When you go off on a “What If” premise, the premise may be fantastical, but the consequences must follow realistically.

Also, I thought they got the tone wrong: would people really be cheering in bars at the thought of the PM fulfilling the demand?

It’s almost like human beings undersell for humorous purposes or something.

Not laughing at you: it’s just that, I feel your pain.

You can use a hammer to put up shelves and knock the dents out of a bicycle mudguard, or build a library … or you can use it to construct tanks and bombs, or just plain cave someone’s head in.
GitS at the end of the day, particularly the Manga version, is far more a work of philosophy and a musing on what it means to be human, be sapient, to have “a soul” than anything much about technology itself.

Much like Star Trek could be easily retold, with a few tweaks, as a story about a sailing ship on a grand voyage of oceanic exploration (the original remit was, after all, basically “the odyssey, In Space), you could quite easily transplant GitS and its Sufficiently Advanced Technology into a fantasy setting, with the Puppet Master being some other, magically summoned blithe spirit, and it would work as well. The tech is just there to keep the fanboys happy.

It’s the sort of thing the Japanese do very well, having held onto a rich animistic folklore a lot longer than the monotheistic, earlier-industrialised “west”. What Measure Is A Man and all that. Or with a sidestep into, say, Princess Mononoke, What Measure Is A Wolf / Demon… despite an otherwise human exterior…?

It’s not so much the technology being evil that is the crux of his attention, but the possibilities it opens up for the darker side of human nature to abuse. That’s why I can’t bring myself to watch and why it sticks with people so much – there’s nothing quite so disturbing as the casual cruelty inflicted on people by other people, whether facilitated by smartphones, ubiquitous surveillance (might The History Of You or whatever it’s called be a modern homage to 1984?), a corrupt legal system, or the advantage wrought by a sword and armour vs shovels and pigskins… It’s just that this particular technology is so damned new, with such widespread cultural penetration, that not many people have integrated it into their stories or explored its possibilities yet. A lot of it WAS literally pure sci-fi ten years ago (note that the first iPhone was launched in 2007, and decently capable touch-screen mobiles of any shirt hadn’t been around for long before that), which is a short time in literary and scriptwriting circles.

The last major work I read which largely revolved around Mans Inhumanity To Man was the Millennium trilogy. That’s roughly 10 years old now, or a little less. The most advanced technology in that is a Palm Tungsten (based off a modified MC68k CPU, IIRC), which has to be bluetoothed (very cutting edge at the time) to a separate, non-”smart” (ie no touchscreen, no apps) but otherwise sophisticated-for-the-time mobile phone in order to go online. Said online-ness involving IRC, email, a bit of FTP, and some presumably text-based or low-image web browsing, given that all you’ll get over GPRS is about 30kbit/s. And covert video surveillance involved a handycam in a sports bag. If Lisbeth Salander and co had access to iPhones and the like, and GoPros or those mini cameras that lurk in a ballpoint pen, record to a microSD card, and can be plugged directly into a USB port for downloading, the story would have come out VERY differently. A lot of it revolved around the Bad Guys being able to get away with what they did for decades precisely because of a lack of civil connectivity and ability to capture, record, share and report their doings, certainly with any kind of speed or ease or at a low cost, and by assuming a very traditional, chauvinist world would continue forever in some way – with that house of cards being, eventually, triumpantly swept off the table by a few people who were able to leverage the new technology and their access to it – particularly Lisbeth and a few bit players – in order to have them tie the noose for their own neck without even realising.

If we fast forward the tale 20ish years so it starts with her petrol-bombing Zala’s car sometime in 2013, then instead of it being an isolated incident with a few confused eyewitnesses, and the police able to blithely ignore her protestations and appeals to go help her mother, instead whisking her off to a secure institution… we now get footage of the incident from three different angles, including the authorities’ response to it, going up on Youtube within a matter of hours, there’s a public outcry beyond anything that Sapo can cover up, and the rest of the story fizzles. So instead we have to talk about something else, something that now maybe includes said new, disruptive technologies as a potential negative, or at least something possessed both of dark and light sides, rather than being a misunderstood, civil liberty facilitating tool used only by curious and self-protective geeks.

(Oh, and I probably should have said in case no-one noticed… Brooker is a devout misanthrope… so he’s all over this kind of storyline like a rash.)

(But in contrast to addictive substances, you don’t wake up in the morning craving the first twiglet of the day, and don’t suffer terrible physiological withdrawal symptoms…)

You can find yourself banging through them at a surprising rate because they’re delicious and enjoyable, and they arrive in perfectly sized bursts, little morsels that don’t actually add up to a full meal or drawn out game. But, although difficult, it’s not impossible to stop before the box is empty or it’s 3am and you realise you have work in the morning.

Alcohol, cigarettes, heroin aren’t moreish, they’re addictive and habit forming.

The jury’s out on coca-cola and coffee…

Nope, nope, nope.

Truth always hurts the worst, and horror is always most effective when it cuts very close to reality and what could well happen just with the right series of decisions by a few unexpectedly influential people – or what may have happened if they had made them differently.

Let’s say, for example, yer man in Russia who held his nerve when their ballistic early warning system glitched out and suddenly started showing multiple incoming bogeys, refusing to turn his activation key because he couldn’t believe a state even as heavy on the rhetoric as the USA would dare act with the necessary belligerence to launch a first strike without any warning, build up, or other more minor action… for which he was proven right.

He has one more cup of coffee that morning, or had a fight with his wife the night before, or simply has a minor car accident on the way to work that means his post is filled by an upstart young lieutenant keen to get in his superiors’ good books. The key is turned. As a result, we get The Day After, and Threads… the kind of thing that made people shit themselves at the time and has since been held up as truly classic. The kind of thing that, despite far more low key, intimate and low budget, makes the Skynet attack in Terminator 2 seem relatively harmless and cartoonish.