Ghost in the Shell: The Horror of Mass Production

Masamune Shirow’s cyberpunk masterpiece envisions a world where people, not just products, are mass produced

by Nicola Kapron

We now live in a world where nearly everything you can touch is being mass produced—everything except people. Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga Ghost in the Shell examines what systemic nightmares could arise when people, too, become the object of mass production. 

Shirow’s iconic work was one of the foundations of both Japanese cyberpunk and cyberpunk in general, and for good reason: it touches on many of the genre’s most central and impactful themes in its drive to examine the horror of losing one’s identity to the machine, whether that machine be capitalism, society, or a literal encroachment of the technological on the organic. The expanded Ghost in the Shell franchise is best known for depicting the struggle of cyborgs to find meaning and humanity, but the original manga spends a surprising amount of time portraying the less arthouse, more mundane struggle to live in the shadow of mass production.

The central protagonist of Ghost in the Shell is Maj.or Motoko Kusanagi of the cybernetic SWAT team Public Security Section 9, a military cyborg whose brain occupies a completely artificial body. Within the larger franchise—which encompasses multiple movies, anime series, and video games—Major Kusanagi is depicted as a stoic and philosophical individual. For most of the original manga, however,she’s cheerful and highly opinionated,. her bright smile and cocky attitude standing in sharp contrast to the grim, industrialized world in which she lives. The influence of corporate mass production on the setting is made clear from the very first page, where Japan is referred to as a “corporate conglomerate-state”—but its effects are most obvious on the Major herself.

Motoko Kusanagi occupies a mass-produced cyborg body with large eyes, a bob cut, and a full figure—a decision made because the look is popular, and her superiors wanted to pack her full of military-grade hardware without risking someone mugging her for it. The effects of this decision haunt Maj. Kusanagi throughout her professional life. In Chapter 6, “Robot Rondo,” she is flat-out mistaken for a robot by one of her boss’s old military friends, a man who makes a hobby of collecting android love dolls and who takes one look at her in her dark glasses and long uniform coat and dismisses her as being “too mechanical” and “no damn good.”

While the cyborgs of Section 9 aren’t legally property, their bodies are. And when they die, they’re returned to the labs that built them.

The rest of the cyborgs of Section 9 are in a similar, albeit less sexualized, position. While they aren’t legally property, their bodies are—and those bodies require constant maintenance to stay functional. If they resign, their bodies will be repossessed. And when they die, their remains will go back to the labs that built them—they won’t have graves. While they’re alive, Kusanagi and the other cyborgs often go days on the job without sleep and constantly risk being made into patsies or sacrificial pawns as a result of inter-departmental disputes within the government. This grim existence, however, may be one of the least horrifying aspects of Ghost in the Shell’s take on the mass production of people. Because the true fear isn’t what the government will do to Section 9, but what Section 9 will do to those they hunt—and those they’re meant to protect.

In Chapter 2, “Super Spartan,”  Kusanagi is sent to investigate a welfare facility that takes in war orphans. The facility, however, is very obviously a forced labor camp—one which Human rights organizations have remained silent about   because the water filters made in the camp are more important than the children or their well-being. To make matters worse, it’s also a government brainwashing facility, and if the Major goes in without an arrest warrant she’ll create a huge scandal and leave her team  to face the repercussions. She legally can’t save the children, but she can’t make herself leave them in such an awful situation, either.

By the end of the chapter, Kusanagi has found a third option: take out the facility’s blatantly corrupt supervisors (who the government throws under the bus) and put the children in charge of the operation. She still fully expects the incident to be the end of her military career.

This first encounter with the horrors of a society scarred by unrestrained mass production doesn’t end on a tragic note, but it’s only the beginning. Throughout the rest of the series, Kusanagi is continually faced with the question of how to save people when those same people are measured only by their worth under the capitalist system. The outcome of these encounters shows how Kusanagi goes from rebelling against the system to save the individual, to ultimately failing the individual while saving the system.

This turn begins in Chapter 3, “Junk Jungle,” when the Foreign Minister’s interpreter is hacked by agents from a war-torn country. Kusanagi and her team are left with two hours to trace the virus back to the source and find the culprit while trying to avoid an international incident. The signal turns out to be coming from a garbage truck driven by a sanitation worker, who has been bribed to carry out the hacking in exchange for figuring out why his wife sprang a divorce on him. However, it turns out that the sanitation worker has also been hacked—he was fed a simulated software dream, given a fake identity and some former military tech, and set up as the operation’s fall guy. In reality, he was never married and his wife doesn’t exist. Worse still, current technology can’t erase the simulated memories and he’s left with a permanently hacked brain. The same chapter has Kusanagi override her subordinate Togusa’s body to keep him from shooting a suspect in the head in order to protect her, forming a parallel that calls into question the meaning of autonomy in a world where the human brain and body can be reprogrammed by outside forces.

The sanitation worker isn’t the only person caught up in a problem created or exacerbated by improperly decommissioned military tech.

On page 92, Kusanagi’s superior Chief Daisuke Aramaki remarks,“In this case, the fate of a single nation… and the life of a single person have both been treated as though they’re worthless.”

He’s right. The sanitation worker is easily one of the manga’s most tragic characters, even though—or perhaps—he is a one-off character who is never seen again after his debut. Section 9 does not press charges against this man—but they don’t help him, either, even though he is very much the government’s responsibility. He was victimized by technology that was created for military purposes and never properly decommissioned. He, too, has been permanently scarred by the callous boot of mass production.

The unlucky sanitation worker isn’t the only person caught up in a problem created or exacerbated by improperly decommissioned military tech. In fact, the plots of most chapters are kicked off by terrorists, hostile nations, and giant corporations using stolen, resold, or legitimate military hardware and software against Japan, its people, or Section 9. Even the godlike AI known as the Puppeteer begins its existence as a computer program designed by Japan’s Foreign Ministry to hack specific targets and guide their actions. However, an even more callous side of Ghost in the Shell’s examination of industrialized suffering is revealed when Shirow Masamune addresses an ugly truth to the sex robot market: it’s a lot easier to copy and butcher a human brain than it is to create a realistic but limited AI.

Throughout Chapter 6, the reader is confronted with increasingly distressing imagery, beginning with an adorable and childish prototype love doll suddenly attempting to tear her owner apart with her hands and teeth. It soon becomes clear that she’s only one of many. The chapter asks questions about the subdued horror of planned obsolescence in the android and cyborg industry, especially when the motivation for the attacks appears to be that the rogue love dolls have gained self-awareness and are rejecting everything they were built for. Although the actual explanation turns out to be quite different, the shot of Kusanagi following a lab tech into a room filled floor-to-ceiling with cages packed with crazed, struggling androids is striking to say the least.

When the truth is revealed later in Chapter 6, it’s even more disturbing: in an attempt to create a more realistic sex robot, a corporation has been using an illegal ghost dubbing system to copy the brains of smuggled children into love dolls—effectively transforming human trafficking victims into robot sex slaves. The result is an incredibly high-quality robot and a dead child. Kusanagi’s subordinates Batou and Togusa are able to save two of the victims, Link and Adam, but not before the girls’ attempts to draw attention to their plight cause a lot of collateral damage. They manage to bribe one of their captors to help them insert a virus into the prototype love dolls, which then attack the VIPs they’d been sent to. Two people died, twelve were wounded, and dozens of misdemeanors were committed by proxy to save two young girls from ending up on the production line. 

Is mass production so prevalent in Ghost in the Shell because the future is grim, or is the future grim because of rampant mass production?

When the truth is revealed, Batou loses his temper at the girls and demands they accept responsibility for everything their actions caused. Their response is as simple as it is heartfelt: “That’s not fair! It started when the people here did bad things to us!” (pg. 135)

Ghost in the Shell only explicitly grapples with the uncanniness of mass production in a single chapter, “Megatech Machine 2: The Making of a Cyborg,” which focuses on the construction of a single full-body cyborg. Though the scene is mostly played for a sense of technological wonder—and fan service—it ends with an uneasy note, as Major Kusanagi begins to vent her fears about not really being human to her friend, a fellow full-body cyborg. She’s not upset because of some vague sense of lost humanity; instead, she’s afraid of the possibility that someone could just show up one day, announce the recall of a defective product, and haul her off. 

Given the many moments where the manga shows people being left to the nonexistent mercies of a system that sees them merely as equipment or collateral damage, this fear is painfully justified. It also raises one question that the manga never truly acknowledges or grapples with: is the rampant and uncontrolled mass production of weapons, AI, and people so prevalent in Ghost in the Shell because its future is grim, or is its future grim because of rampant and uncontrolled mass production?

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