#cyber kowloon walled city | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

burnt-multimuse · 2 years ago

Text

Kowloon District

//Today I bring some lore about Kowloon District, the place where Rose and the gang live (with some help and inspiration from @unforgettable-garbage1997)

- Kowloon District is right on the west edge of Cyber City, bordering the Trash Zone. It’s made up of skyscrapers so tightly-packed they’re clipping into each other, the physics broken just right so that they keep each other in place rather than all launching into the air. This mostly doesn’t affect the living experience too much, though inhabitants need to be careful putting anything on or too close to any clipping wall. As a result, apartments at the sides of buildings are the cheapest.

- Apartments with a window tend to be the most expensive, even if the view tends to be nothing more than darkness and an overwhelming number of advertisements. Windows are often also used for disposing of trash, with the other most popular method being leaving it on the roof.

- The district itself is a pit of anarcho-capitalism, ruled over by a crime syndicate. As a result the district is unregulated and rife with crime, with many businesses ran by rules that would get them closed down anywhere else in the city. Attempts to do anything about this have been abandoned, as no Ambyu-lances that were sent in made it back out.

- Wealthier residents can pay for protection from the syndicate. The price of this increases with their earnings, never leaving them with much money to spare. More often than not, more money is spent on this protection than the rent.

- This area is mostly inhabited by failing Addisons, with this being the last place they can afford to go other than the Trash Zone itself. The adspace is ridiculously overcrowded due to the sheer volume of Addisons living in a relatively small area. Flocks often share adspace, investing in one larger ad that has a slight chance of being seen than multiple tiny ones.

- Many Addisons run their businesses from their apartments despite the limited space. A separate shop is another luxury that only the wealthier residents can afford.

- While the vast majority of Addisons in Kowloon District live there because they have no other place to go, there are a handful of more shady, successful ones that moved there specifically to take advantage of the lack of regulations. To them, the risks of living there are worth the ability to do anything with their business with no legal consequences.

- While it’s not completely unheard of for Addisons to make it out of Kowloon District and find success in the inner city, it’s incredibly rare. Due to the nature of the place and the syndicate’s prices, any progress is often an illusion and the district’s inhabitants are stuck in a cycle of barely getting by.

#low standards low prices (addisons)#//worldbuilding #//don't have a tag for it for now but maybe will come up with one later #//long post

6 notes · View notes

l-in-c-future · 8 years ago

Link

Ghost in the Shell (Japanese: 攻殻機動隊 Hepburn: Kōkaku Kidōtai?, "Mobile Armored Riot Police") is a Japanese media franchise originally published as a seinen manga series of the same name written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow. The manga, first serialized in 1989 under the subtitle of The Ghost in the Shell, and later published as its own tankōbon volumes by Kodansha, told the story of the fictional counter-cyberterrorist organization Public Security Section 9, led by protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, in the mid-21st century of Japan.

Animation studio Production I.G has produced several different anime adaptations of Ghost in the Shell, starting with the 1995 film of the same name, telling the story of Section 9's investigation of the Puppet Master. The television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex followed in 2002, telling an alternate story from the manga and first film, featuring Section 9's investigations of government corruption in the Laughing Man and Individual Eleven incidents. A sequel to the 1995 film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, was released on 2004. 2013 saw the start of the Ghost in the Shell: Arise original video animation (OVA) series, consisting of four parts through mid-2014. The series was recompiled in early 2015 as a television series titled Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Alternative Architecture, airing with an additional two episodes (one part).[1] An animated feature film produced by most of the Arise staff, titled Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie, was released on June 20, 2015. A live-action American film of the same name was released on March 31, 2017.

Back to 1990s when the plot of the story was developed, it was based on a primary set in the mid-twenty-first century in the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, Niihama Prefecture (新浜県新浜市) otherwise known as New Port City, the manga and the many anime adaptations follow the members of Public Security Section 9, a special-operations task-force made up of former military officers and police detectives. Political intrigue and counter-terrorism operations are standard fare for Section 9, but the various actions of corrupt officials, companies, and cyber-criminals in each scenario are unique and require the diverse skills of Section 9's staff to prevent a series of incidents from escalating.

In this post-cyberpunk iteration of a possible future, computer technology has advanced to the point that many members of the public possess cyberbrains, technology that allows them to interface their biological brain with various networks. The level of cyberization varies from simple minimal interfaces to almost complete replacement of the brain with cybernetic parts, in cases of severe trauma. This can also be combined with various levels of prostheses, with a fully prosthetic body enabling a person to become a cyborg. The main character of Ghost in the Shell, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is such a cyborg, having had a terrible accident befall her as a child that ultimately required her to use a full-body prosthesis to house her cyberbrain. This high level of cyberization, however, opens the brain up to attacks from highly skilled hackers, with the most dangerous being those who will hack a person to bend to their whims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(1995_film)

Putting the time clock forward, we are in the early of 21st century already. The 2017 life version movie story setting is in the near future, the vast majority of humans are augmented with cybernetics, enhancing various traits like vision, strength, and intelligence. Hanka Robotics, the world's leading developer of augmentative technology, establishes a secret project to develop a mechanical body, or "shell", that can integrate a human brain rather than an AI. A young woman named Mira Killian,[10] the sole survivor of a cyberterrorist attack, is chosen as the test subject after her body is apparently destroyed beyond repair. Over the objections of her designer, Dr. Ouelet, Hanka CEO Cutter decides to train Killian as a counter-terrorism operative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(2017_film)

Philosophically, the comic book depicts the new world view almost subvert the human past for the "life" view in an upcoming man-machine interface era of new technology. It is almost like prophesizing a new psychological bedding for these cyborgs.

Traditional science fictions usually ignore the negative effects brought by rapid technological developments. The emergence of cyberpunk is a type of self-correction to complement the loss of ecological balances resulted from technological developments. It is a kind of alarm to the so-called “science and technologies ethics”.

But what touches me is the societal setting of the fictional city in the story fictional Japanese city of Niihama was inspired by a ‘ghost’ place in my hometown Hong Kong-Kowloon walled city.

Kowloon Walled City was a largely-ungoverned densely-populated settlement in Kowloon City in Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain by China in 1898. With no government enforcement from the Chinese or the British aside from a few raids by the Hong Kong Police, the Walled City became a haven for crime and drugs. It was only during a 1959 trial for a murder that occurred within the Walled City that the Hong Kong government was ruled to have jurisdiction there. By this time, however, the Walled City was virtually ruled by the organised crime syndicates known as triads.

Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. By 1987, the Walled City contained 33,000 residents within its 2.6-hectare (6.4-acre) borders. The highest density in the world. The City also underwent massive construction during the 1960s, with developers building new modular structures above older ones. A few of the streets were illuminated by fluorescent lights, as sunlight rarely reached the lower levels due to the outstanding disregard to air rights within the city. It was a truly urban dark forest.

The Walled City was still known for its high number of unlicensed doctors and dentists, who could operate there without threat of prosecution. Although the Walled City was for many years a hotbed of criminal activity, most residents were not involved in any crime and lived peacefully within its walls. Numerous small factories and businesses thrived inside the Walled City, and some residents formed groups to organise and improve daily life there. In summary, this ungoverned city has its own unique set of societal orders-informal and underground, you may call it forest rules, to govern how people live with each other. Before the Walled city was demolished, a group of Japanese artists and explorers were allowed to get inside to have a last exploration trip. From which, they documented in details in arts and literature what was the perception and image of this unique place in their minds. Probably, this inspired the subsequent creation of ghost in the shell comics, as people could see the trails of Kowloon Walled city throughout the comics artists’ work.

Though the Kowloon Walled City had long gone, the life version of the movie still came back to the old pilgrimage place-HK-to recapture the feels from old districts. In a sense, the story tells the dark side of the future of a city, may be HK, or any other city that we can find similar images and phenomenon in other places as well. Beyond the high-end modernized sides of a ‘cosmopolitan city’, there are bustling streets decorated by colorful billboards and neon lights, there are traditional markets with hawkers’ stalls, dirty fire exit lanes at the back of many buildings, caged people (people living in cage size or coffin size ‘homes’ under the barest standard of living “standards”, if one can consider these are living standards at all. There are a mixed of ethnic races in a city but surely not every race has equal treatments and equal residents’ rights (please search more about the predicament of ethnic minorities in HK-people who have no and never will have any identity even they live there for 4 generations). There is a feeling of a cross-societal borderless social disorder feeling. A city that emits a mysterious and treacherous despair atmosphere where local citizens of the lowest social sector are forced to live in illegally built structures one overlapping with each other growing vertically as if some kind of “organic structures” (which were a typical feature of the Kowloon Walled City).

Despite that the urban ecological environment is unusually disordered, people are blind to the reality. They seem to get used to the chaos but continue to strife on every day with vigorous vitality. This has almost become a microcosm of the anti-utopian world. For this reason, Hong Kong is also a symbol of the future of the city and metaphor, which with the Central business area of the elegant high-rise buildings form a strong contrast and contradiction to the dark side of the society. Such huge contrast in the city’s landscape has enriched the drama tension.

But going back to the technology side, Ghost in the shell is one of those science fictions that touch the topic of “humans” 2.0- Nanobot implants could soon connect our brains to the internet and give us 'God-like' super-intelligence. Some technocrats suggest that human brains’ memories can be stored in the clouds in the future. A notable recent example is Elon Musk’s neutral link project with the ambition of linking human brains to computer chips under ‘medical’ research. (Well, if you don’t mind nakedly expose yourself completely transparent to anybody and your memories or thoughts being hacked or stolen by anybody.) According to traditional Japan’s animism, every material matter in this world has a spirit, including mobile phones, computers, internet programs and algorithms. Of course, then why not cyborgs also have ‘souls’? If they can have ‘souls’, then theoretically there may be mutation in the process of cybernetization.

Even though being a cyborg, Kusanagi doesn’t want to be defined by the cybernetic enterprise’s default setting her as a commodity, a product or even a weapon. She has her own thinkings and emotions. She will she was a human rather than a piece of assembled cold machine. She has her dreams and illusions, sometimes there are images of ‘wrongly set’ coming to her ‘mind’, memories of her former life (her human body was dead, buried and she went to visit her own grave with her mother). All these suggested that Kuze is a human, or at least the ghost of a human being living inside a machine body. Was it living inside a machine body or captured inside a humanless body? that is another philosophical aspect to rethink or debate. But what the hacker 9 told her: those people (i.e. those cybernetics scientists and cybernetic technologies enterprises) did not give you life, they took away your original life. This became the key clue to decode the mystery surrounding Kuze.

Linking back to the inspiration of a dystopia city’s future in a cyborg era, I started to feel very sad for those people living in places where their freedom of thoughts are taken away by authoritarian governments (save the long talks of what happens to my hometown right now under increasing screwing up of political atmosphere and ruined integrity of governance........). It is in substance an order of orderless. A law of lawlessness in a dark urban jungle. The autocratic government wants to make their citizens as soulless and mindless people without acting on their free will. They want to make their puppet governments as their robot machines, programmed to do whatever they are ordered to do so, like Kuze, the cyborg obedience ‘police’. Precisely, they DO NOT give people lives, they TAKE AWAY their original lives. They do not regard human rights, DO NOT respect humanity values, the 1% dictating enterprises and the rulers are the ‘super-gods’ who rule over everybody.

But can they really take away human souls and human free will? It is not a story about the technological utopia and dis-utopia aspects, it is a story of THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY. Shall we give up our free will? May be just because we are ‘told’ to buy in ‘technological’ developments? Or we are coerced to become a mindless robot serving the dictatorship of ridiculous lawlessness?!

p.s.-if the animated version 1995 had prophesied anything about HK, a group of young kids holding yellow umbrellas running in the rain....

In the technological side, I always wonder whether the technocrats in our time now in the 21st century are just some super science fiction fans and they self-fulfilling the “prophecies” on the fantasies of the fictions, cartoons, comics. In the course, we become comically put as real life tested-subjects....whether we have our free will to decide... Do we have REALLY have the free will to decide whether we use iPhones, smart phones, i-pads, and ten thousands of tech products? Or just as Steve Jobs said, the society didn’t know what they need until they were TOLD so!!!

#cyborg #cybernetics #robot #AI #technology #human-machine interface #cyber punk #city dystopia #city #ghost in the shell

1 note · View note