I've interviewed more people than I can count. This week I tried something new. No guest. No co-host. Just me, a small camera, and 333 meters of orange and white steel behind me.
A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli
Prefer to watch? I recorded this one standing under Tokyo Tower:
On YouTube: https://youtu.be/glGHghhhXWc
On Tik Tok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8MM8Hd9/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdlAe7tAOQK/?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
I spent twenty minutes looking for the right angle.
A small camera, a mini tripod, a patch of sidewalk that wasn't full of people taking the exact same photo. Behind me, 333 meters of orange and white steel. In front of me, nobody. No guest, no co-host, no second microphone to hide behind. Just me, talking to a lens on the other side of the world.
I've interviewed more people than I can count. It turns out talking alone is a different sport entirely. It felt weird. I decided that was okay.
And this was the right place to feel weird, because Tokyo Tower is a monument to something that should have been replaced and wasn't.
It was born out of a television boom. Once Japan started broadcasting TV in 1953, every new station began raising its own antenna, and the city was heading toward a forest of them. One tower for everyone was the answer. Ground broke in June 1957, and by December 1958 it was open to the public, a country barely more than a decade out of war building something taller than the tower in Paris it so openly borrowed from. The Eiffel silhouette, repainted in international orange and white. Colors chosen not by an artist but by aviation law. A safety regulation that became an identity. Some of the most iconic things we make start as constraints nobody would have picked.
Its job was simple: send television and radio across the Kanto plain. For more than fifty years, that's what it did.
Then the future arrived the way it usually does. Taller. Tokyo Skytree, 634 meters, built because the old tower wasn't tall enough for digital broadcasting. Television moved across the city. By every logic of our time, the story should end right there. Obsolete. Replaced. Maybe demolished, maybe left as a postcard.
Except it's still standing. Still lit every night. Still sending FM radio into Tokyo cars and kitchens. Still on standby, ready to carry the television signal if the new tower ever goes quiet. Still pulling visitors up to its observation decks, where on a clear day you can look across the skyline at the tower that replaced it.
Two towers. One city. Nobody had to choose.
I think about that a lot, and not only in Tokyo.
We live inside a story that treats every new technology as an eraser. AI arrives, so writing is over. Streaming arrives, so records are over. Podcasts arrive, so radio is over. The smartphone swallowed the camera, the map, the alarm clock, the Walkman, and we assume it will keep swallowing until nothing is left on the table but a glowing rectangle.
Some things do disappear. They should. Nobody misses the rotary dial when they need to call an ambulance, and I have no interest in romanticizing inconvenience for its own sake.
But look at what actually happened. Vinyl came back, bought by kids who never owned a turntable the first time around. Radio is still in the car. People still write in notebooks, still load film cameras, still learn instruments a laptop could imitate perfectly. Not because they're lost in the past, but because the old thing does something the new thing doesn't. It asks for your hands. It carries imperfection. It has a pace.
When someone hesitates in front of the new, we reach for the word Luddite. It's usually an insult. It's also usually wrong. The original Luddites weren't against machines as such. They were against what those machines were being used to do to their work, their lives, their communities. That's a different question. A better one. Not "should this technology exist?" but "what is it for, and what are we willing to lose so it can win?"
That's the question I keep asking here and on the show. Not analog versus digital. Analog and digital. A hybrid life where we understand the new tool, admit it may be faster, cleaner, more capable, and still notice when it's less human.
Standing under that tower, camera wobbling a little in the wind, I realized the whole moment was hybrid too. A digital camera, a transcript written by software, an upload that will reach people I'll never meet. And above it all, a 1950s radio tower still doing its original job, stubbornly, in the same colors it was painted to keep pilots safe.
The new tower is taller. The old one is still talking.
So why are we in such a hurry to kill the past?
And what's the analog thing you'd bring back?
Stay imperfect, stay human.
- Marco Ciappelli
This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.
Hello, everybody. I'm not sure if this is a good angle or not, but it's the best I could find around here. And around here is the Tokyo Tower. Some of you know that I am in Tokyo for a few days, and I wanna start doing some short podcasts by myself. I'm always interviewing people and it's exciting, but I feel like I wanna do something short and taking advantage of situation when I'm traveling, and that's what I'm doing right now. It seems weird, and that's okay. I'm on the other side of the world. And I wanna take this opportunity to reintroduce myself. My name is Marco Ciappelli. I'm from Florence, Italy. I have been living in Los Angeles for half of my life almost. I'm older than that, but let's say half of my life. And now I'm here in this part of the world. I love to travel, and I'm lucky enough that I cover cybersecurity and technology conferences. I get to travel quite a bit. When I don't travel for that reason, I try to travel anyway. And, , I wanna start taking these opportunities to talk about things that inspire me in terms of the things that I do. First of all, I've studied political science and social communication. I love technology. I also love branding and advertising. But that's another side of my business. As far as the passion for society and technology and cybersecurity come from my past, again, sociology of communications, and I've always been thinking about all the new things that are coming up in our life, in our society so fast like AI, robotics and self-driving car, electric vehicles, do they need necessarily to delete the past? And here is an example. So the Tokyo Tower was finished in 1958, and it was for broadcasting television. Also in 1962, they started broadcasting radio as well. See, a little, a little bit of history there. And at the time that it was built was modeled obviously and clearly on the Tour Eiffel, just painted in white and, uh, orange because of, aviation regulation here in Japan, and it's so symbolic. It's still standing. It wasn't tall enough to be use for digital land signal, so They built the other tower which is taller than this, and this is still standing. So my point is it's still broadcasting. We're still now listening to vinyls we are still using things with our hand. We are still listening to radio and not only podcast on our mobile phone because i- it's a different kind of technology, and my point is maybe there is room for a little bit of both. Sure, certain things are gonna die because they're less functional than others, but when it comes to entertainment and things that we can choose, I think honestly that we could just live in a hybrid way as we're doing right now between an analog world and a digital world. And that's why I call my show An Analog Brain in a Digital Age, is because I like to be able to show that it- we don't have to choose one or the other. We can take advantage of both technologies. We can think about our humanity, our imperfections, and that's what really make us human. So standing here at the tower which is pretty cool. I want us to reflect on that. I would love to hear your comments about rushing into the new technology, taking all that is old and throwing it in the trash, or we should resist a little bit, but without being the Luddites that destroy the new technology. Understanding the new one, understanding that it's different, understanding it may be better, but maybe it's less human, and maybe we need to keep them both. So I'd love to hear your thoughts and stay tuned because I'll try to record more here from Tokyo while I'm in Japan for the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned, stay human, and stay imperfect.