Thresholds of Humanness
Somewhere around the age of fourteen, I saw The Matrix for the first time. I grew up in a household informed by the spiritual teachings of Gurdjieff and J. G. Bennett, so the core themes around consciousness and awakening were both familiar and intriguing.
A few years later my cousin-in-law was getting rid of some of his old anime VHS tapes, and I learned about The Ghost in the Shell—one of the primary influences for The Matrix. During this era I saw the anime film. Only this year did my friend lend me her copy of the original manga.
A Future Receding
The first thing that I’m struck by in reading The Ghost in the Shell in 2020, more than thirty years after it was written, it feels as the the biotech future it describes in the year 2029 is further away than it was in 1989 (maybe this can be said of science fiction in general). Sure, knee replacements work pretty well these days, as do dental implants. And massive amounts of funding are poured into biotech research each year (but more for the sake of solid Return-on-Investment for pharmaceutical intellectual property than for the sake of pushing the envelope in the medical field). And there’s certainly a dedicated biohacker subculture. Maybe we’re a century away from cyborgs, but not a decade.
