What Hideo Kojima Taught Us About Technology and Human Freedom
Pioneering video game developer Hideo Kojima has lost authority and autonomy within his longtime parent institution Konami games. Everywhere, the Internet is abuzz over Konami’s treatment of Kojima and the future of his pioneering Metal Gear Solid game series. While fans are right to decry the shafting of a beloved auteur, it would be a shame if Konami’s institutional politics overshadows the sheer magnitude of Kojima’s intellectual contribution not only to video games and digital art, but also to the debate over algorithms and human freedom. The message of Kojima’s work is (in part) that it matters whether technology gives us the space to evolve, grow, and express our own individuality or whether it acts as a mechanism of control, communication, and self-regulation. And the Metal Gear Solid series is one of the most sublime and deep-ranging critiques of technology ever seen in modern art. Will technology give us the space for us to grow and live out our own potential or will it control and cap that potential? That is the ultimate — and difficult — question.
First, it should be acknowledged upfront that a complex digital text like Metal Gear Solid does not have any one clear meaning. My friend Brett Fujioka, for example, has written a fascinating analysis of how Kojima’s game series is actually a conversation about Japanese philosophy, art, and fan culture. But, as many have noted, Kojima is also speaking about things like evolution, information, control, memes, and the experience of reality that are timeless aspects of the technological conversation. All of this may seem a bit much given that the game series concerns a spy/commando named Solid Snake that sneaks around in a cardboard box and shoots bad guys with ridiculous names like Decoy Octopus. But hear me out.
Philosopher of technology Evan Selinger recently argued that the rise of more efficient methods of simulating and replicating pedestrian walking and actuation is a harbinger of a “dystopian future.” This is not a new claim. In the 1950s, the father of cybernetics himself Norbert Wiener was torn between the advantages of automation and control and the prospect of dehumanization and a loss of human autonomy and authority. Indeed, the prospect of autonomous technology as a backbone to human authority and understanding might very well eliminate human autonomy. How can we answer this question, or prevent such a dystopian future? Technology, as an interface between larger social and political designs design and the physical laws that govern how artifacts work, has a Janus face. From one angle it may be read as a declaration of independence from larger institutions and systems that control us, and such a spirit motivated the Californian hippies-with-computers counterculture of early Silicon Valley. On the other, it might also be plausibly regarded as yet another manifestation of those control structures embodied in computer code. Which is it?
The difficulty of this topic lies in dual perceptions of how complex technological systems work. Are technologies, as early cybernetics theorists imagined, mechanisms for self-regulation of a system by use of feedback from an environment? Or are they, as complex adaptive systems theorists argued, living and evolving systems tending to higher states of order, creativity, and adaptation instead of just purely regulation and control?
A thermostat, for example, maintains a desired temperature state even as the environment around it changes. It is purely a control program, taking in feedback from the environment only so that it can maintain a preset state. However, as noted by foundational work in complex systems science, living organisms are engaged in a constant dialogue with the environment. They use the environment for feedback and control, but also change and adapt over time based on their interaction with external objects. This dichotomy is especially relevant given that humans have used technology since our very beginnings to augment our cognition — we use the machines to implement the changes and actions in the environment necessary for our instrumental goals, but machines also change us in the process.
Kojima’s games do not answer the question of whether our machines allow for creative autonomy, growth, and novelty or whether they attempt to regulate and control us, but they are one of the most eloquent explorations of the topic. The world of Metal Gear Solid is one governed by the encroachment of technology. “War has changed,” an aged Solid Snake ruefully observes. “It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicities…..war, and its consumption of human life has become an well-oiled machine.” Snake laments a world of soldiers with “ID-tagged weapons, ID-tagged gear,” and in which machines control and regulate everything from physiology to command and control of augmented humans and lethal autonomous weapons platforms. The eroding distinction between the two may be seen in Metal Gear Solid 4’s biomechanical Gekko systems. Gekkos are robots, but have artificial muscles grown specifically to give them naturalistic movement and dynamic control.
The world of the Metal Gear Games is ultimately bleak for humanity as we traditionally understand it. In keeping with descriptions of the Cold War as competition with a “closed system” of rigid alliance and political systems undergirded by a similarly rigid cybernetic backbone that merged conceptions of man and machine, Kojima’s sprawling game saga chronicles — from World War II to the War on Terror, the struggle between subcomponents of an Illuminati-like group of power players known as the Philosophers. Once the Philosophers were an enlightened group of intellectuals, scientists, businessmen, and politicians that sought to rescue humanity from the horrors of war and worked in the shadows of World War I’s devastation. With the Cold War, they split into dueling factions and sub-factions, with the American bloc being a small group of special operatives and scientists known as The Patriots.
Over time, the former MI6 operative and Patriot codenamed Zero became disenchanted with humanity. He grew disenchanted with the chaos, disorder, triviality, and lack of meaning that he perceived in both warfare and human life, and came to believe that a world governed by control, regulation, and rules was the only way to rescue humanity from itself. Zero’s Patriots soon became a machine that controlled and regulated American politics, culture, and society from behind the scenes. Fearing that this control would fade after his own demise, Zero decided to embody his will in a computational system. In a grotesque variant of the real-life attempt by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a knowledge-based command and control system for America’s military, Zero constructed a distributed network of expert system AIs (named after American presidents such as George Washington). This network became the guiding control mechanism behind the Patriots. Human tyranny and control became artificially intelligent.
It is important to recognize, however, that the control of the Patriots went beyond merely just machines that secretly called the shots. The Philosophers and the Patriots had always both operated schools and systems for training elite operatives to carry out their will. In the game’s fictionalized version of the 1960s and 70s segments of the Cold War, these operatives became uncontrollable and rebellious, raising a problem for the continued usage of elite special soldiers in war. The prospect of genetically modifying and cloning elite operatives suggested the potential for greater control, but this hope was dashed by yet more soldier rebellions despite modifications and petri dish births.
The Patriots’ control over both the society they wanted and its soldiers still remained frustratingly elusive. The Patriots could neither completely control humans and they could control large social and political systems, because there was inherently some room for originality and novelty implicit in both complex biological and social systems.
The Patriots responded by effectively joining the two control mechanisms (information and biology) together. They needed a means to both manipulate larger political and social systems and individuals at the same time. The Patriots successfully executed an experiment in which they utilized a combination of their geopolitical influence and increasingly fine-grained control over machines and programs placed within unwitting individuals to see if they could completely both simulate and replicate a complex geopolitical event that had occurred years earlier. Cybernetics had always blurred the distinction between simulacra — copies of humans and machines that always ended up being dramatically distinct from their supposed originals — and simulation imitations of the real. With their successful experiment, the Patriots had erased that distinction entirely.
As Kojima’s conclusion to the game saga Metal Gear Solid 4 notes, the implication of the merging of biological and informational understandings of life was precisely monstrosities such as the Gekko system or the control of human soldiers like puppets and marionettes. His depiction of soldiers suddenly being controlled by an external force mirrors Selinger’s sense of horror over the prospect of being able to simulate and replicate the biomechanics of walking and actuation. But that isn’t the lesson of the game series.
The Patriots viewed human culture from the framework of “memes” — a popular conception of culture as a virus that replicates itself in biological human hosts. There was no obvious way for good memes to win out over bad memes. Like the notional totalitarians that philosopher Karl Popper chronicled, the Patriots’ response was to forego the dynamic, messy, and complex evolutionary interchangeable of memes for a rigid and controlled process. Humans could be not be trusted to rule themselves if they were so susceptible to influence via meme. Experimental evidence in social network experiments suggests that we may be simply helpless in reacting to information stimulus; within the network we may all just be as controllable and “nudge”-able as the Patriots’ unwitting victims.
But, as various characters in Kojima’s Metal Gear Games often argue in eloquent monologues, human freedom is more than that. Snake tells a dispirited comrade at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 that “[l]ife isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA.” Snake, an artificial soldier, has a short lifespan. But he emotionally argues that he, though unable to have physical children, will nonetheless have a legacy on the Earth: “[t]hrough speech, music, literature and movies… what we’ve seen, heard, felt…anger, joy and sorrow…these are the things I will pass on.” In fighting the Patriots and their memetic control, he seeks to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. …..[w]e have all the magic of the digital age to do that with.”
This speech is especially poignant coming from Snake, a man whose very biology was genetically engineered, modified, and manipulated by the Patriots. Snake is more than just a tool or a pre-programmed cybernetic mechanism. He is someone that seeks to create something new, novel, and act according to his free will. Snake lives despite his short lifespan because he experiences the world, is changed by it, and can change the world. Snake’s — and Kojima’s — view of our world is one of life as autopoesis, creative and emergent self-regulation, innovation, and novelty in the world.
What Kojima tells us in Metal Gear is that we can be more than our machines, no matter who or what we are. But those machines (and the social systems that order them) must not be the product of rational, rigid, and top-down control. They must be living systems that allow for growth, evolution, and creativity in an ever-changing world. Yes, it will be messy. No, it won’t be perfect. But it is not fearmongering to note that the alternatives are dystopia and the end of human freedom as we understand it. That’s some deep stuff for your Playstation, but anyone that cares about the future of humanity should boot up Kojima’s games and — as Kojima himself would have intended — judge his message for themselves.
