Massive Attack at Fuji Rock and 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.'

The question Massive Attack posed at the end of their live performance—'Are your emotions and thoughts truly your own?'—seemed to connect with the concepts of the 'Laughing Man,' a main character in 'Ghost in the Shell: STAND ALONE COMPLEX,' and Jean Baudrillard's concept of the 'simulacrum'.

In 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.', the 'Laughing Man' is depicted as a media hacker who exposes drug-related harm that the government tries to hide, all while quoting J.D. Salinger's novels. The essence of the Laughing Man incident lies in the fact that, in the absence of an original (the real whistleblower), the symbol of the 'Laughing Man' took on a life of its own, creating a social phenomenon.

Massive Attack also continues to use the giant screens on their stage to 'hack' and expose 'invisible systems' such as state lies, data surveillance societies, the dominance of multinational corporations, and the manipulation of public opinion by algorithms. Is the question they posed—'Are your own anger and thoughts just being 'made to be imitated' by media and algorithms?'—not a critique of the 'copy without an original' depicted in S.A.C.?

Jean Baudrillard's philosophy of the 'simulacrum,' which signifies a 'copy without an original,' is the underlying philosophy of 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.' and is similar in form to Massive Attack's message. The idea that the 'emotions' we consume on social media and in the news in modern society might just be copies of symbols created by someone other than ourselves is reflected in the question, 'Are your emotions and thoughts truly your own?'

Massive Attack's frontman, 3D, seems extremely conscious of how technology distorts people's perception. Their stage confronts the audience with the possibility that even the consciousness they believe to be their 'true self' is merely a copy planted by the massive simulacrum that is the 'information society'.

The port city of Bristol, where Massive Attack was born—with its multicultural environment and high immigrant population—and the Japanese cyberpunk worldview depicted by Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii, and Kenji Kamiyama, were strongly linked in the pre-internet era of the 90s. Even if 3D has not officially stated that they were 'influenced by Ghost in the Shell,' the theme they share—'the loss of identity in a highly information-oriented society'—is exactly what 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.' sought to depict.

By finally posing the question, 'Are your emotions and thoughts truly your own?', they may have been trying to pull the audience back from being mere 'consumed copies (the symbol of an audience)' to becoming 'individuals (stand-alones)' who stop and think.

Regarding their collaboration with BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, 'Massive Attack v Adam Curtis,' and the production of the 'Mezzanine' 20th-anniversary tour, Adam Curtis said in 2019: 'We have moved into a strange, backward-looking world surrounded by 'machines (algorithms)' that read our data and predict our every move. Inside this seemingly safe dome of pleasure (the internet society), suspicion and distrust are spreading like a virus.'

By teaming up with Adam Curtis, who exposes the darkness of the data surveillance society, Massive Attack's message has been established as a political visual. They refuse to let music be mere 'entertainment (a tool for escapism)' and treat it as a 'device for awakening' to shake the audience's identity.

In 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.', a world is depicted where brains can be digitized and bodies replaced with machines. There, the anxiety that even one's own memories and emotions might be 'copies rewritten by someone else' is always present. Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of 'Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.', lived believing in the existence of a 'ghost (a human soul/original self)' within her, but she constantly fought the anxiety that even that might just be a 'program that only thinks it exists.'

Toward the end of the story, Aoi (the Laughing Man) and Motoko Kusanagi converse in a library (a graveyard where information is stored on paper), quoting Salinger's novel 'The Catcher in the Rye.' The theme discussed there is how we maintain 'differences as individuals' in a world where information saved in the brain—the hard drive—is parallelized and the original (the real thing) has disappeared. Society continues to run on its own through a 'chain of copies' even without an original, and the original will that an individual should have possessed from the beginning disappears within that chain of copies.

The original in 'S.A.C.' is a 'phantom that everyone chases but cannot find anywhere in the information society.' The question Massive Attack posed at the end of their live performance, 'Are your emotions and thoughts truly your own?', sounds like a cry from the real world against a world where the 'absence of an original (the true self)' depicted in 'S.A.C.' has become the status quo.

In the society depicted in 'S.A.C.' where humans are cyberized, everyone accesses the same information and can instantly share the same experiences. It can be said to be a caricature of the modern era realized by AI, but Aoi (the Laughing Man) despairs, thinking that when information is completely parallelized, everyone's brain becomes like 'one large, uniform pool,' and individual uniqueness (the original) disappears. In fact, in the Laughing Man incident, isolated individuals (stand-alones) are swallowed by the waves of copied information on the net, becoming beings that only imitate the symbol of the 'Laughing Man.' In the final episode of 'S.A.C.', Motoko presents 'an answer' to this difficult problem, but I recommend watching the main story and having individuals judge it as stand-alones. Whether that is hope or despair is not something that can be easily answered.

[Related Information]

I have rewatched the 26th and final episode of 'S.A.C.' dozens of times, and each time I find something new.

The new 2026 'Ghost in the Shell' work. Produced by Science SARU.

A masterpiece by Massive Attack. It can be said to be the embodiment of Bristol's racial diversity.