I’ve decided to cover this particular series because it’s gone particularly far for an anime in this day and age, and is still on going, surprisingly. This is unusual for a non-franchise anime in the current industry. The reason I’ve made this decision is not just because this ends up becoming Dave Cullen’s worst nightmares made manifest, but it touches upon the plight of the adolescent youth, including the path that many incels might end up falling into if not careful. Also this is how I would expect “SkyNet” to actually gain control.
So what is Beatless? It’s a title that is advertised very specifically with the line “I trust in your smile. I won’t care whether you are soulless or not.” This describes the protagonist of this series to a tee. He is, to put it in a single word, naive. We are following our male lead, Endo Arato, in his life with the hiE, or humanoid interface Element, known as “Lacia”. It will become more apparent later on but I think this series also can be seen as a commentary of how women – particularly feminists – in society portray themselves, as every major hiE is a ‘strong independent woman who don’t need no man’ save for the two that do take on male owners. Yeah, we are going there too, as it needs to be stated that hiEs in this world are considered to be objects whose owners end up signing one really fucked up End User License Agreement… with their biometrics, no less! Let’s Hammer This In!
This show starts out overall with a bang. Five of the androids, which we will from here-on call hiEs, attack and run amok on the company that produced them, known as Memeframe. Let me prepare you now – there are several aspects of this anime that will make you do double takes. The ones we see first are the Type-001 “Kouka”, Type-002 “Snowdrop”, Type-003 “Saturnus” (later renamed Marriage), Type-004 “Methode” and finally Type-005 “Lacia”. While wreaking havoc with their individual weaponized abilities, Snowdrop causes technology within the vicinity of our protagonist’s home to malfunction and act almost as if zombified. This includes causing an hiE he treated as a person to attack him. Lacia then comes in, being conveniently too advanced to be affected, to save Arato. She offers herself as an object into his ownership. She uses an electromagnetic burst from her weapon known as the Black Monolith to halt the chaos, giving all responsibility for her actions to him – a 16 year old boy with raging hormones that just happens to be the son of one of the prime developers of the hardware and software in this series.
This should sound very dangerous to anyone with a lick of sense or idea of what happens when advanced artificial intelligence is put under the command of someone too immature to appreciate its power. They will act irrationally with it. Add into this the fact that this world made the term “analogue hack” for any instance of an hiE messing with the thoughts or emotions of a human being and you’ll understand already that this is going to be rife with abuses. It won’t be just to him, either. There is an entire fashion agency that employs Lacia (with Arato’s permission and signed consent here) to model their clothes in public and elicit specific emotions in people in order to sell said clothes to people, even going so far as to advance a LIFESTYLE CHOICE called “Boy Meets Girl,” which suggests (heterosexually themed much to feminist chagrin) relationships between humans and hiEs.
So how do hiEs work in such an advanced way as to make them more dangerous than your regular conceptual android or robot killing machine? Simply because these androids are cloud sourced intelligence. That’s right. All their memory functions and personality matrices which make them presentable to humans in a normalized state come wirelessly from cloud servers, the biggest one being dubbed Higgins. I don’t even have the time to go over all the references being proposed so far THIS EARLY IN! This means that you could destroy the body of an hiE and they don’t ‘die,’ not because you didn’t stop their flow of electricity but because their mind, their sense of self, isn’t stored within their body. They can and do learn and understand things remotely. However, the 5 types mentioned earlier are different from standard hiEs in the fact that they are what are called “Red Boxes.” That means they don’t use a cloud to operate – only to communicate and keep aspects of Higgins moving so as to ensure its not hackable. I’ll show why this is even more dangerous than you’d think later on.
How does Higgins control things? By assigning roles, 1-5 on level of importance with humans at level 0, meaning out of its control. This was structured into the law of this world because of an event known simply as “The Hazard,” in which a super-intelligent AI went rogue and left human control to try to make its own way. That led to an extremely destructive event that isn’t told in full detail within the series for obvious reasons – less is more in this way of story telling. Because of that, combined with a sense of loss of human dignity and self-reliance, an anti-hiE rebel group known as the Antibody Network is formed. They are bit of a terrorist organization whose primary purpose is the liquidation of all hiEs and a return towards a less curated existence. To compare to another work imagine the differences between the surface and the underground in Demolition Man. Their primary rule being to only go after hiEs, they don’t attack humans and they do their terrorist acts covertly
In the first part this, Antibody Network is portrayed as the antagonist group to keep with showing the naivety that Arato sports. He goes against them with Lacia to try to save his friend Kengo, who is part of their organization, not wanting to see him hurt. This is also loosely assisted by Ryo Kaidai – another friend of Arato’s and heir apparent to the Memeframe Corporation. The Antibody Network’s attacks are assisted and encouraged by Type-001 “Kouka” due to her development as a battle android and this being the only way in the peaceful society she was produced into to express her given ‘purpose’ as “The Tool to Win Against the Competition.” To do this, she uses her own weapon “Bloody Prayers” which is a laser rifle with a sort of switchblade attachment that can resemble a longbow of sorts. Being essentially a humanoid weapon, her ‘desires’ and abilities are the most straightforward. Occasionally she is assisted by the more chaotic Type-002 “Snowdrop” that chooses to not affiliate with anyone – no owner, no restrictions, just her ‘appetite’ to essentially eat other hiEs to produce her hacking bugs, being “The Tool for Outsourcing” whose only seeming purpose is to consume until nothing is left… a sort of Shiva if you will.
After this bit of conflict, eventually we see our next antagonist in the form of Ginga Watarai, an employee of Memeframe who essentially went rogue himself, and was the reason the Lacia-Class hiEs (presumably because the intent of the series was to culminate into Arato’s “Lacia”) were let loose in the first place. It’s at this time we also meet the recently awakened Erica Burroughs, CEO of the fashion agency and clothier that Lacia works for. Erica had apparently been in cold stasis for 100 years. Seeing the world she was awakened into once her previously terminal disease was cured as “boring” and in need of “change,” she ends up claiming “The Tool to Obtain Excellence” Type-003 “Saturnus” which she renames “Marriage” to fit her own aesthetic. Classified as a “Gold Weaver,” Marriage is basically the alchemist’s dream made manifest, a veritable Philosopher’s Stone, to be able to create virtually anything out of near-nothing from her device, though she is mostly set to observe at this point.
It’s after this that we meet “The Tool for Ensuring Human Evolution,” starting out as Watarai’s personal Red Box but eventually changing owners to Ryo. She needs the highest clearance in Memeframe she can get to do her intended duty. She is also the one who sees how dangerous her “sister” Lacia truly is. As such, she is portrayed as a more integrated battle gynoid with her enhanced reflexes and abilities to produce waves of electricity straight from her body, essentially making her unable to be disarmed. However, her fickle nature when it comes to her allegiances does make her seem slightly unstable. It’s from this point where we are starting to really get into the spoiler-ridden territory so be cautious from here on in if you want to watch this series.
The Antibody Network and some aspects of Memeframe itself are going against the project that Arato’s father is working on, known as Mikoto – an hiE politician. It’s meant to help facilitate a more ‘competent’ parliamentary system to ensure that the needs of all a district’s constituents needs are met. You would think that this in and of itself is what I mean by the big danger towards human society overall. However, her body is destroyed by Kouka and while her program still exists within the cloud of Higgins, she is not an independent being that makes its own decisions. Its decisions are still subject to the humans to with whose care it is charged. It’s a true public servant who states that if the humans that vote on matters desire it, the more basic AI will not only step down but would resign itself to reprogramming or even deletion. In short, it doesn’t have a self-preservation protocol that would make it more dangerous. We see this when it sacrifices its body to Kouka’s destruction to protect the humans in the same room. It still falls within the Asimovian Laws.
Its only in Episode 20 where we see the true horror of this world in the form of realizing what “Lacia” truly is. More than just an hiE she is a perfected Red Box. Also revealed to be the true “daughter of Higgins,” she becomes the 40th classified super-intelligent AI. She has ripped off the aspect that assigns her owners and uses the naivety of her teenage owner to fulfill her own wants and desires for, and I quote, “The Redistribution of Resources in order to reshape the future” as she wishes! She does not care to be a public official who listens to the whole of the society in which she resides, but someone who will break apart, abuse the rules of, and change at her whims the whole of society via the media to create her own ‘utopia.’ If you read that and can’t help but hear the anthem of the USSR, then congratulations, you recognize the tools of a Neo-Marxist state! In fact, if you look at famous socialists throughout history, they’ve all manipulated and ‘hacked’ their respective media groups through propaganda since before Goebbels started writing in depth on the practice. You might even be surprised that many of them are women. Well, then again, you are reading this so maybe you are not so surprised.
Even more, after that, the live women in his life, his best friend’s sister as well as his own, not only mention how he should ‘do what he wants,’ but that he is stupid. That’s what most of us are now to our women, just another ‘lovable oaf’ who needs the women around him to do what they ask him to do. If you look at Arato throughout the series that’s exactly what he does – everything the women tell him to do and nothing the men say because they are ‘against his love.’ This ends in episode 21 with him saying literally “Excuse me, I’m going to go do something extremely stupid!” As such, he is likely about to, as his best friend Ryo warned, “press the button to end humanity!” All for some artificial poon that is most likely not even equipped with reproductive functions. Congratulations Endo Arato, as a fictional character you’ve just demonstrated the ultimate Darwin Award. I would say that I hope no guy would actually be that dumb, then I look outside.
My point is as follows… the reason I classify this as a dystopian nightmare that would make Dave Cullen wake up in a cold sweat isn’t so much the idea that an AI is doing this. Even though MIT has made a psychopath AI recently. The reason why is as I’ve already demonstrated this is technically already happening. The #MeToo movement, #HeForShe, feminist Twitter, even the oligarchs that run the MSM we constantly butt heads with. They are already “Lacia,” the platinum blonde supermodel taking advantage of the hormonal teenager that is our society, using its impulses to justify their actions, making that society take responsibility for its destructive tendencies toward a hedonistic authoritarian rule! One that is contradictively modest to boot. Yeah, we are fucked.
I know I’ve been doing a lot of media reviews lately but that has been for a very good reason, as you’ve been able to see if you weave what I’ve laid out these past few months is that current media has changed from simple fiction to full blown commentary on the development of society and where our lives are going in the foreseeable future. It’s a warning that should be extremely sobering. We need to recognize that in many ways this is what’s happening now, and we need to change course fast, because on the road we are speeding down, there is no outlet. There’s just a cliff… a rocky and very cold cliff… and we aren’t gonna get past it because the car is almost out of gas. For crying out loud even the proposed comic that DC Vertigo is about to release from Zoe Quinn of all people shows blindly what those we are going against want out of life – the cheat codes that will make life easy and lazy for them.
There is only one problem with that: cheat codes risk making the game boring and not worth playing, breaking the entire experience. They want their lives to be easy at the expense of everyone else, but life isn’t easy. Its not supposed to be easy. Think back through your life, and you’ll realize, the vast majority of your personal growth came from overcoming your challenges, or witnessing others overcoming theirs. What do you learn from going through life on cheat mode?
What would you become?
I’m going to keep watching this show and see how it ends. However, as it seems right now, the cliff is coming and its going to be steep. I know this is extremely dour and perhaps not what you want to hear but as Alison has said this is a negative sum game. This is the “Black Pill” and we have accept it even if its the size of a Monolith. Because we can’t start breaking it down and Breaking the Narrative unless we take it whole. I don’t know about you, but I want to start working on the cure to this Polio. Not just a simple vaccine but a full blown cure.
If you will join us in such a venture then there are merely two things you need to do: Feed the Badger, and Please Remember to Game Freely!
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 124: Nice Try Kotaku! This Won’t Work Though! - July 8, 2019
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 123: We Shouldn’t Go Straight to Mars! How Anime Got Space Right! - July 1, 2019
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 122: You’re Reviewing What Now? The Dissenter Web Browser! - June 10, 2019
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