December 13th, 1997

Ghost in the shell

I saw "Ghost in the shell", the Manga animated movie, today. I've wanted to see it for years and years, ant it was every bit as good as I'd thought it would be. It takes place in Japan, in the not too distant future, and most people seem more or less cybernetically enhanced. One of the things I liked about it was the way Major Kusanagi (the female cyborg who's the main character) jacked herself into the net, found the route map for a garbage truck, and followed it on a treee dimensional map. I like that idea, and that's somewhat how I imagine the future to be. Imagine not having to use a keyboard, or even speech recognition. All you have to do is think, and you'd be moving through a graphical representation of all the data on the net, with highways and alleys, huge sky scrapers and little huts all over. _That_ is cyberspace, that's what William Gibson foretold (not knowing anything about computers, mind you, and perhaps that's why he did it so well, and why we're striving for it today). What we have now is like rock inscriptions compared to a word processor in relation. I can't wait :).