Liao Peiyuan

It still amazes me how The Information gets the most incredible scoops and simultaneously writes as if they do not understand what technology is

Thoughts are inherently contagious - in that sense everything is a psyop. You should just do things

械无理，无德，无荣，无耻，故不得主事。

I'd like to think that's what makes us humans great - we as a species can never really be homogenized. There will always be outliers, "individualists," who can keep thinking the unthinkable, and I think that's good enough for now.

2024

But SAC_2045 still came to be - a polished work, though a spectacle, but not just a sliver of thought in the head. So I sincerely thank you. Because even though you felt helpless, you didn't give up. You kept on thinking and kept saying, "I beg to differ."

I'm no Kamiyama - I've seen much less, lived much less, and have not chased hope (or glory) to the fullest. Yet I can't help but empathize with him - as every year goes by, I feel like I am transmuting into a new person, abhorring my past thoughts and appalled by what lies ahead in our future.

The opposite of the Stand Alone Complex took place - individuals in a hyper-connected society lost their agency when inundated with information and rendered helpless by surveillance states—the unfortunate byproduct of 10Gb ethernet. We became meek, null, and, worst of all, the same.

Fast forward to today, the 2045 treatment instead offers a defeatist sense of acceptance - that the world is burning and the best solution is to lock oneself away, wandering in the construct of one's mind. Between the original SAC and the new show came two things: social media and language models...

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," and Kamiyama seemed to have approached the idea with a mix of criticism and cautious optimism - that individuals, though powerless, can still have agency and turn the tide as an unconscious collective.

and live like a hermit. And if that's a problem, then I'll have to ask you to die!" And it seemed to be a rebuttal of his 20-year older self: Kamiyama on Kamiyama. The meme in season one (the Laughing Man) was created with a J.D. Salinger quote,

The very first episode of the first season had a quote that stuck with me: when confronting a criminal who cried "there's no hope for justice in the system!", the protagonist answered: "If you've got a problem with the world, change yourself. If that's a problem, close your eyes, shut your mouth..."

vigilantism - which we can interpret as harmless as the Harlem Shake to something as controversial as WikiLeaks.
Instead, we got much better animation in SAC_2045 but only a fractured and sensationalized message: that perhaps we should all become nihilists, to reject reality.

which we can contextualize by replacing the Japanese Miracle with a frontier AI model, and a post-nuclear-war world with a more peaceful but equally anxious one. Season one similarly talks about a meme that emerged from a hacktivist, causing spontaneous imitative acts of corporate ransom and...

The main antagonists were two lone actors in the government: a neo-conservative cabinet member hoping to share the Japanese Miracle with the American Empire, and the disgruntled inventor of the technology-turned-intelligence official who sought to earn his rightful place in society via manipulation-

The parallels that can be drawn with our world are eerily relevant - season two revolves around a technology (the Japanese Miracle) that can eradicate radioactivity from any environment, which was an invention unique to Japan (in the series) in a world where nuclear war had broken out decades ago...

The original SAC presents itself more like a treatise: distinct characters within a singular narrative - that a country could leverage its superior technology to find political independence in a new world order. Many scenes are even static frames with long prose, yet they remain equally fascinating.

which made the lackluster presentation of the Netflix-funded SAC_2045, in a way, reflect his loss of faith in society. I felt saddened as I watched the two new seasons. It was 2004 when he wrote a dystopia, hoping that our world and his country (Japan) would be better.

Kenji Kamiyama produced the first two seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (SAC) 20 years ago, with its uncanny prescience having predicted both the hyper-connectivity of the internet and the complexity of the migrant crisis...