攻殻機動隊
G h o s t I n T h e S h e l l
We’re making things that haven’t even been released yet look old.
By 2060, the Cyberpunk Future will look exactly like it was predicted in the 1980s.
(Ghost in the Shell: ARISE, 2015)
“Why do we have to meet in person? You telling me my cyberlobby is bugged?”
It just occurred to me that, assuming the cyberlobby is hosted locally, this someone their cyberlobby is bugged occupies a strange space in between telling they have the flu, telling them they have a bad apartment messed up by previous guests/habits, and telling them they have an STD.
Which makes it insulting, which is low-key hilarious.
Wait, wise old Chinese dude? Do you mean Beat Takeshi as Section Chief Aramaki? He’s a Japanese comedian and actor speaking Japanese.
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
Because Eclipse Phase is too unrelatable to general audiences.
We even got a live action Ghost in the Shell movie, and it really missed tons of opportunities in trying to dumb itself down for general audiences. Perhaps the worst part of it is that Standalone Complex was really quite prescient about the power of memeforce!
Though really, I also think that many Hollywood writers are mostly not of the sci-fi visionary caliber to go from “what if some dude became part robot?” to “what if every dude became part robot?”
The latter includes all sorts of cascading changes throughout society, seen in shows like Standalone Complex, with ordinary people becoming vulnerable to cyberbrain crime and reserving organs to be grown in pigs. Psycho-Pass is really the spiritual successor here in that it will probably seem really prescient about the use of big data to analyze people for criminality in about 10-20 years, the way Standalone Complex seems prescient about crimes-as-memes.
But even then, those are what, two shows in a foreign country, where most of the shows are either not of that type, or not of that caliber.
How would American audiences have responded if Standalone Complex were a live-action TV show?
Huh,
You know, I just realized, the Ghost in the Shell: ARISE movie would have been better
as a book.
I feel like probably the language they were speaking was Japanese, since why would you /not/ have them speaking Japanese?
I am clueless and do not speak Japanese.
From what I heard, people were speaking Japanese, but I couldn’t clearly hear the background people in the various scenes. However, I think the movie takes place in something like a Japanese Hong Kong or Japanese Singapore, probably following a world war which shuffled the national boundaries throughout Asia.
Note: “Ghost in the Shell 2017 takes place in Japanese Hong Kong” is speculation on my part. However, some of it was filmed in actual Hong Kong, so it’s not entirely off-base.
It just sounds like the most credible explanation for why “Japan” is suddenly so multiracial, multicultural, and English-speaking that an entire team from its internal security services consists primarily of non-Japanese people who speak English.
I feel like probably the language they were speaking was Japanese, since why would you /not/ have them speaking Japanese?
I am clueless and do not speak Japanese.
From what I heard, people were speaking Japanese, but I couldn’t clearly hear the background people in the various scenes. However, I think the movie takes place in something like a Japanese Hong Kong or Japanese Singapore, probably following a world war which shuffled the national boundaries throughout Asia.
“[Ghost in the Shell] is a perfect overlapping of form and function. They speak directly to the audience and say “the patriarchal corporation made Motoko white because they consider it more marketable.”
The irony of the film is that people [online] have bought entirely into the corporate logic and are now arguing that ‘authentic’ Japanese identity is superior because it’s even more marketable - literally that the movie would have made more money with an authentic Japanese on the posters.
In this view, Cutter was bad not because he was using billions of tax dollars to vicisect people for profit, but because he failed to make enough profit for his shareholders. He was not exploitative enough - he did not ‘Think Different". Cutter’s sneering racism is unfashionable, and so his Caucasian deathbots were left in the dust by the burgeoning Japanese-Looking Fucktoy industry.”
An interesting response, though I believe the arguers actually wanted it for authenticity/racial representation reasons and only made the argument about money because they thought “be more moral (according to our morality)” wouldn’t be convincing.
It’s sort of weird sometimes seeing how cyberpunk works dealt with the relationship between people, corporations, and government. I always figure it say some interesting things about people’s politics when you see how they construct their cyberpunk world.
One of the weird things I always notice is the status of the government? Do they still exist? Are they overtly weaker than the corporations? Being your marxist inspired leftist, I always sort of feel a failure of verisimilitude when corporations overtly take over. The corporation doesn’t want to do the things that government has to do. It’s great when the government breaks up a riot or strike and the corporation can have clean hands, publicly chastising the government while benefiting from the social order it creates.
Then there’s the issue of mercenaries, the corporate security forces that are ubiquitous in these settings. I always figure them as having the same problems that Machiavelli identified, namely that mercenaries are shit that will desert you if things go bad and you really need them. They’re fine for quashing protests, but if it’s devolved to the point of full-scale war, I wouldn’t count on them. To have them be dominant or unstoppable just seems strange.
Finally, there’s the old joke about sufficiently large corporations becoming central planning. If it’s large enough it conducts a lot of it’s business itself, it basically becomes a command economy with all the interesting issues that has. That’s especially the case for some works where basically everyone works for one corporation.(Although that’s more in weird dystopia than cyberpunk per se.)
But, those issues at one point made me think of something that I can only describe as a syndicalist-inspired megacorporate cyberpunk world. It’s what you might get as corporations realize they have to take up the slack of governments fully. You can think of it as if, rather than “Germany”, the region becomes “United German Carmakers” and the ideology and culture of the entire country are bent towards car production. It would control the ideological institutions, having media and schools tell people that prosperity of the entire nation/corporation is dependent on making cars, basically an attempt to build actual loyalty to a company rather than just the corporation being something you join to pick up some cash. It could have elections, perhaps using a principle like employee-ownership model but with the problems of
bourgeoisie
democracy heightened, as your prosperity is linked to that of your department and boss and those are manipulated to keep certain policies on top. It could become regionless, where you live next to citizens of other corporation/nations and yours basically negotiates the status of citizen-employees with other corporations in a sort of polycentric legal order.
You would be born into the corporation and would be expected to die there. I could expect something like a jobs-guarantee, although the jobs at the bottom will probably be shit. There are all sorts of weird things that you can see as corporations have to take control of issues of legitimacy and defense rather than just inheriting them from the government. I would expect the corporation itself to become more democratic, even though there may be less democracy in total due to the lack of external government.
And the thing is, I sort of see shades of this in our world. I chose German carmaking for a reason, Germany’s national pride and economic future is tied to it’s cars at this point and it is very defensive of this industry. And corporations do try and build loyalty beyond simply paying people, I’ve seen retail establishments do what basically amount to loyalty chants and pledges of allegiance, and it was in the news awhile ago that Amazon was basically doing self-criticism sessions that were likened to Maoism.
I sometimes see bits and pieces of everywhere, and actually the real “Cyberpunk” works seems to have bits and pieces of this type of thing. It’s actually the cyberpunk-adjacent works that are the worst, those that use a generic corporate future merely as set dressing for their story. But I still see this type of work do things that just seem wrong or impossible, and I do a double-take.
cyberpunk, cyberfolk, cybernumetal
By total coincidence, this squidpost happens to be relevant to what I’m up to now.
Unfortunately, I cannot go into more detail, as segments describing more of the workings of the Pacific Metropolitan Collective Corporation, Outer Hong Kong Metropolity have yet to be posted. However, I do believe that some of those workings would satisfy @collapsedsquid, at least in terms of not being just “lol corps took over k”.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
