Outside Your Heaven

Metal Gear Solid 2 Is Not About The Internet

Posted: 30 Apr 2018 09:09 PM PDT

In the age of Trump, the infamous cult classic video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty seems to be getting a critical reappraisal. Released in 2001, mere months after 9/11 and the same week the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, MGS2 was kind of an accidental anti-establishment firebomb. Conceived at the end of the 90s, the game takes the left-wing conspiracy vibe of the The Matrix, The X-Files, and Oliver Stone's JFK and drops it squarely into the plot of a right-wing Tom Clancy-style thriller. The results are bonkers. It's basically a spy vs. terrorist story where the "twist" is that the American experiment is a lie, that U.S. democracy is a carefully orchestrated sham, and that in the end you are a tool of an unseen oligarchy who controls everything you do. It starts like Mission Impossible and ends like 1984, except your torturer is an artificial intelligence bot named "George Washington" who lectures you on American supremacy until you cry yourself through the closing credits.

At least that's what it always felt like to me. According to most of the recent articles I've read, it's about the "post-truth" Internet. I know where this comes from. There is a lot of stuff in the game about how proliferation of unregulated online content has pushed culture to further and further extremes, into warring camps of tribalism where any common sense of truth is lost. The game takes place in 2009, the "future" from the perspective of when it was written in the late 90s. A lot of this stuff went over the head of American audiences at the time, but given the culture wars spawned by Reddit and Twitter these observations now feel spot on. Of course MGS2 is a Japanese game, and Japan was a bit ahead of the West in the evolution of social media, so in a way these "predictions" are just a byproduct of that.

MGS2 remains a very weird piece of politically-charged sci-fi. The stuff in it about the post-truth Internet has Japan-specific cultural origins that are projected onto an American context, specifically the context of a jingoistic Hollywood action thriller set in a speculative near-future. Brett Fujioka has written some good stuff on how Japanese cultural specificity influenced MGS2's storyline, but this context is absent from most of the critical reappraisals I've read. Instead most people seem focused on the game's convoluted views on A.I., social media, and whatever other speculative sci-fi noise game auteur Hideo Kojima fills his Ghost in the Shell-lite world with.

It's amazing to me that, even today, in a world that looks an awful lot like the dystopian one MGS2 was projecting, critics who laud the game seem mired in its finer points about tech and nerd culture, rather than its larger points about mythology, oligarchy, and propaganda. Focusing on how it portrays the dangers of social media seem especially misguided, since those "dangers" in the context of MGS2's totalitarian narrative are the excuse the government gives as to why citizens should not be allowed to govern themselves. It's not a critique made by the game. It's a critique made by the fascist government in the game to justify their fascism.

MGS2, in a way, isn't really predicting Trump's America at all. Rather, Trump's America is what the fascist oligarchy of MGS2 is trying to save us from, or rather save themselves from. MGS2 is about the old power structures of American democracy, the ones that exist above the law and behind closed doors, trying to figure out a way to maintain their power in an era where information has become terrifyingly free. It's an attempt by the elite to keep democracy out of the hands of The People. Because if let run rampant, their power might erode. Anything could happen. A clown could even be elected President.

The critique of MGS2 feels modern because it involves the Internet, and what it says about the Internet feels eerily correct for having come out before social media. But this is a detail in a larger picture. It's not about What The Internet Does To Us. It's about how power functions the same as it always has, regardless of new technology. Power rises to the challenge of new information technologies by trying to master them before The People can, because if we master them first it will be their end.

The reason MGS2 is bleak is because it's about the oligarchy succeeding at this -- they successfully master it before we know what's happening. They do it by getting young technologists to work for them, to find new ways to employ old myths, the same myths that always keep us in line. In a way its a modern update of Edward Bernays, the guy who literally wrote the book -- it's an actual book -- on how to keep the public in line via propaganda. The oligarchy in MGS2 is trying to figure out how to update Bernays for the Internet, social media, and video games.

You can look at Trump as kind of a sloppy version of this. The way the Trump presidency has activated white supremacy and other toxic American mythologies and fed off their power is Society Manipulation 101. But the more subtle, organized, and "old power" version of it -- represented by the Neoconservatives coming out of the Cold War -- is much closer to what MGS2 is actually portraying. Coming from the school of political theorist Leo Strauss, who literally taught exploitation of mythology as a large scale tactic for society control, the Neocons were very close to the theory-driven, calculating, decades-old oligarchy of MGS2.

Yes, I know Kojima and his co-writer Tomokazu Fukushima were not really intending to say anything about the Neocons, the Republican Party, etc. However, they were so dialed in to the foundational myths of American society via consuming pop-culture that when they spit it back out as this goofy Japanese game they captured something, an abstraction of American politics, that -- even with all its weird, wrong details -- felt true to me in its critique of American power and the broad cultural currents that shape it. I see the game as essentially in the tradition of, in video games, the outsider critiques of American culture from directors like Paul Verhoeven for Sergio Leone in film.

Whatever flaws it may have, however the years haven't been kind to it, MGS2 still deserves credit for being a kind of magical I-can't-believe-this-exists cultural artifact. Because it was a Japanese team working in an American genre, and because it was written before 9/11 but came out right afterwards, it was able to combine ideas that are virtually never combined in such a subversive configuration in popular big-budget entertainment. In the immediate wake of 9/11 it presented national unity, cultural hegemony, savior myths, and the worship of military might as rotten, corrupt, totalitarian concepts. It took the American Left another 5 to 10 years before it could begin to say these things, and even only then with caution. MGS2 was brazen about American imperialism when Iraq was just a twinkle in Dick Cheney's eye.

It's still a mantle no one working at that budget level dares pick up.

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