By Angus Stewart
Imagine the 2030s have arrived. Your government is mired between toothless neoliberalism and bug-eyed xenophobia. Worker power is gone, replaced by domestic terrorism carried out by isolated social rejects. Sometimes these strange, leaderless nihilists assassinate insufficiently fascist establishment figures. Sometimes they turn their violence on the marginalized; sometimes the state gets there first. Reality, ideology, communication – it has all been scrambled. You suspect that somebody spiritually reptilian is pulling the strings. The worst possible show you could watch for a break from reality is the second series of the TV adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, dating back to 2004.
Yes, the world has been curdling for some time. Yet the predictive power of this run of 26 23-minute episodes – full name Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. 2nd GIG – has proved stunning.
Ghost in the Shell has worn many faces. Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga was followed by Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film, and next came the 2002 television adaptation, Stand Alone Complex. Oshii’s entry is the critical darling, tackling the titular mind–body problem head-on. Stand Alone Complex trades existentialism for sociology to explore the emergent properties of the internet. And it really is ‘the internet’ as we know it today: omnipresent, interpenetrative, wireless. Everyone is online, all the time. We do not have literal 'cyberbrains' running a permanent internet connection, as do most people in the world of Ghost in the Shell, but the smartphone now lives appended to our ‘shell’, as part of our extended mind.
What social phenomena might we expect to emerge from such a network? Seasons one and two of Stand Alone Complex explore the possibilities of decentralised political action from the left and right, respectively – from ‘fight the power’ to ‘purge the powerless’.
The central plot of season one deals with ‘corporate terrorism’. In later parlance: hacktivism. The protagonists are the members of Public Security Section 9: an elite clandestine appendage of the Japanese state. Their target is ‘the Laughing Man’. As their case proceeds they are led to the postmodern conclusion that there has never really been a single or original Laughing Man – only a name and logo that independent actors have appropriated. Thus Section 9 coins the titular concept: a ‘stand alone complex’ is ‘an emergent phenomenon catalysed by parallelisation of the human psyche through the cyberbrain networks’. Or, simply: a pattern arising from copycats without an original.
The crucial word here is ‘emergent’. This is about cybernetics. Kenji Kamiyama, writer–director–storyboarder behind Stand Alone Complex, said in an interview:
When I first named the series, “Stand Alone Complex”, I tried to underscore the dilemmas and concerns that people would face if they relied too heavily on the new communications infrastructure known as "the network".
Luigi Mangione has been proposed as a real-world Laughing Man due to his choice of target–a powerful health insurance CEO–and public attack, coupled with the response online. And yet, in Luigi’s case, no real ‘complex’ emerged afterward, and the state swiftly pinned him down.
Looking backwards from Luigi, one can trace a history of left and libertarian online politics embodied not in lone kamikaze but in faceless swarms akin to those of a stand alone complex. The hacktivism, masking and extreme decentralisation of Anonymous strongly recall the Laughing Man. The Occupy Movement ran (and perhaps died) on decentralised principles. The movement behind p2p filesharing was once strong enough to bring Pirate Parties into Europe’s political arena, and spook the global IP hegemony.
But in the 2020s, much of the radical–progressive potential of online anonymity is gone; the output arising from its anarchic foundations now skews far to the right
Luigi Mangione was a (broadly) anticapitalist outlier emerging from a grim context: the phenomenon of the solitary shooter spreading out from America, and expanding in motivation from generalised social resentment (see Columbine, 1999) to fascist (Utøya 2011,) xenophobic (Christchurch, 2019), or scrambled, meme-driven (Utah, 2025) messaging and ideologies. Meanwhile, online misinformation has become an industry and the far-right are enjoying an extended surge in Europe (despite Orban's recent loss in Hungary) amid a global wave of authoritarianism.
Theorists might blame the reterritorialisation of cyberspace – namely, the process of neutering the old ‘wild west’ internet through the replacement of user-made sites with capitalist platforms, and closing down communicative freedom through state regulation and surveillance. Control has replaced user-generated chaos to put forth its own preferred mode of commercialised reactionary chaos, despite user preference.
Decades ago, Kenji Kamiyama anticipated much of this turn for the worse. Season one of Stand Alone Complex first aired one year after 9-11. When 2nd GIG aired, Japan’s leaders were turning to neo-nationalism, with a gusto for historical revisionism. The writer–director remarked on how pessimism in the face of this surging chauvinism informed S.A.C. 2nd GIG:
I would say that for the first series, “information disseminates and parallelizes; and the Stand Alone Complex phenomenon actually exists.”
And for the second, “good cause is seldom parallelized, and does not disseminate.”
Accordingly, 2nd GIG saw Stand Alone Complex return with a sterner face. More episodes progress the main plot; less are ‘standalone’. The opening theme, Rise, and its montage crank the tempo and discard the wide-eyed Y2K wonder of season one’s opener, Inner Universe. (Rest in peace, Origa; angelic voice of both tracks.) 2nd GIG drops season one’s compulsive fetishization of the main character – Section 9 squad leader Motoko Kusanagi (AKA the Major) – and is keener to depict her as a uniformed officer. Governments Japanese and otherwise are key to the plot, which begins and ends with geopolitics.
2nd GIG episode one sees a cell of right-wing terrorists identified as ‘The Individual Eleven’ holding the Chinese embassy hostage. They have targeted China because it has passed a large number of Asian refugees on and into Japan (mirroring the ire that British anti-migrationists direct at France and the EU). These refugees were displaced by a fourth world war, centred on Vietnam. Their identity is never explored – they are simply ‘Asian’. The Japanese state has taken them in partly to maintain good international standing and partly to exploit as cheap labour, and has for the most part sealed them off from society, living in dire conditions, on the artificial island of Dejima. This draws upon the historical Dejima of the Edo period, which an isolationist Japan used to keep European traders at arm’s length.
The Individual Eleven are attached to a broader ideology the show names ‘individualism’, muddily binding together real-world conservative individualism’s philosophy of personal (and national) self-reliance with a distaste for the collective consciousness of the net. Given the hivemind nature of the movement, this never quite holds together - perhaps intentionally.
Conundrum turns to crisis as more anti-refugee attacks by unaffiliated individuals all identifying as ‘Individual Eleven’ spark around Japan. Section 9’s besuited leader, Aramaki, quickly surmises that the attacks seek to provoke the refugees into a backlash that would in turn trigger a crackdown by the new reactionary government installed in 2031 after the fallout of season 1’s Laughing Man case. Yoko Kayabuki heads this government as Japan’s first female prime minister (landing six years behind real-world reactionary Sanae Takaichi). Kayabuki learns very quickly that the older men in her cabinet intend to rule through her. Certain ministers have formed a secret pact with an unelected official who is manipulating events to worsen the crisis. This is Kazundo Gouda, one of 2nd GIG’s two curious antagonists. The other is Hideo Kuze, first Gouda’s puppet and later his antithesis. These two – not the members of Section 9 – form the complex heart of 2nd GIG. Let’s meet them.
Through Gouda, 2nd GIG explores one form of cyberspace capture: the engineering of virality; or, if we prefer, of stand alone complexes. It also anticipates the political emergence of the fascist cyber-incel: an online cohort of men who, even if they are not incels by the dictionary definition of the term, have adopted the movement's extreme hatred of women and devotion to violent reactionary politics . Before rising to his position in the intelligence service, Gouda was headhunted from the Defense Policy Bureau and quickly rose through the ranks. Section 9’s Ishikawa, who ran the check that collates this career history, says:
“...his record at the time wasn’t anything special. In fact, he was more like an outcast.”
Next, Ishikawa discovers Gouda’s university thesis. In short, Gouda identified the stand alone complex phenomenon long before Section 9 did, and then analysed its potential for producing a ‘heroic’ leader. After the thesis, he studied information science, ethics, and applied informatics before a detour in the private sector. Every step indicates a privately formulated political project.
In the events of 2nd GIG, Gouda uses his position within the deep state to engineer a stand alone complex, which begins with his online planting of a collection of essays on revolution under the name ‘Patrick Sylvester’, titled The Individual Eleven. While the text mainly concerns progressive revolutions, the tenth essay covers Japan’s May 15th incident of 1932: an attempted ultranationalist military coup in which 11 young naval officers assassinated the Prime Minister. By appealing to patriotism during their trial, they secured an extremely light sentence, opening the door for more far right agitation. Gouda’s fabricated ebook contains a virus that drives infected users to anti-refugee violence – a cyberpunk shorthand for the mind-warping potential of the net’s deepest hiding holes. Consider 4Chan.
Gouda’s seed eventually brings together an even more extreme Individual Eleven: all virgins, all violent. This band of lone militants first meet at a shrine honouring foreigners killed in war. One of the terrorists stamps on an incense stick in anger, hoping to extinguish it. The names on the shrine are written in Latin characters but are exclusively Chinese and Korean, strongly suggesting a link to Imperial Japan’s crimes and aggression on the Asian mainland, and perhaps nodding to the tens of thousands of Korean and Taiwanese conscripts’ commemoration at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. The incels’ first gathering precedes their final mission. On a skyscraper rooftop, they ritualistically kill each other with katanas in view of national news channels, creating an inflammatory spectacle to protest tolerance for the Asian refugees.
Gouda himself is not so visceral a reactionary. Destabilising the state and inflaming ethnic tensions are his means. His ends are ‘secular’: to reshape the state in his image, to move Japan toward closer partnership with the American Empire, and to restore Japan as a colonial power, which he says is what its people want ‘deep down’.
“I’ll tell you what this country is searching for right now – it’s the return to a Shangri-la way of life, built entirely on the backs of outsiders. Although occurring by accident, there was a period in this country’s history in which this had come to pass. Even now, those without motive yearn for this without realising it. All I’m doing is giving them what they want.”
Here the show underscores a contradiction among the reactionary figureheads of the 21st century – to promise the citizens renewed national dignity while slavishly serving American interests. When finally foiled, Gouda attempts to flee with an American delegation. Fundamentally he is interested in himself, not the country. The same goes for the likes of Nigel Farage, or Jair Bolsonaro. ‘America First’ is a global project for the accumulation of private power and wealth at the expense of national sovereignties – 2nd GIG understands this.
Like the most dangerous reactionaries, Gouda is intelligent and intellectually ambitious, driven by spite and disdain. His conservatism is informed by cynicism, understanding people as tribalistic mobs and pinballs to be directed for personal gain. He cites he and his pawns’ status as incels as a trait highly suited for his aims.
“Well if I were the culprit, the factor I would probably use is… virginity. They’d have been virgins prior to getting their prosthetic bodies. If you’re looking for someone who’s prepared to martyr himself as a hero of the masses, that is the essential factor … You think it’s twisted? Well if you must know, I myself am a virgin.”
He never expands on this angle, but it points to a deep-seated antisociality – a resentful distaste for warm contact with ‘the other’, founded on an inferiority complex developed early in his career, where he saw more charismatic personalities surpass him. Like an incel, he interprets this failure deterministically:
“The problem lay in my very existence. In every society, there are certain personalities that are longed for – characteristics sought by the system itself. Most of us even lust after them. But you know it’s funny, because in spite of this, they’re totally unaware of that longing.”
Late in the series, we often find Gouda lying flat, vampire-like, plugged and immersed in the net. Perhaps this is where he feels most at home: bodiless, observing and directing from a panoptic position. For all purposes at a remove from human life.
Cataloguing every flesh and blood Gouda of the 2020s would be an essay in itself. In cyber-America, we might point to PayPal alumni Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, social maladjusts who appear to be turning a litany of perceived slights against homo sapiens writ large. For sleeker figures we might look to the two major political advisors of 2020s Britain: Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney, each brimming with ideas, each socially abrasive, and each responsible for cynically dragging the nation rightward by cultivating xenophobia in the name of electoral strategy.
2nd GIG grants the viewer a centrist (arguably, feminist) power fantasy when PM Kayabuki attempts to arrest Gouda, and, when this fails, the Major machine guns him to the ground. As Freud teaches, pleasure is the release of tension. Reality is less willing to unburden us. Since the late 2010s, our world has been a playground for Goudas, Thiels, and McSweeneys. Liberals won’t splatter them, and the leftists who would are far removed from power. So who will resist? 2nd GIG explores this in the interplay between an individual, Hideo Kuze, and a collective, the refugees.
Kuze and Gouda never meet, but they are twinned. Each has discarded their original face, and refused the ‘normal’ replacement a cyborg body offers. After surviving a serious accident, Gouda elected to remain facially disfigured – perhaps to remain distinct from the herd. Kuze’s body is entirely military grade prosthetic, and, doubling down, he has installed a rare form of ‘sculpted’ face which locks him into a single expression. He does not even open his mouth when speaking.
Kuze’s radicalisation began during his time in the Japanese military, deployed as part of UN forces in ‘the Peninsular War’ – a new Korean War. After defending refugees from a rogue Korean battalion, he becomes disillusioned with Japan’s role in the conflict. He deserts, first living among the Korean refugees and then relocating to Taiwan to live among the refugees residing there. Kuze later resurfaces in an attempt to ritually assassinate PM Kayabuki at a Buddhist temple. He has apparently joined the anti-refugee Individual Eleven, leaving only when backing out of their suicide stunt. Next, he joins the refugees on Dejima as a freedom fighter and leader.
The rationale for this flip from left to right and back again is that Gouda was infected by and then overcame Gouda’s mind-virus (to borrow a term from the online right). Thinking more connotatively, we can see in Kuze a model of the ‘horseshoe theory’, where the militancy of the far left and right’s opposition to the status quo can blur and flip with strange results. The Individual Eleven’s idiosyncratic ideology, aesthetics, and theatrical suicide strongly recall the persona of Yukio Mishima, a 20th century Japanese author who was openly gay and enmeshed in popular literary culture, while espousing far-right nationalism. Mishima’s contradictory, performative, provocative, cultural, erotic, stylised (and so on) mode of fascism has seen him revived as an icon of the self-consciously weird, cultural cliques of the online right.
Kuze, as his true ‘leftist’ self, does not employ performative cultural tactics, and is guided by a sincere human compassion rather than an imagined premodern honour code. However, his tactics verge into the fraught terrain to which real-world Marxism and anti-imperialism can lead. Kuze’s short term plan (to which he was steered invisibly by Gouda) is to help the refugees on Dejima acquire nuclear weaponry, to allow them to assert themselves as an independent micro-state through the threat of mutually assured destruction. The relevance to today’s world is clear – weak or middle powers in imperialist crosshairs need leverage to survive. Ukraine has Western support, North Korea has ICBMs, Iran has the strait of Hormuz, and so on.
Kuze’s long term plan assumes that the refugees’ position is ultimately hopeless. He intends to ‘help’ them exit their bodies to be uploaded collectively to the net. Using Marxist jargon (‘superstructure’, ‘base’), Kuze justifies this plan to a bemused Daisuke Aramaki, brother to Section 9’s leader. Daisuke has also ‘gone native’ among the refugees, and, rather appropriately, has met Kuze in a small Chinese teashop with retro-revolutionary art on the walls. Kuze’s idealism echoes old Maoist fervour; Daisuke’s plain-spoken cautionary response suggests the pragmatism that the Chinese Communist Party adopted after coming to terms with the various domestic disasters that Mao instigated:
“If you’ll consider the advice of a doddering old codger, I’d say place your priority on reality rather than your ideals. There’s still time to put an end to this whole mess, you know.”
Kuze forges ahead, forced in part by helicopter and missile attacks from the Japanese military. Meanwhile, a nuclear submarine belonging to the American Empire has surfaced, primed to wipe out Dejima. This is the work of Gouda, whose triggering of conflict before the arrival of UN weapon inspectors recalls the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the 2020s, seeing trapped civilians bombarded by heavy weaponry they can't possibly fend off, it is hard not to think of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza.
After Section 9 manages to halt Gouda and the American nuke, the situation de-escalates, but Kuze does not make it out. The next and last time we see him, he is on his back in a van, near-paralysed. The American agent who has just administered a fatal injection remarks:
“You really are a fascinating person, for sure. However, we view you as a dangerous element. Your country has no need of charismatic leaders that can’t be controlled. Docile consumers, that’s the way to go.”
It’s horrifying because it’s real. In the world of Ghost in the Shell, the USA we know has fractured into three states: a Russian appendage, a rump state, and the American Empire. This latter power is continuing in the post-WW2 role the USA is currently playing overtly – albeit clumsily – under Donald Trump: maintaining a system of unequal alliances with lesser capitalist states, and using intelligence operations to quash resistance wherever it might arise, in whatever form.
In 2nd GIG, we meet no progressive players within the state. PM Kayabuki favours a more self-sufficient Japan and Section 9’s Aramaki is upstanding, but the former is a conservative politician and the latter polices society. Among the population, we hear of pro- and anti-refugee sentiment, but nothing specific besides resentment over public spending. Administrative solutions to solve rather than manage the refugee crisis are not on the table, either. Resistance to oppression arises among the oppressed, the refugees, plus the charismatic leading figure of Kuze, who has witnessed their suffering and lived alongside them. To empathise and bond with them is not to celebrate their cultural heritage (though this may help – Kuze’s Taiwanese friends gave him a Chinese nickname), but to acknowledge their material struggle – and then support them accordingly.
In its climax, 2nd GIG explores the shortcomings of reliance on a single revolutionary leader. Kuze is ideologically muddled, isolated from broader political movements, manipulated from on high, and – ultimately – killed. To lead and direct the refugees as one man, he turns to using their cyberbrain network, only to find that his ‘people’ have become dependent on his guidance. Adopting Kuze’s programme seems the cyberpunk equivalent of signal-boosting a flag-heavy X account, or jumping onto the Discord server of a streamer dealing in bastardised ‘theory’ – minimal individual cognition necessary. The thin membrane between such channels and the online right is mirrored in 2nd GIG’s Individual Eleven plotline, where virality can no longer be trusted as an expression of the general will.
Here, in our neoliberal late-2020s, where no help is coming from our heads of state and the internet feels less like an anarchist tool and more like a fascist neurotoxin, we might look to the radical potential of empathy, solidarity, and the collective fightback in the flesh, on the ground. We might do well to disregard indignant cultural posturing, and fix our critical faculties on the world before us. As individuals; as a swarm. Using our leaders as tools, and not the reverse. History is reactivating – one suspects that for Kenji Kamiyama and the makers of Stand Alone Complex, it never ended.
Angus Stewart writes strange stories and essays that have found home in publications including Necksnap, Big Other, and Cha. He hails from Dundee, lives in Stockport, and ran the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast for five years. Here is his personal website: https://angusstewart.myportfolio.com/work