Pop Culture and Philosophy vol. 3: Sexual Confusion In a Time of Cyber-Identity

When Ghost in the Shell was first released as an anime nearly fifteen years ago, it provoked a great deal of criticism for the sexualized nature of some of the violence.

In the film the main character, Kotoko Kusanagi, undresses before engaging in combat.

Interestingly enough, however, Ghost in the Shell is essentially about a futuristic world wherein cybernetics has advanced to the point where entire android bodies can be implanted with human brains.

Kusanagi is a member of Section 9, a police unit that consists almost entirely of full cyborgs. As a result, Kusanagi's body isn't really female. It's merely a machine built to resemble a female body. It cannot reproduce -- although the first film deals with the issue of reproduction in an intruiging manner -- and could be populated by absolutely anyone.

Sociologists have long recognized that sex and gender are often treated as the same concept, yet are markedly different. Sex is a description of the sexual characteristics of the body. Males have male sexual characteristics and females have female sexual characteristics. In terms of biology, this essentially comes down to the sex organs.

In Ghost in the Shell, fully cybernetic bodies have no sex organs. Accordingly, they can only accurately be described as asexual.

Gender, meanwhile, is a much more complex topic. Gender is largely considered to be a function of identity: a collection of the ideas, concepts and emotions one holds regarding their sexuality combined with their phsyical characteristics and impulses.

Clearly, gender confusion would be much easier to deal with in an age of cyber identity -- wherein one's physical form could be entirely customized at will so long as one were willing to compromise on conventional concepts of their own humanity.

Transplanting into a fully cybernetic body would pose to one the philosophical dilemma of embracing asexuality in order to rectify their gender confusion -- something they believe will be solved by transplanting themselves into a body of another sex.

In order for the transplanting of one's brain to fully solve their gender confusion one would have to find someone willing to have another brain implanted in their body, and their own brain implanted in someone else's.

Organized gender swapping could very much be a reality in such a world.

But it also poses larger questions about how one keeps track of identity in such a world. Many of the documents used today to keep track of one's identities deal with physical characteristics -- height, weight, hair and eye colour, skin colour and even date of birth. These are all characteristics securely grounded in time and space.

Take the case of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister suggested in episode one of Stand Alone Complex -- an anime series treated as separate from the feature-length films or the original manga. When the Minister gets drunk he occasionally likes to swap bodies with Geishas at a club he often frequents. The national security of Japan is eventually compromised when an individual with criminal intents steals the body of the Minister.

The individual in question has perpetrated the ultimate act of identity theft. With notions of identity naturally focused around one's body it doesn't even necessarily take a talented actor to steal one's body and, forthwith, their identity.

The individuals swapping bodies through an organized gender swapping scheme could be considered to be swapping not only their sex, but also their effective identities. While one has to imagine that a society in which the swapping of bodies is possible would have to employ more fluid methods of tracking identity, one also has to consider the likelihood that such methods would first have to breach a psychological and philosophical barrier.

Certainly, the idea that one's true identity lies somewhere other than with their body wouldn't be a new concept. Religious people believe in the soul. However, one has to remember that they treat the soul largely as an otherworldly entity. The more fluid sense of identity required for a society like that portrayed in Ghost in the Shell would need to apply such ideas in the corporeal world.

TV programs like Ghost in the Shell mount an interesting challenge to traditional notions of identity. One only has to wonder how long it will be before global civilization actually has to deal with that challenge in real life.

History Imitates Fiction, More Or Less

Patlabor II packs terrorism-related political punch

Patlabor I was a film about the perils posed by technology, and the risks global civilization accepts by embracing new and untested technologies in the name of convenience.

Patlabor II is a film about an altogether different subject.

The film opens with a scene set on an unnamed 1999 battleground. Lieutenant Colonel Yukihito Tsuge, a Japanese commander leading a UN peacekeeping unit through an unnamed battleground.

Upon encountering hostile forces on the ground Tsuge calls his superiors for permission to open fire. They deny him permission to do so, telling him he may not fire until fired upon.

With complete operational freedom, the hostiles neutralize the UN labors' censors before opening fire on them with cluster munitions. Tsuge's unit is wiped out nearly to the last man. Tsuge is the sole survivor of the attack.

The film then jumps three years into the future, to the year 2002. It's also three years after the events of the first film. The Babel project is officially dead, being unable to survive the destruction of the Ark, essentially a massive labor garage that, upon being struck by hurricane force winds, would produce a sound resonance that would have set every labor in the city of Japan upon a rampage.

Many members of the Mobile Police division that averted the disaster by destroying the Ark have moved on to different things.

But they're abruptly brought back together when a mysterious fighter jet destroys a bridge in downtown Tokyo. Shigeki Arakawa, an intelligence officer with the Japanese Self Defense Force, alleges a conspiracy by an organization calling themselves the National Security Family to use the spectre of terrorism to subvert civilian rule of Japan is alleged. Tsuge is fingered as the central figure in that conspiracy.

Among other things, Arakawa relates a post-Cold War story about a Soviet fighter plane slipping into Japanese airspace unchallenged. The incident set off panic in the Japanese Self Defense Force, and led to demands for improvements of Japan's security infrastructure.

Arakawa insists that the National Security Family staged a repeat of the incident in order to set off another panic in government. Clearly, the motive of the plot is scaring the government into spending additional funds on the JSDF -- conditions under which the National Defense Family would profit handsomely.

Police commanders take advantage of the faint spectre of a military plot in order to increase its own power.

The military responds by destroying the headquarters of the mobile police and taking control of Tokyo under de facto martial law conditions. A civil war ensues, and the only hope to avert it without bloodshed is for Captain Kiichi Goto and Captain Shinobu Nagumo to track down Tsuge and put him under arrest.

In real life, Japan is among the world's top military spenders. It ranks sixth among individual countries.

Any such attack could only be described as a form of institutional terrorism -- a terrorist act aimed to either terrify the government into meeting one's demands without them ever being publicly made, or perpetrated by a government itself to justify a course of action it's already decided to take.

Interestingly, this is the notion that the 9/11 "truth" movement uses to push its bizarre conspiracy theory plaing the United States at the centre of a false flag terrorist act. It's incredibly prophetic that a film that made predictions about the future that were simultaneously far off (with giant mecha robots used both to enforce the law and to fight wars) and so short (with VHS tapes used in place of DVDs) could so effectively replicate the intrigue of the modern war on terror in a fictional film with terrorism at its root.

The film broadly relfects many of the security anxieties that plague modern security planners. An attack in which Japanese fighter jets are disguised as foreign jets is accomplished via sophisticated hacking techniques. Blimps are used to jam communications in Tokyo. Both are hallmarks of cyberwarfare, which is becoming more and more important to the national security of any country.

Tsuge's central role in the conspiracy also serves as a reminder of two things.

First, it's important to remember that the nature of modern peacekeeping has changed. Modern conditions have condemned the Pearsonian model of peacekeeping to obselescence. Modern peacekeeping missions are very much combat missions that demand an appropriate approach.

Second, it's important to take proper care of soldiers who become casualties of war. Not all casualties of war die or return home with physically debilitating wounds. Many of them -- like Canadian General Romeo Dallaire -- return home with psychological afflictions. Many remain embittered about their experiences.

While the threat of embittered soldiers hatching terrorist plots to effectively teach their country a lesson as Yukihito Tsuge does is both hyperbolic and remote, it doesn't make it any less important to take care of those who are harmed in the service of their country.

Patlabor II certainly has even deeper messages for those more familiar with Japanese politics. But as it pertains to the modern state of the world vis a vis terrorism, the film should be considered must-watch material for anyone interested in the wider implications of terrorism and the military industrial complex's role in the war on terror.

Death By Technology?

Patlabor reflects potential benefit, perils of technology

Sometimes the predictions about the future featured in TV and movies can be comically inaccurate.

But even when inaccurate, they sometimes contain traces of prophetic warning.

Patlabor is the tale of the chaos wrought by a monomaniacal computer programmer with a God complex. Disgusted with the hubris of the Babel project -- a large-scale land reclaimation project in 1999 Tokyo -- master programmer Eeichi Hoba programs an inentional flaw into an operating system for labors, futuristic mecha used for defence and industry in a fictional late 90s Japan.

When wind blowing against buildings produces the proper sound frequency, labors equipped with the faulty Hyper Operating Systems go berserk, unstoppably destroying everything in their path.

Patlabor seems to be yet another comically remiss prediction about the future. The robotics technology necessary to produce labors is now far more developed than in the late 1980s when the film was produced, but remains far out of reach.

Yet Patlabor seems to have predicted another technical blunder that it was believed would devestate global civilization: the infamous Y2K bug that had computer programmers working overtime for the latter portion of the 1990s in order to avert the impending disaster.

The belief was that computer programs with only two digits to record the year would crash at midnight on New Year's Eve as their programs forced them to record the year as 00.

Efforts to update the computers of government, business and the vast majority of home computers with software providing four digits to record the year were successful and it remains unknown whether or not the disaster would have actually taken place.

Patlabor provokes an intriguing question: what kind of devestation could someone with malicious intent inflict if they were able to design key defects into an important piece of technological work.

The potential ticking time bomb of such an act could even provide yet another venue for terrorism. Scientists aligned with or sympathetic to terrorists could accomplish more for a terrorist cause in one calculated act than a hundred 9/11s.

It's a frightening prospect, but it begs the question of what is actually the bigger problem: the potential to design catastrophic flaws within technologies, or developed civilization's clear over reliance on technology?

On a yearly basis, decision making power is taken out of human hands more and more often and bureaucratic decrees are enforced through computer. On a yearly basis, more and more basic tasks are taken out of human hands and performed through a machine.

The argument is that these things are making developed civilization more efficient. But as part of a wider trend, this is making developed civilization more and more vulnerable to such malicious acts.

There are, of course, solutions to these problems. Background checks on those involved in high-profile research and development programs have been part of the standard operating procedure of cutting edge R & D projects for years. This isn't likely to change any time soon.

But vigilance as a watchward is nearly always a wise idea.

Considering the stakes global civilization has invested in high technology, such vigilance remains as important as ever.

Full Metal Shock Doctrine

For the sadly unitiated, Full Metal Panic is an anime series about Sagara Sousuke, a 17-year-old mercenary serving in an organization called Mithril.

Born in Afghanistan and rescued from a civil war there, Sousuke operates an AS unit -- basically a common mech as imagined in various anime series, but perhaps most notably in the Mech Warrior series of video games.

In the opening episode of the third season of the show, Sousuke and his unit are sent to intervene in an ethnic conflict in the Republic of Balic, an ambiguously Eastern European country in which militia led by Colonel Maress are slaughtering civilians.



When Kurtz Weber -- another teenaged mercenary, a sniper -- wonders aloud about the purpose of the conflict, Melissa Mao, the commanding officer of the unit, offers an explanation that is rather reminiscent of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

"They probably use actions that violate international peace treaties to give major countries suitable provocation and then look at the results to decide who to approach for backroom deals regarding the rights to their mineral resources or whatever," Mao explains, before admitting, "our involvement here is part of that, too."



In other words, Mao is suggesting that the beligerents in many civil and ethnic conflicts engineer the conflict in order to provoke an international outcry. While the media and general public focus on the atrocities being committed, the country in question quietly sells its natural resources to the highest bidder -- regardless of whether or not such countries may or may not be under a trade embargo of some sort.

Quite often, such arrangements could be augmented -- or obfuscated -- by foreign aid arrangements.



An interesting case is that of Myanmar -- also known as Burma -- where the government refused foreign aid after a cyclone devestated a local "undesirable" population.

Eventually, the government of Myanmar allowed foreign aid from members of the Association of South East Asian Nations. Less than one year prior, however, a proposed free trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand and ASEAN provoked international outcry because of Myanmar's poor human rights record.

Despite such outrage -- which only became worse as it became evident that the governmeny of Myanmar was allowing victims of the cyclone to die of starvation and disease following the cyclone -- the ASEAN-New Zealand-Australia free trade agreement was signed on August 28, 2008.

With their eyes glued to the situation in Myanmar, many international observers failed to notice until it was too late.

While Naomi Klein clearly intended her shock doctrine to only be applied to market capitalist regimes, it's clear that the doctrine has fascinating implications anywhere a catastrophe is exploited to further an economic agenda.

Scenarios such as that portrayed in Full Metal Panic may turn out to be far more plausible than one may prefer to imagine.