Stand Alone Complexes [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes, 54 seconds. Contains 2580 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges where we’re apparently just doing cartoons from my childhood.

Wait! Don’t go!

It’s relevant, I promise!

So, the cartoon I want to talk about is the 2002 sequel to the masterpiece 1995 film Ghost in the Shell. Subtitled Stand Alone Complex it’s a mix of stand-alone episodes and a story about the return of a super-hacker named The Laughing Man.

While not as cohesive or stylish as the original film, SAC takes the task of living up to what might be the single best work of cyberpunk fiction anywhere seriously and makes a good show of it. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it and have any interest in transhumanism, go watch it. It’s great.

We’re mostly indifferent to that bit here.

Oh, and there’s gonna be hella spoilers for the show coming up.

The Laughing Man’s greatest power is graphic design.

Fast Walking Through SAC

Structurally, SAC does something I really like: It labels its plot and filler episodes at the front of the show so if all you care about is the laughing man stuff you can skip to it.

That’s nice.

There are 14 Stand Alone episodes, each exploring a different piece of the world or its characters, and 12 Complex episodes building a quality political thriller.

Before we go much further we need to bring up a basic common difference between Japanese cyberpunk and American cyberpunk: Japan’s fiction tends to be just as critical of state power, but more sympathetic to the people involved. Many protagonists are straight-up government agents trying to do the right thing. This is the case in SAC.

I’ve always mused on that. It’s relevant to our larger discussion how much influence the Japanese far-right, including WW2-era war criminals like Nobusuki Kishi, had on its Parliamentary system. The simplest explanation is that Kishi was integral in the 1955 formation of the Liberal-Democratic Party, where he spent years as Prime Minister of Japan.

But I don’t think that’s the underlying root of this creative choice so much as the status of government bureaucrats in each country. Americans hold bureaucrats in almost total contempt. Japan has a more complex, if not always positive, view.

So, our heroes are from Public Security Section 9, a secret elite task force of cyborg cops with both intelligence and law enforcement authorities. They’re an ethical nightmare. Or would be in the real world.

Luckily for the people of Japan, they’re all pretty good people. Most of the show is built around the relationships between their leader, Aramaki, and the show’s main three protagonists: Major Motoko, Batou, and Togusa. Plus their adorable sentient hive mind tanks, the Tachikomas.

Aramaki is an old hand at bureaucratic knife fighting who takes his principles seriously and regularly manipulates everyone around him because, in a world where your government is three conspiracies wrapped in red tape, only sociopaths can be heroes.

We’re gonna skimp over the rest aside from a brief mention that the Tachikomas are one of the most interesting AI characters I’ve seen in fiction and the source of several heartfelt moments.

Rewatching the show in 2021 is especially funny because the plot mainly revolves around vaccines, corrupt government agencies, and memetic terrorism.

Except in SAC, the vaccine was good, suppressed to ensure funding for a less effective but more profitable treatment, and the memetic terrorist is both a hero and a villain.

See, The Laughing Man isn’t someone’s personality, but a kind of social role people can inhabit for their own purposes. We never really find the originator of the ID, and the guy we meet as the “real” laughing man is himself just working from an idea he’d found deep in the recesses of the Internet.

The phrase they use to describe this social role is why I wanted to write this email.

STAND ALONE COMPLEX

Oh shit, someone’s been clever.

In the last episode, the Major and the guy I’m just going to call the Laughing Man are discussing his past and legacy. Turns out he just stumbled on a manifesto about the anti-vax conspiracy and took it up as his own personal project.

He got pilled.

And he went on to pill others.

Initiation by way of televised kidnapping.

Copies without an original.

So he was hunting for truths on the Internet and found life redefining secrets and became an info-warrior.

Sound familiar?

Well, the Laughing Man is closer to Q than Alex Jones but both of their intertwined conspiracy networks are built on the same, “redefine everything to match this narrative” structure.

It’s the worker bees producing that good conspiracy honey.

A system without leadership where anyone involved can become a primary subject if they have the right information at the right time.

A Stand Alone Complex.

Schizophrenia or fracturing of self-driven by the gap between hyperconnection of information and the mind’s ability to process it. Stress induces a search for an effective shortcut. And when one stumbles on an answer that both explains enough and is sufficiently emotionally satisfying, it can become all-consuming.

This juxtaposes to two ideas about ideas:

1. Richard Dawkins’ original notion of Memes as the genes of culture.

2. Idea-as-Contagion, social movements as pandemics

Both skew things an exponential growth curve of adaption. There’s a Lenin quote stuck in my mind:

But in a revolution, the masses are in motion; the developments of years are compressed into months and days; class relations and class antagonisms are revealed acutely, starkly, and uncompromisingly.

Once you hit a tipping point all bets are off.

GITS doesn’t really go into anything like that. The contagion was quickly localized and burned out though, of course, the government scapegoated itself and pretended to execute the members of Section 9. Thus, both the original conspirators, their state backers, and the people outing them are purged.

The infection is checked and even the Laughing Man himself is ultimately offered a job on Aramaki’s now even more secret spy/hacker/cop team. Perfect recuperation of radical potential back into the system.

All of this echos Jean Baudrillard’s notions of hyperreality especially in Simulacra and Simulation. Copies with no original. Imitation of a lie without basis in social or physical reality. The illusions that keep the world going.

In a world of Fake News, all of this seems fairly precinct. But of course, it was all visible long before it became common knowledge. Even McLuhan’s work in the 50s and 60s stressed this kind of exaggeration and distortion.

We can also trace it through French Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. A society mediated by images, not by grounded social relations.

There are a lot of people who think this kind of postmodern thinking is toxic to real values and culture, but I’m not one of them. Holding onto an idealized prelapsarian image is just as toxic to actual social relations as skepticism of them. And one can see that easily just by looking at the number of the self-proclaimed champions of ideals past who are literal abusers in the personal life.

It’s not merely hypocricy, but an outgrowth of the kind of posturing that comes along with pretending you have all the solid answers as a play for social influence. Frank Herbert put it well:

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Of course, the problem is much broader than mere formal state power.

This brings us back to GitS, a show about cyborgs and AIs with souls struggling to retain their individuality in a society of near-perfect dehumanization. Late-stage alienation, with a transhumanist spin.

All this is why the secret police the show follows are allowed to be heroes. Detached from normal politics they’re able to behave how they want to for better or worse.

With their secret power to watch and infiltrate, they do not rely on mediated images but can get to the hidden truths under those images.

Could a Ghost in the Shell series center outsider groups without fat black budgets and cover the same points? I don’t know. The original film was about the synthesis of the outsider and insider perspective but never showed the result. And it was a limited personal kind of synthesis.

When considering the cyberpunk genre, it’s interesting that none of the protagonists are really presented as Anti-Heroes. Major Motoko might do some bad things, she certainly steals, kills, and violates the minds of several people and so on. but she’s never presented with any kind of challenge to her behavior and there are almost no consequences for it.

Was that intentional? I don’t know. GitS seems to veer widely between extreme sophistication and extreme naivety.

An issue perhaps also tracing back to the Mediaed-Images nature of the spectacle. Because narrative is more important than underlying reality, it’s easy to accept the assumptions of your premise and hard to get a good look at your own premise threats.

As a narrative network grows, it feeds on itself to reach more people and mutate. Qanon started off as a promise that Hillary Clinton would be arrested in October 2017.

But in a stroke of genius, instead of being disproven by her obviously not being in jail, Q spun a story to justify it. And that story became addictive.

This brings us to an underrated theme about Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes: If they behave as genes do, then they don’t spread around for any reason other than their own spreadableness. They seek to propagate without any regard to any value other than avoiding extinction.

Thus we find much of culture is a stand alone complex. Any sufficiently powerful signal becomes noise and we need to get outside it to understand what it’s doing.

Mediation as intermediary as Descartes Evil Demon, telling us lies because we want to hear them.

Stand Alone Complex?

So in the last episode of SAC, after the scene with the Laughing Man, we see the CEO of one of the companies walking to his car with his bodyguards. He passes a nondescript man and goes to open his own car against a bodyguard’s protest.

The car, of course, is rigged to explode. No testifying against your coconspirators.

And before a short scene of Section 9 mobilizing for a new crisis, we see the assassin walking away from the scene. That same nondescript man from a few seconds before when the CEO was still a person and a threat. Even the chance for moderate reform to prevent future corruption is made less likely.

He muses to himself:

“You have to adapt to survive. Bend your morals or you’ll break eventually”

Score one for Dawkins, I guess.

The Music of GitS SAC

Mostly written by legendary anime composer Yoko Kanno, the music of SAC is maybe its strongest feature. I wanted to touch on its opening and closing themes real quick because they provide some interesting context to the series.

The opening is called Inner Universe and is about the protagonist grasping, perhaps futilely for transcendence.

Angels and demons were circling above me
Swishing through the thorns and galaxies.
Only the one doesn't know happiness,
Who couldn't understand its call…

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glory, heavenly glory
Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glory, heavenly glory

I am calling, calling now
Spirits rise and falling
To stay myself longer…
Calling, calling, in the depth of longing
To stay myself longer…

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glory, heavenly glory

Stand alone…
Where was life when it had a meaning…
Stand alone…
Nothing's real anymore and…

Endless run…
While I'm alive, I can try not to fall while flying
To learn how to dream… to love…
Endless run…

Calling, calling, for the place of knowing
There's more than what can be linked
Calling, calling now, never will I look away
For what life has left for me

Yearning, yearning, for what's left of loving
To stay myself longer…
Calling, calling now, spirits rise and falling…
To stay myself longer…
Calling, calling, in the depth of longing…
To stay myself longer…

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glory, heavenly glory
Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glory, heavenly glory

It’s about, wait for it, searching for real reality in a world of confusing illusions.

And it’s a real banger to boot.

Back when I was I was watching it on fansubs, they mistranslated one of the phrases as, “The Flow will Swallow you.” and that seemed extremely fitting of the show’s themes and tension.

By contrast, the closing theme is idol worship. Perhaps sung from the PoV of one of the show’s teenage fans obsessing over the Major’s shapely body.

She's so cold and human
It's something humans do
She stays so golden solo
She's so number nine
She's incredible math
Just incredible math

And is she really human?
She's just so something new
A waking lithium flower
Just about to bloom
I smell lithium now
Smelling lithium now

How is she when she doesn't surf?
How is she when she doesn't surf?
How is she when she doesn't surf?
I wonder what she does when she wakes up?
When she wakes up

So matador
So calm
So oil on a fire
She's so good
She's so good
She's so goddess lithium flower
So sonic wave
Yeah, she's so groove, yeah
She's so groove
Yeah

Wow, where did she learn how to surf?
Wow, where did she learn how to surf?
Wow, where did she learn how to surf?
You know I've never seen the girl wipe out

How does she so perfectly surf?
How does she so perfectly surf?
How does she so perfectly surf?
I wonder what she does when she wakes up?

I wanna go surfing with her
I wanna go surfing with her
I wanna go surfing with her
I wanna go surfing with her

It took me a while to really parse what made me uncomfortable with this song. But it’s not just the stalker-vibes and idealizing and thus objectifying the Major, it’s the way that its placement in the show maps a descent through the act of watching it.

From the struggle to experience and express the sublime to being caught in the weeds of lust after some imagined beauty.

A splash of cold water on the viewer perhaps.

I find it very interesting that the implication of this pair suggests that anyone watching this show for insight into transcendent thoughts is wasting their time and will just get caught up in its own images.

Whoops.

Of course, that can happen anywhere.

Trying to cut against mediation is a constant fight and even the act of trying to put in that work can be a distraction.

Shit’s complicated, yall.

Conclusi- Wait.

Wait, shit, I almost went through this whole essay without mentioning JD Salinger, the Catcher In the Rye, or calling everyone a phony.

The laughing man uses this quote from The Catcher In the Rye as part of his iconography and it’s a major clue to the “real” laughing man in the show.

I’m… not going to do much in detail with The Catcher in the Rye, but let’s leave it that the protagonist is an angry, traumatized teenager running away from some shit and who’s enraged at the inauthenticity of people.

It was hugely popular when released and, ironically, became the kind of book people would pretend to have opinions about without having read.

The quote comes from a bit where the protagonist expresses a desire to help protect the innocent children from learning about the horrors of the world. It’s a whole thing.

In GITS context, it’s used both in the laughing man’s logo and in this panel in a facility for kids who adapted too well to their cyberbrains and have a mess of mental health issues because of it, where the Laughing Man is pretending to be a patient.

At the time, he’s using the facility as a place to hide. But the quote here ends with, “Or should I?”, implying his discomfort with that role.

By the end of that episode, he’s erased his tracks at the facility and left to renew his war on his own corporate espionage/government corruption brand of phony.

It’s a cool bit.

Anyway, I’m off to study for my tax exam.

-SF