I think the crazy year that is 2017 is very comparable to what The Patriots AI was discussing with Raiden in the final 140.85 codec call of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

Inbetween under water swimming segments, Emma Emmerich described Arsenal Gear's purpose as The Patriots censoring the internet for fear of their lack of control; the mass information that flows freely across the internet was supposedly making them irrelevant & powerless. An immediate real life comparison was drawn to MGS2 during the 2012 Protests against SOPA and PIPA incident, which saw the internet rise against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) acts. Even Giant Bomb involved themselves in the protest albeit it in a more comedic fashion when they became the replacement for Wikipedia for a day.

But at the end of the game as The Patriots contact Raiden, they explain it in a different light, one few understood 16 years ago when the game was released. Indeed, many people criticized MGS2's final hours as a big confusing load of mumbo jumbo; nonsensical garbage that was a far cry from the big action hero film style that playing as Solid Snake was in MGS1. And that doesn't even include the too many cutscenes argument which took centre stage of complaints about MGS games prior to MGSV's release. Only years after did people truly disect MGS2 and start referring to it as a post-modern video game.

The AI explains the thought process for Selection for Societal Sanity, the idea that humans on the internet are too immature to 1) discern what useful information is based on its intellectual and factual value and 2) only pass on information when it meets up with their confirmation bias.

And... well, 99.99% of us are very much guilty of both a great majority of the time. Whether arguments in comment sections or Twitter ranges from religion, political affilations and morality squabbles to the celebration of celebrity culture etc. The S3 plan is very much the most extreme version of the idea of "creating context," and I like to think, I hope, that such a system wouldn't be needed. But I will be the first to admit when I see some of the stupid shit that goes on online, it would be nice for people to think, just think, and maybe try to better themselves?

Or to quote Senator Steven Armstrong of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance fame, "fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit!"

As I've been on a big cyber-punk binge recently, I find myself watching some videos that discuss these points, whether it be clips from Blade Runner, which I watched this past weekend to get ready for the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, and if anyone has thoughts about the S3 plan itself.

So allow me to present 3 videos to finish this blog, with the hope that by posting the first two videos, I'm "creating context" for the third.

This has been food for though for me a lot in the past couple of weeks, is the S3 plan needed today? Do we live in a post-truth society? Is Hideo Kojima Nostradamus? Why did Konami have to be a bunch of asshats and force Kojima out? Will Death Stranding shock everyone to the point of blowing the MGS brand of craziness out of the water?

Video games! That can be stupid and amazing and I love them so.

PS. If you've never seen Blade Runner and The Matrix before, you should get on that post-haste.