point the possibilities for actual production meet up with the growing demand sown in the seeds of fantasy.

Illustrating this, another Japanese invention which portends the 'smartphone' is the Tamagotchi ². Being neither a game, nor useful object, nor pure kitsch, the egg shaped 'electronic pet' plays upon attachment and caring needs. If the Tamagotchi is not regularly fed it dies (becoming a 'bricked' bit of landfill fodder). The role played by Tamagotchi in preparing the ground for cellphones seems unrecognised. Today, 'pet' objects with a life of approximately two years, which must be fed electricity and credits, which provide enormous grief and inconvenience to their owners if they get lost or die, are commonplace.

Generally prank technology is harmless fun. The obvious ethical concern, for internet enabled light bulbs, USB pencil sharpeners, non-rechargeable earphones, and unmaintainable phones is environmental. Embedding flashing LEDs into disposable party wares means cadmium, arsenic, gallium and crushed micro-plastics will surely end up in the wild.

The main danger from motorised coffee stirers is sploshing it all over your family or workmates. Most people figure out the real practicality of gadgets like that after the first go. Less obvious are the cyber security and privacy implications that can pose a real threat to other people but in a silent and invisible way. Frivolously embedding Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities into silly objects creates an exploitable network of devices that can be harnessed as remote microphones, movement sensors, cameras, or as botnets and malware relays.

There are also pernicious dangers like casual normalisation or spreading of addictive technologies that begin as a joke or curiosity but reach a critical mass, then become entrenched with an irreversible foothold. At the time of writing this, electronic vapes and camera doorbells are the fashionable objects of dubious goodness. Whether they will endure another decade, given health and privacy concerns, remains to be seen.

Nobody wants to limit seemingly harmless consumer goods, because nobody wants to stifle innovation. An example from this grey area between acceptance and non-acceptance are camera eyeglasses. Recently driven back by popular opposition, but still lurking, are products like the Google Glass (augmented spectacles for covert computing, surveillance, recording and analysis).

These are super-chindogu; simultaneously "Spy-Kids toys" with obviously no place in a civil adult society, but also immensely cool; but Why? and For what? Unlike the mountaineers eyeglasses with lights, someone creeping around in the bushes with eyeglass cameras feels different from our thoughts around the rugged outdoor hiker.

Indeed we know in our hearts that they appeal to the weakest parts of human psychology, selfish, voyeuristic fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience. Yet they offer virtually no societal utility. Who actually needs to get a weather update, or take a photo of what they're looking at so urgently while walking about that they can't pause to find another tool? They appeal to an imaginary sense of an urgent, hostile environment and a fantasy of "efficiency and capability" that is schoolboyish. They are on the wrong side of the chindogu line and their wearers are routinely referred to as "Glassholes".

Not to deflate any argument over the rights and wrongs of on-body surveillance in general and covert AV surveillance for professional reasons. Ubiquitous mass produced wearable surveillance is a different thing. Their mass production would be irresponsible. That's because they are more akin to weapons we would expect to find in a cyborg soldier's kit bag. What does that say about our society and the people who market them?

The problem is that while most people would not like to live in a world where such technology is common we see its creators as playful jokers, having fun "trying to make the world a better place".

We must trust our Spidey-feelings and check-in with our sense of dignity. Are we "missing out" on the thing that finally makes sense of life? Or making fools of ourselves with silly gadgets as life passes by? Are the creators clowns in a dark carnival foisting technologies upon us, regardless of our needs? Are they pushing at the threshold of acceptance until the joke becomes serious? Or do we get to call out the joke, call out chindogu and enjoy it, briefly for the art it is?