Futuristic cyberpunk anime is my jam. It takes a lot of imagination and world awareness to be able to put plausible futuristic predictions into a fictional story grounded in our reality. What’s more impressive is when those future predictions end up being more right than their writers could begin to imagine. Akira, for example, predicted not only a 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, but a pandemic cancelling said Olympics, thirty years in advance.
This past weekend, while working on some projects, I turned on the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I love Ghost in the Shell and have seen SAC more than once. Probably more than ten times, if I'm completely honest.
This viewing, however, I caught some parallels to our own recent world events.
Besides self driving cars, which have become more of the norm in modern days, or the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence in technology, arts, and as a tool available to law enforcement, it was the third episode of the introduction to the first season’s antagonist, The Laughing Man, that really fascinated me this time around.
Episode 6, “Meme” finds our protagonists protecting a Superintendent General from an assassination attempt. During a press conference meant to explain the current investigations into a corporate blackmailing attempt six years prior, multiple civilians, encouraged by either a virus, admiration, or misinformation attempt to kill the Superintendent by any means necessary. The chaos that unravels leaves all parties involved obfuscated from the truth of why the events unfolded the way they did.
The title of the episode is an apt description of the events that unfolded. In case you haven’t spent a lot of time on the internet, a meme was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene. It’s literal definition, a meme is an “imitated thing”. Though in modern vernacular it is used to describe the proliferation of the spread of ideas. In the context of the episode, it describes the idea that regular civilians took up the idea to assassinate the Superintendent General separately but simultaneously among many actors.
The episode also plays with the idea of a fake Laughing Man, through the works of a hacker, information and evidence has been rewritten to frame someone else for the events six years passed and the events that transpire seen throughout the runtime.
So where is the parallel to today’s events?
With the main focus of a disinformation campaign and multiple civilian attempted assassination attempts, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the January 6th storming of the US Capitol and the many failed assassination attempts of former Vice President Pence and members of Congress. The Internet conspiracy theories of the fictitious character Q who fed the rioters false narratives in the weeks leading up the protests, in addition to attempted rewriting of history just hours after the events could easily have been the premise of the aforementioned episode.
Information warfare has always been a theme in GitS. When I first watched the show when I was younger, I was always hesitant to believe information warfare to the scale shown in the show could be a reality, and yet, those warnings are becoming more true every day.
Two asides; I used to own both seasons of SAC on DVD, but had to sell them some years back to make rent. I was looking recently to replace them and saw they had been released on BluRay, but unfortunately, it seems those releases were extremely poorly handled. Japanese and English audio play at the same time, encoding errors are predominate enough to add echoes to character dialogue, and overall it’s just a sloppy release. Those came out in 2017, and they run roughly $20 per season, brand new. And I honestly don’t know whether to save up for ‘em, or just wait for them to be rereleased in the future, but hopefully better.
The other aside; awesome J-pop band, WORLD ORDER, released what could be called a protest song during the Trump administration back in 2018 called, "LET'S START WW3”. Take note the anime poster in the opening shots, behind the televisions, is from Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig. If you have seen all the way through SAC, the reference felt unfortunately appropriate.
That’s all for now.
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