“Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.”

I recently visited an exhibition in West Tokyo about the works of Shirow Masamune. Masamune is best known for the manga series, Ghost in the Shell, about a special police unit of cyborgs set in a distant and dystopic future. The series features Nietzschean philosophy and monologues on being, truth, and humanity paired with raucous computer hacking, cyberpunk aesthetics, and plenty of gunfights.

The series originally came out in the early 90s during the interregnum after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Japan’s own economic decline, the Yugoslav and Iraq wars and “the end of history”. 

Ghost in the Shell had a profound impact on my outlook and aesthetic sense as a young person. It has also been inspiration for classics such as The Matrix, with its questions about the nature of reality and being in the face of new technology. A deep theme in the work is the way the circuitry of the physical world and the internet come together. Which one is more real?

These two worlds of the physical and the virtual overlap and interesting things can happen.

We still occupy physical space and have bodies, but we can also hide away and go into our shells and become anonymous avatars. There is a sense of freedom in being untethered to a face or a name or a physical location, but we can never get rid of those things completely.

My own creative practice wandering the world’s cities by night came in part from this sense of the liminal, of being a body in an ocean of strangers. The final scene of the 1995 animated adaptation of Ghost in the Shell looks out over the futuristic New Port City from a high place, asking that question:

“Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.”

I followed after that question, standing on the rooftop of an abandoned colonial villa somewhere in the nocturnal jungle of Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, gazing in awe at the vastness of the city of light that emerged from the dark ocean below. 

What could it all mean? The city looked like I imagined the internet looked. Circuitry, light, networks. These pillars of concrete and glass built to reach the sky were like racks of servers. The people and energy and money that flowed through the city was such a profound idea for me.

I imagined I could be a pinpoint of light in one of those massive towers where I knew no one and no one knew me. I could be untouchable and there was a sense that I could hide away from the world, that I could retreat into my shell in some stoic sense, somewhere in the liminality of seeing but not being seen. 

In my naivety I could think of nothing more incredible than being on my own in that fantastic world, to be left in that construct of dreams. I could gaze out from the 50th floor window: nameless and faceless.

From my own standing place in the orchards and farmlands of rural New Zealand where everything was muddy base layer reality, Ghost in the Shell’s futuristic visions were an escape into a more abstract and alluring world.

***

But over the years the way I think about this has all changed. This kind of escape has become common: masked up, headphones in, eyes trapped inside the screen, actively avoiding engaging with anybody and anything. We are atoms alone in the great digital vacuum.

It is a clause of the social contract that means order and safety have been assumed by the state. We need not defend ourselves or take responsibility in this place of the real.

The Ghost in the Shell and its cities of strangers is a world that ultimately grants us no political power. In that world you are permitted to live but you must remain silent. To actually speak is to challenge the state and we cannot hope to fight it man to man, for it is no man but leviathan. The state has an almost unlimited ability to visit violence upon whomever it seeks, and in this sense I think the cyborg and transhumanist themes of Ghost in The Shell are very relevant

Instead, for us to match up, we must speak. We must ask questions. We must be seen.

Why are things the way they are? What do we get from complying, and what do we get from resisting? What makes the law of the state so? What gives that law authority?

I have drifted away from seeking to be faceless and from hiding in the crowd like a pack animal to instead put myself out there. I have a humble podcast and I write things. I speak. Sometimes people listen.

The word is the only tool I have but the word must come from the face. To hide away in the city, behind a screen, to be nameless and faceless is to silence ourselves.

My role model is no longer the wanderer in the world untethered, though I still have an affinity for that but instead I look to the journalist, the writer, the speaker, the confessor. Not the mainstream media of course, but the muckraker working his art, the whistleblower, the gadfly.

These are the kinds of characters that cause a problem in the world of Ghost in the Shell. By exposing the state and the police and ultimately asking the forbidden questions.

In our hyper-connected world if we seek to be comfortable and hidden away we must not provoke nor resist the state. But by complying we delegate our moral agency to it. Sometimes the right thing to do is not permitted and then we must speak up. 

My own political awareness has been born from this gray space between the right and the law. It took me a long time to understand this distinction.

The shell within which the ghost resides is of course our bodily form, our bio-political entity that is the most clear site of control. If you mask the mouth no words may come forth.

I have begun a journey into learning about self-sovereignty, Bitcoin, freedom, tino rangatiratanga, and the hegemony of the state. I have begun to speak. I have begun to listen.

There is of course nuance and detail. I am sometimes not even sure what it is I have got myself into. Others smarter than me have gone radio silent for good reason.

There was something critical missing from that youthful vision I had:

To speak, one’s ghost must first come out of the shell.

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