"...if the right kind of people begin to believe it was arson, caused by deliberate action, the threat that more arsons will be committed increases drastically.
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."
"...A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar, the result being that the potential increases exponentially for copycat behavior that forms a Standalone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is indefinitive."
this runs contrary to the mcluhan-inspired idea that has gained popularity recently — that media fracturing and echo chamber effects are shredding our shared identities and political control structures. i find this idea more convincing; we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
Yeah I think the AI's monologue from Metal Gear Solid 2 (basically an anime) cut closer to our present reality:
> "[...] You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." [...]
The full version is something like 20 minutes long, but basically the AI argues that digital communication leads to the decentralization of 'truth' and that the solution is employ narrative shaping algorithms against the general public.
I wouldn't say it runs contrary, but that it's evolved second-order thinking. While the media raves about echo chambers, incels and religious terrorism few focus on emergent hive minds.
GITS is an absolutely brilliant ode to emergence and second order effects.
I don't think it's contrary at all, but rather complementary. The quoted lines don't say that all of society becomes one, it says larger groups of people are exposed to the same information and thus makes their behavior similar. These groups of people are the bubbles and echo chambers that become blocs of people with similar behavior and ideas. You yourself show how the two ides work together:
>we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
These days known as "stochastic terrorism". Mass murderers crop up with similar quotes in their manifestoes, often shared via the same websites, but when looked at from the traditional model of terrorist groups with "handlers" or "cells" there is no control relationship.
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."