Shell Games and Shirow Masamune
“[Motoko’s] body consists of all her active drives; her memory of all her active sources,” begins Man-Machine Interface, “There are variable, but on a periodic basis her bio-components crave energy and sleep and remind her of her basic identity layer.”
Arthur Koestler wrote The Sleepwalkers, “I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances.”
Dry sockets and loose connections can progress to tightness, wetness. An ocean around us means an ocean of pressure and moisture. An ocean around us can mean an ocean beneath us.
Shell Games and Shirow Masamune
by Travis Hedge Coke
Commonly called Ghost in the Shell is a manga by Shirow Masamune, serialized from 1989 to 1990 in Young Magazine, at a rate of approximately one chapter every three months. Titled both Kōkaku Kidōtai (English translation: "Mobile Armored Riot Police”) and, in English, The Ghost in the Shell, a reference to the 1967 philosophical treatise by Hungarian author, Arthur Koestler, with Koestler’s idea of the holon and his personal journey through different ideologies reflected in the planned course of the manga’s narrative and protagonist Kusanagi Motoko’s character.
While others adapted The Ghost in the Shell’s scenarios and characters into animation, video games, prose and other manga, Shirow revisited with two official canon sequels.
From 1991 to 1996, Shirow drew and wrote four stories in the style of an episodic police procedural series, based on a desire of the publisher of all three volumes (Kodansha) for something ongoing and without a stories’ long arc or progression, compared to the novelistic original. Only in 2003 (Japan) and 2007 (US), were these comics collected as a graphic novel, under the name, The Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor.
But, first: The Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface. Published serially in 1997, Man-Machine Interface was collected in a significantly reworked limited edition in 2000, then a further reworked paperback release in 2001, before having an English-language translation by Dark Horse Comics in 2003.
Currently, Kodansha offers English and Japanese editions of the manga, included a single-volume hardcover collection subtitled, “Fully Compiled.” This edition contains the heavily restructured Man-Machine Interface and a version of the more mildly edited original English-language release of the first volume, which swapped a sapphic orgy for three women lounging on the ocean.
I: Graphic
Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell trilogy are constructed of images. Text, when included, is image. Inference, when made apparent, is image and imagistic.
We know Ghost in the Shell a priori. It anticipates our questioning, and supposition, and assures us immediately that we already understand, that we have a greater technical and philosophical awareness than we might.
Images can compile in sequence, but our eye – our mind’s eyes – drift and range. We track and we do more than tracking.
The opening pages of Ghost in the Shell, before it was Volume One, when it was the only, feature circuity extending to the edge of the page, blending visually with images on the successive pages, on the other side of the page.
As a trilogy, all three volumes of Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell have a “Western,” which is to say Euro-culture pacing and arrangement to them, which is unlike traditional manga. Ghost in the Shell looks like something published for the first time in English or French. There is an Enki Bilal to it. The stylings ease an international acceptance, and it has been an international success.
Is Vol 1 hot media – demanding, requiring – and Vol 1.5 cool, televisual, easy and episodic, or like Vol 2 do they present hot and cool but both disguise a counterpoint gag? Magic tricks disappear in the closest examination.
The presentation of non-causal moments as alien or unusual, and the average page dedicating itself to a moment-to-moment or directly causal pacing, often called cinematic time, is most comfortable for American and European audiences.
Volume 1.5 can take on comedic stings closer to Monk than Special Victims Unit. The fluctuation of specificity and tight vagary aid the agreeableness. All three volumes are naturalistic, even in their alien scenes, their oddness or novelty.
When mechanics are too simplified or operations are aesthetically framed and might raise flags to some readers, all readers are assured these are deliberate misrepresentations or simplifications. You know. The author knows. We know.
The most common elements adapted from Ghost in the Shell have been visuals. Character designs. Hairstyles. The look of tanks and trucks. Cityscape. Things we know.
Hard shifts betwixt more realistically-proportioned or carefully hatched representation and clean-line or cartooned “super-deformed” summation are unlikely to be seen in an adaptation. Tertiary personality traits and individualistic quirks are omnipresent and precociously presented in Shirow’s manga, but elsewhere, absent.
It is a consistently Japanese comic.
Novelty, in all adaptations and the original trilogy, are given as familiar newness. They represent something pre-seen. Shapes are collective shapes. Image, visual or visualized, is a shape.
Televisual, prose, video game and other adaptations of Ghost in the Shell have traditionally been void of personality quirks, personality variables evidenced and demonstrated by the original three-volume manga. The manga combine aspects which are novelistic and which are imaginal, or, to conflate, prosaic and image. The novelistic might be the conflation of images.
No movie version of Ghost in the Shell has risked the implications of excessive policing, political abuse, or the day-job callousness of intelligence and corrections work. The manga are consistently thickened by acknowledgment of long-term trauma, post-traumatic stress, physical injury, torture-induced disability, and deprivation of social status and free socialization by government or corporate whim.
II: Novel
Every volume of The Ghost in the Shell (which we will now refer to as Vol 1, Vol 1.5, and Vol 2) can be read as a story unto itself, a collection of stories, or a part of a three-volume story. The volumes represent sequential ranges of calendar time, overlapping experiences and philosophies; intermittently repeated experiences and acknowledgments.
Reading through The Ghost in the Shell, revisiting parts or wholes, can be like the pluralistic individuation of a plugboard, reinserting, removing, reinserting, indulging in the spark of – and of the loss of – connection, as you remember that plug and jack can be defined by placement or mobility rather than gender.
Referencing Isaac Asimov might make Vol 1 seem literary, but it is the progression of literary ideas into practically-applied physical and political function which gives the novel air.
Vol 1 takes place, in immediacy, over the course of 526 days; March 5, 2029 to September 18, 2030. Volume Two covers a present of a single day – March 6, 2035 – though variation of geographic time zones and the experiential time differences of digital platforms make this single day mutable.
Vo 1.5 has less claim to being novelistic than Vol 1 or Vol 2, except that to be a novel ought to be to be novel, and Human-Error Processor is that almost by title alone. A novel in short stories without even a whiff of season arc. A sequence of episodic crime-investigation stories with a recurring cast of the law enforcement types from the first volume who remained in government service.
Yet, not everything novelesque is the synthesis. Shuffling, and reshuffling, are sometimes underrated avenues of progression.
The break for Vol 1.5, not collected or a recognized volume until after Vol 2 was published, is a novel characteristic. The subtitle may allude to both the processing done by policing, and to the volume as a failed or misaligned attempt at being a second volume is novelesque in the high-minded sense, recognizing and acknowledging the characteristic self-referential awareness expected of The Ghost in the Shell.
By reclaiming this first attempt at a sequel volume and making it Vol 1.5, the more successful and completed Vol 2, Man-Machine Interface, is not erased nor superseded, and the trilogy feels both newly complex and – for having a 1, 1.5, 2 structure which is also a 1/2 structure, and a 1, 2, 1.5 structure – novel.
III: Comfort
The more you read of The Ghost in the Shell, the harder it can be to suss out what the politics of the (different) comics are, or what the author’s personal politics might be. Is this a Socialist work? Capitalist? Nationalist? Globalist? Progressive or Conservative? The presentation of what seem like clearly-defined elements, commented on by mostly-clear, concise perspectives, within the comics, give us a comfortable reassurance of things defined as the things they are, but all the perspectives, all the things, are limited representations modeling real things.
When Vita Sackville-West differentiated cant from slang by saying that cant is, “tight and correct,” while slang is, “loose… and metaphorical,” she inadvertently described the kind of crystallization of data which the Ghost in the Shell trilogy makes correct and tight until it becomes “metaphorical.” The comfortable Cronenberg cool of slotted souls and machines, bodies and bodies, embodying like em dashes, lack a pulpy or wet biology. Wet biology upsets Batou, explicitly, and others are made to feel awkward about it. The hard, brittle, replicable and replaceable biology of spirituality and cybernetics is crystalline like the cosmos, like calculations and comics.
Vol 1 is a graphic novel, Vol 1.5 is a serial, and Vol 2 is a mirror. Systems comics, but systems comics all from specific, tainted human perspectives.
The division of the world into specific nations, into dominant and dominated countries, into cultures and ethnicities, classes and classifications, gives a sense or orderliness and in orderliness, correctness, however those same classes and classifications are consistently undermined by a real world politic that defies realpolitik and the category-mindedness of the Risk-player or “fan of war history.”
Our jargon-jumble cant is slang.
Cooling. Crystalized at its most complex. A nature of hot media and hot things.
More than once, outside-of-story text tells us to avoid reading the author’s notes peppering almost every page, but they crawl across the margins so appealingly, asking us to parse.
A quarter of one page is given to an interrupting author’s note, a block paragraph, which begins: “Many readers think, ‘What?’ at the idea…"
What will me miss if we do not parse? Do not try?
I think it was Bob Dylan who said Realism, the genre, was body odor and stereotypes.
Creativity is a learning process, but if creativeness is given, collectively, to being inevitable, all processes are creative and all states, states of learning.
The fuchikomas, spider-legged tanks, stage talks of rebellion in Vol 1, motions for revolt from their enslavement as built machines, but these are subsystems for relief. The talks allow them to vent and to circumvent actual action.
Rights are no more real than false consciousness, and that can seem fairly tangible.
Presenting arguments as dialogues assures is of their reasonableness. A dialectic is not an argument, but an argument for. We have comfort in being unsure how much we are being lied to.
Most of us have no idea what Masamune Shirow believes or commits to, partly because Masamune Shirow is only a name someone else publishes by. Masamune Shirow can present police who are both the good guys and undeniably corrupt, a world which appears to demonstrate the perfect socialism is capitalism, the perfect capitalist state a socialist one, and the kind of earnest-seeming ironic distance which lets us step back if anything bothers us or flags mistrust.
IV: Misdirection & Force
A state of public undress, unconsciousness, and uncontrolled urination distract, in one panel, from the idea being expressed in dialogue which shares the page-space: If a person can hack their way into another person, and that person has a directory of accessible people, of people’s minds, how branched can someone become, if they stretch the accessibility?
The three volumes of The Ghost in the Shell are concatenations of convecting tolerances, wants, and tolerations. The seductive author notes, providing so much assurance of help, of honesty, have an intense Stan Lee Effect on audiences unprepared to take a narrator as part of the fiction without actually ensuring they are not part of the fiction.
The first volume opens with a semblance of photographic evidence, and text reassurance that what is visualized is, “a photograph of a growth-type neurochip, created at Harima Science City in 1998 (enlarged 50, ooo times).”
We can keep in mind that 1998 had not yet occurred when this comic was published, but especially post-’98, we are inclined, perhaps, to forget. We might simply leap over that detail, because it seems correct. It seems reasonable enough it must be real. Calling it a “photograph” and adding the extreme magnification allows us to excuse the low fidelity of the image, the lack of clarity we have in what, precisely, is visualized and shown to us, while the text and style of presentation position us to be more of an expert than we are.
How much can one grow before becoming something different? How much is differentiation immaterial or artificially-distracting from the linking element of sameness?
A holon is something at once a whole and part of another whole. A particle of, and a particulate whole, which Arthur Koestler considered self-reliant units, stable, yet intermediate forms, putting the lie to classifications as “parts” and “wholes,” subjective and objective and similar dichotomies resolve into semi-autonomous sub-wholes for which assertiveness and integration are not contrary impulses or contradictory activity.
In Vol 2, the expertise of characters is taken as understood, is accepted to a degree that cosmogonic or cosmological statements are unquestionably interpolated by us, into an understanding that makes up a substructure to the comic and encourages us to do any filling in of gaps or strengthening of tenuous connections which may otherwise occur to us.
Vol 1.5 lets its police direct our attention and our understanding with police jargon, police rhetoric, technical language, legal and practical language.
When Shirow points out to us that increased eroticization is an eye-pull away from where the magic tricks are being performed, is he asking us to pay attention away from the sexualized artwork or is to it? Is the note contextualizing the sometimes-incongruous erotic, itself, a distraction?
By forcing abusive situations not to rectify, but to transform into other abusive systems, is Shirow - the author - commenting on his own belief about our real world’s situations, or is it narratively functional, or in a fictional context amusing him?
Motoko receives her promotion from Lieutenant to Major concurrent to someone rebelling because they cannot get a promotion. Neither of these women (both at best nominally or intrinsically women) are confused about their worth or how they are treated for their worth.
Is a dialect’s nature to expand a receiving consciousness’ cache or perspective - playing field and rulebook - to be outside but to contain the dialectical? Can complex systems produce simpler systems without subsuming them, and what is subsumption from the perspective of beyond in?
Author’s notes, floating file icons and text windows, background and foreground detail variegate, a kind of psychical noise like that experienced by the cyborgs and tech-savvy of The Ghost in the Shell’s world and of our practical own.
In an early scene from Vol 2, Motoko Aramaki wears tight panties with a woodland-type camouflage pattern. She makes sure to display these, while performing an unnecessarily showy martial arts display. The woodland pattern distinctly shows in the polished wood of the boat on which Motoko stands, alone except for her own digital assistants and service machines.
There are at least two why’s, two whos. One is Motoko, herself, and the other is us. Those are the whys.
Hidden below the water on which Motoko’s boat rests on the deck of which she can show her underpants, is another Motoko, resting in an undersea boat, tethered, mirrored, but not the same. The on-the-sea Motoko can be the undersea Motoko while displaying an avatar for her assistant, Grace, which shows a third Motoko who is simultaneously those two Motokos. Grace, herself, has an avatar displayed which one might respond to as a living face, a representation of character, personality, professionally, while unlike her smiling, coiffed, well-dressed avatar, there is simultaneously a disheveled, wearing her sleeping clothes Grace who can brush her tooth or use the toilet while someone she engages with online has no idea.
Multiple Motokos exist, by their extreme-similarity and their exchange, their sharing of experience and tasks, as a singular Motoko. We can be our avatars, project our avatars, hide ourselves, show ourselves, be live and absent and so can characters.
And, also, sometimes, maybe they do not.
V: Nom de Brume
What difference in a social media avatar, a professional headshot, makeup; maintaining a smile, a scowl, a stiff lip and raised chin? Are one person’s avis for social media, dating apps, a gaming platform, and a work Slack the same person?
The Ghost in the Shell, for all three volumes, and for many of the spinoffs and adaptations, is most visibly the story of Motoko Kusanagi, and in Vol 2, the framing device of Tamaki gives us a view from outside and a soul from outside her, but taken as a whole, the three volumes together also present the story of Batou.
What is the holon of me?
Masamune Shirow is a construct, a pen name, a semblance. Any author beyond or before Shirow is a semblance, a constructed name; a semblance. Even Shirow Masamune can be shuffled.
Batou, a fellow agent of Motoko’s in her anti-terrorism unit during the first manga volume, is a principle and joint protagonist of the second volume, and exists on the periphery but with an entire look, characterization, agenda, and structural purpose in the third.
In Vol 1, Motoko observes, and discusses with Batou and other of the men in her immediate work and social sphere, that she is experiencing - in the Puppetmaster, the new nonhuman intelligence they mistake for human hacker - “Three elements in a netlike formation.” She believes the elements are in opposition, coming to understand that they are paired, and that the pairs rotate against each other, throwing off expansions which may amount to seeds.
In Vol 2, the third volume, Motoko learns that while two of the elements, in this cosmogonic, cosmological, psychological, psychic, hylic and metaphysical model, two of the elements might be reached but this will position the third element far away. Or, it is two mirrors, skewed, rotating into reference with one another, and an implication.
Three elements. Three women. Three lights. Three Decatonchir computers (which I assume is a riff on, the Greek mythological, Hecatoncheires). The sword, the mirror, and the jewel. Persimmon. Darkness, light, and Orion.
“One is about 20% smaller and of a different nature.”
If you want it to be, Batou is that element. Which one?
Touga and Azuma operate, in the first two stories of Volume 2, as a two-person unit, that unit our protagonist and perspective. In the second of those stories, Touga has to leave the pages for Batou to make his first Volume 2 appearance, two pages after someone who might be the former-Motoko or the former-Puppet Master make their appearance. Pages later, this potentially-former is given the names Ms Aramaki and Ms Chroma.
Tamaki, Motoko and Mokoto.
All things are media. The manga on the page. The manga in your head. The manga. The comic.
Repetition and duality, parallels and vibrations, conscious or unconscious experience, are – orchestrated or not – a continuous scale or fanning diversification.
Pairs. Triads. Rotations and distance.
There has to be angles to anything. And, when there are no apparent angles, we or someone will produce some.
Arthur Koestler said that the emergence of insight is an act of intuition, but I say, both emergence, insight, and intuition are processes of learning.
Why both? Pairs. Triads. Rotations and distance.
Everything we know or suspect was redrawn, rewritten, edited, altered remains in our understanding of the comic, our read of the comic.
Motoko may be in her sixties, her seventies, or a relative child; ageless, aged, another age or multiple ages. How do we round off and would we?
Gender politics and practices are fitfully reduced to absurdity and habit. What are inherently feminine or masculine, female or male, to Motoko, are physical or social aspects of borrowed bodied and potentially-enacted lives. “Fat cat” big wigs have robots designed like young women to attend them, boss women around. Men anticipate certain ranges of abilities, and ranges of limits on women, and women the same of men.
The most common presences of hypersexualization are a dry eroticization, and in that, women at men’s initiative. The hyper sexualization which is least at men’s initiative, a scene of virtual reality group sex, is cut from many versions. Erased but from memory or learning.
Stray thoughts may as well be visions, as Batou suggests when a traumatized veteran sees his child and his wife. Batou says they are a vision or goddess of Death.
The lesbian orgy which Batou accidentally patches into when thinking his way into Motoko’s experiential frame, she on her vacation, is sapphic to avoid the author, Shirow, having to draw a nude male behind, but it also queers Motoko. By framing Motoko’s sex with women as “for the experience,” and also for profit, elements of voyeurism, exhibitionism, the pursuit of novelty, and the frisson and fun of bisexuality come to play. Motoko comes to play.
Body sounds and dial tones distress those for whom they are not immediate, personal elements. For whom they are strange and from strangers.
This sapphic scene, that Motoko is penetrated and penetrated by women, that Batou experiences not just the idea of penetration, but the feeling of being penetrated in well-lubricated group sex on a boat on an ocean, makes Batou sick to his stomach. It is not unlike his - and other cisgendered men’s - discomfort with menstruation, this sickness.
When the sapphic scene is altered to three women simply on a yacht, relaxing, it does not cease to be queer, but the sickness comes from purely experiencing her bodily nature or seasickness; we cannot tell.
The narrators of these comics are multifarious and unreliable. We are consistently reminded they are lies, they are stories, fiction, but the reiteration, itself, becomes voices we think we can trust.
Whether Professor Rahampol is Professor Rahampol or a Rahampol-like entity; whether Mokoto Kusanagi and Motoko Aramaki can be ever said to be ever the same; whether a Creator and a Creator-like entity are distinguishable outside of chronology or causality; we already might agree that any observer is observed, that any observer is an actor, but observation is observed, actors are actions.
Implication and detail are inextricable, repeating, and affirming. The truism of all life resembling cancer or all cancer resembling life is a dissemblance with joints articulating the angle it needs to bend to.
VI: As it Lays
Motoko tells a kid, an orphan living in a brainwashing, control-through-punishment sweatshop for filtration systems, to make his own future, but your future is the future. Motoko’s job, the role of her unit and branch in Vol 1, is to violate the system of her government, but that is tasked to her by her government, whose system cannot operate without the nominal violations. A system can outgrow its nominal range and practices, but it cannot outgrow being a system. To systemize is to exist, to the degree that systemize could be a noun and existing a verb.
The state cannot function without off-the-books factories, social services, police actions, international and internal sweetheart contracting. But, could you? Would you function without these things?
“[Motoko’s] body consists of all her active drives; her memory of all her active sources,” begins Vol 2, “There are variable, but on a periodic basis her bio-components crave energy and sleep and remind her of her basic identity layer.”
Arthur Koestler wrote, “I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances.” I have truncated that quote, taken it from context, to suit purpose.
Dry sockets and loose connections can progress to tightness, wetness. An ocean around us means an ocean of pressure and moisture. An ocean around us can mean an ocean beneath us.
While Vol 2 was serializing, Shirow said, “This material isn't as easy to order as that in the first paperback volume,” and that he was, “having trouble with adjusting things.”
“Major surgery will be required,” said Shirow, of Vol 2, and that he was, “rethinking the entire structure,” while the comic was still being serialized; what that would mean for material that had yet to be serialized.
Color pages, in Japanese comics, are often assigned, rather than chosen for artistic reasons or to enhance a scene. The novel structure of the original volume and the implied novel-nature of the novel-in-short-comics Vol 1.5 and the experiential game, Vol 2, give us reason to respond to the uneven application of full color pages as if they have greater creative intent. Particularly in Volume 2, color pages have a weight that many of the black and white passages correspond to with, instead, ballast, including an extended venture which is both intended to waste our protagonist’s time and to present a diffusion of the idea of time-wasting. Some color sections, towards the end of Volume 2 are particularly timely in their timelessness.
As Ghost in the Shell proceeds from Vol 1 to Vol 2, particularly in that latter part, the scenes tend to portray experiential time, for time to be distended, refracted, frozen or made difficult or impossible to properly parse.
Vol 2 presents some full, story-relevant documents backwards, some at too small a size, and too small a resolution, to be readily parsable.
Motoko and Batou both espouse disbelief they can die, but it helps that death is hard to define. Death in a game is a temporary stall. Death really is not a thing we or the characters can apprehend in a crystalline and delimited way. By implication and detail we can figure out the playability of death, the angles, costs, and gaming potential of death.
Any kind of player knows that to be taken out of the game does not ever mean you are forever taken out of the game.
VII: Gameplay
As long as game is the overwhelming set of perceptions, the majority of attention, game is reality. Realness is engagement and the projected consequences of and in engaging.
“To her, the physical world and the world of information are both reality.”
- Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface, Masamune Shirow
In Vol 1, a character who argues for internal, subjective evidence that she is a living human being, turns out not to be.
The fragmentation of experience is not solely a stalling, but a unifying and transfusive experience of its own. Shapes are collective shapes.
Throughout, at least Vol 1.5 and Vol 2, Motoko, or what Motoko has become, are multiple-bodied individuated joint minds or an an asynchronous multitudinous individual.
Batou, a nominally heterosexual cishet male cyborg, is trying to seduce a ninety-five year old man with an online presence as a younger woman named Loffa. But, those are the perspectives of other people, not internally, nor objectively defined.
In this world, as in most, someone’s wife can be a dream, even a dream put there by somebody else.
Gender, maturity, sexuality, and more are up to a plurality and performativity.
Batou knows, physiologically, what it feels like to a woman having sex. What it feels like, intimately, in all details, to be a woman on her period. Many of his male colleagues share these same experiences. Arguably, those who are more willing than Motoko to enter the thoughts and ideation of men know similar of them.
Male and female can not, in context, be delimited to male and female experiences or being. Sexing or gendering are almost explicitly matters of comfort; kinds of efficacy.
If everything comes down to comfort, and comfort comes down to productivity at its most efficient, its most workable, how do we address the plethora of personality quirks, the drive towards entertainment, the seeking of amusement and reassurance, the distractions and embrasure of games? How would productivity benefit from the pursuit of distraction? Embracing entertainment, novelty, and comfort?
Are comfort and novelty opposed? Opposite poles? Is their synthesis some kind of alchemical or mechanistic wedding?
Means and ends are entangled, and it may be in the sense of quantum entanglement, that we delight in reversing the traditional causality of “means and ends,” or “ends and means,” depending on which you believe justify or explain the other. Contingent to the ends and the means are observer and actor, and actor observes and observer acts and each are an end and a means while none are cardinal.
We accept a cardinal model. We accept a quantum model. We accept a mechanistic model. We accept a poetic model.
Motoko’s half-robot/half-digital assistants appear to have a fetish for, “structural analysis,” which could be programmed for the sake of their users – giving them a more vibrant personality – or the obsession could be a method for keeping them engaged in their own awareness, and dispersing that awareness to a field rather than a point.
The semi-intelligent tanks Motoko’s unit in the first volume use, have their own personality quirks, their own focuses, which include rebellion, autonomy, and negotiation, which they frequently understand with a childlike enthusiasm. Trying to pay for goods with an arm. Negotiating for novel or comforting oils and care.
Our interest in games, which we frequently understand with childlike proportions or a chirotheistic marriage, might diversify and disperse our own attentions. Allowing us to receive and reject, and to receive while rejecting information, could be a beneficial, efficacious way of processing an overwhelming and unpredictable wealth of data. Our personalities can be engaged as a way to diffuse strain and hazard.
If we reached deep enough, would it be any worse if we saw ourselves and something else?
Motoko’s assistants in Vol 2 are individuals who make up a greater individual, sub-parts instead of super-parts, as they frame humans. They wonder if statistics and astrology are about the same in the sum.