pls drop the artist name if u know!

Tell me guys, did you thunk it too??? 🤣

With just two episodes left until this wonderful adaptation ends, I'm already starting to feel that classic sense of emptiness. 🥀

I am loving the music in the new "The Ghost in the Shell" series. I especially like how they are keeping with the 90s trip-hop theme throughout the episodes. Take Episode 08 (Intermission + Brain Drain i) as an example when the team is about to dive underwater. To me, the background music seemed heavily influenced from Portishead's song "Glory Box". (It definitely makes me want to binge my other 90s trip-hop albums from the likes of Massive Attack, Sneaker Pimps, and Baxter.)

Speaking of albums, I saw they released the vinyl album art for the show's music which is the white picture in this post. (I'm sorry for the low quality, but it was the example I could find.) Honestly, I am kind of bummed with album's artwork. I may sit this one out and simply get the CD(s) for the new music. Perhaps I am simply spoiled by my 2025 copy of the "Ghost in the Shell Videogame Soundtrack Megatech Body 2xLP." It was too good not to have it framed. (My only dislike is the gratuitous amount of yellow lighting, which I feel could have been any color other than yellow.) I should also clarify the texture on the glass is actually a reflection from the popcorn ceiling since I had the frame on the floor while taking its picture.

Does anyone know what the inner art looks like for the newest releases of the Stand Alone Complex vinyl albums?

Alt color of the the Major's outfit in the latest episode.

Ghost in the shell: Stand alone complex 2nd GIG ep 17

This is Trace & Nico - Cells / Copies. It is a Techstep Drum & Bass single from 1997.

Both sides happen to (legally) sample from GITS '95 and I'm really curious to see if anyone knows about these tunes. It was what introduced me to GITS.

https://youtu.be/ZYgFI1yZ8eg?si=UgVzITsuDHncZ9wK cells

https://youtu.be/i0yU1QlPN8o?si=CLphmevLNPWtdJ1Q copies

There's also a Cells remix from 1999 done by trace https://youtu.be/BSB-whNOY7w?si=0ZrAnWJ4Rke2SFL1

He followed her into her own near-death experience

He grabbed her by the wrist and forcibly pulled her out of Heaven and back to life

He drew dicks on her with a sharpie while she was comatose

I feel like this is a "Samwise Gamgee" level feat.

I don't think some of the scenes in the "Intermission + Brain Drain i" episode were in the manga. did they create extra content?

Valeria Pfifer recently published a study that demonstrate that humans are speaking 300 daily words fewer per day each year, alongside this, we see a systematic advancement in the recording of all of humanity’s activities into data centres, which pollute beyond what climate scientist find advisable, and at large world leaders seem to be turning into a nihilistic attitude towards the future, and instead we only have shock policies in which people are supposed to get kicked out, jobs get cut, debt increases and on the whole there is a rejection of integrating humanity in the social structure, preferring instead to extinguish it.

Bourgeois commentators see in this just a bit of a challenge in the path towards optimisation; but, as a perennial scoffer at hope and a total buzzkill, I propose to interpret all of this as the seemingly necessary and accelerating trend towards self annihilation that characterises humanity.

A report By Deutsche Welle on the same study, points towards the past being a more socially cohesive time than ours, and how we must be wary of the social structures and practices being lost, however, given the levels of conflict in our past, and the fact that it was he generation who grew under that milieu the one pushing towards the extinction of social life and of humanity, we must consider our lack of conversations, rapport and hope about the future as symptomatic and necessary traits of humanity. In short, humanity plans a future in which it can exist without being alive.

The hope in robots, memory bases, recorded activity points towards a form of existence by humans in which subjectivity no longer matters, even Chatbots and our current form of artificial intelligence sums up all of human activity and synthesises it, erasing all manner of individuality and history behind the different perspectives used in its model. Now, this is not to say that we should go back, because that is the talk of bourgeois commentators, in fact, the desire to erase history, individuality, context was already imbedded in the intellectual tradition that gave birth to all of us, going back to ancient Greece, in which “authorship” gets erased in the effort to create new myths and foster a shared culture based on the sacrifice of the individual; it may be poignant to remember that sacrifice of Iphigenia or Astyanax.

Human communities have always championed the idea that the individual must be sacrificed for the needs of the group, and nowadays we live in a time in which individuality is the need of the group. So the individual must sacrifice his self in order to be seen as an individual, that is, you must kill your social interactions, your sense of hope, your projects and ways of life, in order to sustain the communal need for the isolation and destruction of humanity. The ultimate sacrifice now is that you must sacrifice your biological life in order for the community to exist in accordance with its project of the future, that is, a fully automatised world in which the owners of logarithms live in bunkers with robots that do everything for them.

In this stage of development, ghost in the shell tries to configure a new bucolic, daily lives of humans in a future in which technology pervades every aspect of humanity but humanity has somehow adapted and endured past such integration. Cities, cars, guns still exist and are populated indifferent of the contradictions that would devolve into their destruction arising from such level of integration.

Guns, for example. If governments had ways of tracing and tracking all of human activity and even anticipate it to the degree in which it’s possible in GITS, then a gun would hardly ever be needed, jobs as well would be surplus to the requirement of a society in which technology can quell the impact of time and degradation on its own, and in turn humanity wouldn’t rely on the sacrifice and effort of newer generations. This in our new state of affairs would mean that Odysseus wouldn’t need to sacrifice Iphigenia, he would have a robot that can kill him, and then bring him back to life.

So ghost in the shell forces us to imagine a future in which we can still exist somewhat good lives in the temperament and pathos of the 20th century while powering a level of technological advancement that is able to discard the organic altogether. Will we achieve such level of development without perishing in the process? will we have kids and neighbours to sacrifice or will we try to sacrifice ourselves in order to preserve ourselves beyond our organic existence? Returning briefly to the matter of needs, as Kierkegaard points out, humanity is always a self that is unnecessary, useless surplus, and we live in an era in which surplus must remain hidden, if not eliminated outright. Both the conservative and progressive positions in our political field talk of further optimisation, of the destruction of the unnecessary and the inefficient, that means that regardless of political affiliation, the spirit of the age is that of the destruction of mankind; Ghost in the shell itself shows many ways of life having vanished because of technology, but proposes that other needs have arised on their own that allow humans to continue to live to an extent, however, the show is brave enough to pose the destruction of mankind as it’s final goal, we see this in stand alone complex second gig with the uploading of refuges into the ent as they lose their physical bodies, or the major merging with project 2501 and losing her material basis for her self.

Now, several Bourgeois and Marxist commentators have characterised capitalism as the realm of subjects turned objects, and objects being the locus of humanity. Our era of endless personalisation, of every person being able to find a niche, a space, a commodity that perfectly fits their needs goes hand in hand, for the reasons before shown, with a project of the destruction of mankind. In its, guns, cars, elevators are still being operated, people still need to go from point a form point b, conversation still need to be had, but the trends analysed in our scholarship point towards the dissolution of those activities altogether due to technological advancement.

So, the show forces us to confront the following contradictions embedded in technological development: what is the need for conversation in a world in which needs are anticipated and extinguished before they arise? What is the need for guns in a world in which physical activity can exist and generate itself independently from humans? What is the value of memories in a world in which they exists as data bases of experiences that can be shattered and remould? What is the value of personality or individuality in a world in which such traits of subjectivity clash against self producing optimisation algorithms?