This article was deleted from Wikipedia in 2017. There is some deep irony in that fact considering that GiTS has numerous instances of memories being erased or modified.
Archive.org modifies the memories it stores. But I don't find much irony in the article being deleted. It seems more appropriate as part of a larger article on Ghost in the Shell. It's an aspect of an imaginary world not something that stands alone in the context of general shared experience. An accurate understanding requires boiling all the oceans of Ghost in the Shell. As a standalone, it's more like an academic paper.
Incidentally, to the degree there's irony here, archive.org's modification of the content seems more relevant than it's deletion. Forgotten isn't wrong, it's just forgotten.
I find the fact that Wikipedia deletes content to be almost offensive, especially when there are so many 'stubs' and other one-paragraph articles all over the site. It's supposed to be a free encyclopedia that catalogs the world's information.
If there is a serious issue with an article, then fine, quarantine it or somehow set it aside. But to remove a well-written, well-cited and interesting article for dubious reasons really seems unnecessary. Maybe if they had incorporated it into the regular article on GiTS, it would make sense. But there is zero mention of the philosophical content:
Wikipedia has changed a lot. Even back in the mid-2000s, I remember trying to edit a page to deal with a "written like an advertisement" banner; did a lot of work .. and in a few months it was back to its crappy advert style. I've heard there is more editing control today to prevent things like that from happening, but it also is discouraging for anyone trying to edit a page.
There have been a lot of articles deleted over the years. There was a great porn purge where they removed a ton of porn stars and history of pornography unless topics were considered noteworthy. The linked article probably didn't have enough sources or too much original research.
Honestly, the first thing you should look at with any current or controversial article is the Talk Page .. and the history on the talk page. It's often way more useful and has current theories that may not have the best sources.
There is also Deletionpedia, but honestly archive.org is probably a better bet for deleted articles. Deletionpedia didn't really get started until a lot of stuff had been purged, and it still has a lot of gaps.
Wikipedia had a 180 degree change in its stance on works of fiction in the last decade.
Character pages were deleted in bulk even when they were properly sourced, individual episodes pages were all merged together.
Administrators and moderators are pushing all this stuff to Wikia/Fandom, the sister project that is riddled with advertisement, user tracking and bad design.
I was shocked to learn that wikipedia deletes its history in some cases. I always told students to quote the history items when quoting wikipedia believing they are archived. It stresses the importance of the internet archive for any scientific work.
"...if the right kind of people begin to believe it was arson, caused by deliberate action, the threat that more arsons will be committed increases drastically.
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."
"...A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar, the result being that the potential increases exponentially for copycat behavior that forms a Standalone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is indefinitive."
this runs contrary to the mcluhan-inspired idea that has gained popularity recently — that media fracturing and echo chamber effects are shredding our shared identities and political control structures. i find this idea more convincing; we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
Yeah I think the AI's monologue from Metal Gear Solid 2 (basically an anime) cut closer to our present reality:
> "[...] You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." [...]
The full version is something like 20 minutes long, but basically the AI argues that digital communication leads to the decentralization of 'truth' and that the solution is employ narrative shaping algorithms against the general public.
I wouldn't say it runs contrary, but that it's evolved second-order thinking. While the media raves about echo chambers, incels and religious terrorism few focus on emergent hive minds.
GITS is an absolutely brilliant ode to emergence and second order effects.
I don't think it's contrary at all, but rather complementary. The quoted lines don't say that all of society becomes one, it says larger groups of people are exposed to the same information and thus makes their behavior similar. These groups of people are the bubbles and echo chambers that become blocs of people with similar behavior and ideas. You yourself show how the two ides work together:
>we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
These days known as "stochastic terrorism". Mass murderers crop up with similar quotes in their manifestoes, often shared via the same websites, but when looked at from the traditional model of terrorist groups with "handlers" or "cells" there is no control relationship.
I still find it amazing how in 2002 — long before Facebook or YouTube existed — they got so much right about the emergent properties of social media (the Stand Alone Complex piece). It’s a brilliant metaphor that just so happened to predate it’s subject by a decade.
The anime has some problems; namely pacing and the density of narrative. There are two episodes dedicated exclusively to exposition with no action, and they can be really hard to follow due to the mediocre translation. But if you can see past the very real flaws, there is a gem of a story about the nature of what it means to be human in a connected society.
I had trouble getting into the series and was wondering if it was just me, but this makes me want to go back and try Stand Alone Complex again. I really did enjoy the movie. It had really good world building.
Yeah, the world building is awesome. It's really the reason to stick with the show through its rough spots.
The show is divided into 2 types of episodes; about half are one-shot episodes that are only loosely referenced by the main story arc (but they usually explore an interesting theme). If you watch the episodes in the order they were released it can be hard to follow the overall plot.
(In my understanding, this is related to the name: the one-shot episodes are "stand alone", and the main story arc ones are "complex". Of course, the name has other meanings as well, more directly relevant to the story and explained in the article, but I always found it neat.)
I recommend watching the original Japanese dubbed version with English subtitles. At that time translation was rough in most anime but this has since then improved.
(For German readers I recommend the German sub, the used the same people who dubbed the Stargate series which did a really good job in both cases.)
Unless SAC is one of those incredibly rare pieces of Japanese animation where the voices were recorded prior to the animation being completed, the Japanese voiced version is just as much a dub as the English version.
The voices may not have been recorded, but the script is almost certainly better in Japanese. The English dub is a static script, but the fan-created subtitles are usually a much better translation than the official ones from that era.
It is a tough series to get into, and I won't apologize for a lot of it's pacing issues. All incarnations of Ghost In The Shell have prioritized communicating ideas about future society, which often comes at the cost of narrative cohesion. Stand Alone Complex and the Manga are, I think, the best entries in the franchise, but even those subject the audience to big exposition dumps.
But for my money, I think GitS has been one of the most prescient pieces of futurology. It's depiction of the impact of omnipresent telecommunications and technology on society is eerie.
FWIW there's a Stand Alone Complex movie, which is basically just the central plot of the series, with the side-stories edited out. I love the side-stories, but the movie is definitely easier to watch :)
>The anime has some problems; namely pacing and the density of narrative.
I wouldn't call those problems, in that those are the hallmarks of the entire Ghost in the Shell franchise: relatively slow pacing, extreme density of information/concepts, and lots of exposition. If you're getting into a GitS work either you accept those and enjoy it or you don't and have a bad time. It's like saying Naruto has too much fighting.
Otherwise, I completely agree about Stand Alone Complex, and to me Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG was even better. It's astonishingly prescient, it seemed to absolutely nail how the 2016 election would go down to having a Steve Bannon figure who uses manipulates the media and intelligence information to achieve his goals.
The pacing issues IMO are more how the story moves along at a glacial pace, then 75% through infodumps on you and expects you to follow along through a half dozen futurist topics mashed together at the end. The exposition episodes would be fine if they were better translated.
I still think the show is worth watching despite those issues. It's easily my favorite anime series (also agree that 2nd Gig is the better half of the show; they're only separated because of how anime was funded in blocks of 26 episodes in the early 2000s).
SAC, particularly the Laughing Man arc, was very prescient. Especially when it came to light that certain pharma companies were intentionally increasing pharmaceutical prices.
If you only watched the rather recent movie: know that they spun the story around 180°.
The original is more of a love letter to technology [SPOILER] and ends with the first merge of human and AI in to something new [/SPOILER] (it's not about technophobic humans policing the bad runaway machines).
American live action Death Note was the same: I was hopeful since they cast Willem Dafoe and he's usually in good stuff, but no, it was also pretty bad. It seems like American film companies are just trying to capitalize on the popularity of anime without grokking what made the best anime great.
Do you think they really don't grok it, or (as seems most likely to me) do those in control just not care about anything other than the monetary return?
Well, obviously they only care about monetary return, but generally not alienating fans of the source material and not making terrible content are much better ways to make money.
Both films mentioned were commercial successes, but I think in the long run they burned audiences for this sort of film. I won't see any more American remakes of anime for some time.
I actually saw Battle Angel Alita. I thought it was okay, but I hadn't seen the original source material to compare. Other commenters here are saying it was more loyal to the source material.
The other American live-action remakes mentioned were profitable, but by much more narrow margins. If what people are saying about it being truer to the source material is true, then it seems that producing better remakes does in fact produce greater profits. We only have a narrow data set to look at for this, though.
I really don't know what a live action Akira would look like. The body horror scenes are going to have to be CGI, which could go really badly.
I think the problem is too many of them only care about how the film looks. The story is incidental, cobbled together using a lit crit course story construction kit formula.
J. J. Abrams is the living embodiment of this approach, which is why his Star Trek and Star Wars movies look gorgeous and individual scenes are awe inspiring, and the overarching story arcs are all fantastic on paper, but the world building and and actual in-world logic of the setting or character decisions in it just don't make any sense whatsoever. Zack Snyder is just as bad.
Nailed it. This is why the most recent Star Trek movies don't count as actual Star Trek to me. We had the 'pretty' and 'explosiony' action sci-fi movies in the form of Star Wars. Star Trek was supposed to wrestle with just a little bit deeper themes.
But now they've devolved into beautiful looking action movies which exist just for the sake of action, with the story being secondary.
The major thing that I miss in NuTrek is the optimism. We have enough shows that are gritty, dark, and depressing. My favorite part of Star Trek was how is showed that optimism about the future is not naive.
Abrams approach to creating new content for existing universes seems to just remake a previous beloved movie from the canon except much worse than the original (Wrath of Khan > Into Darkness, Return of the Jedi > Rise of Skywalker).
The American Battle Angel was pretty damn good -- but it helps that they stayed faithful to the manga, only changing a few minor details. (Zalem is in South America rather than North, Alita is named for Ido's dead daughter rather than his cat.) I consider it a Hollywood take on a Japanese story -- done right.
The original Ghost in the Shell has been one of my favorite films since the first time I seen it. To be honest, there's no other anime I've seen that I actually enjoyed apart from the Cowboy Bebop movie. So I don't consider myself a anime fan. The original GITS is a brilliant film that is beyond a specific genre.
You might like the Patlabor series/movies, directed by GITS's director Mamoru Oshii. Particularly the first two movies, which have a more serious tone than the rest of it. And imho the animation and aesthetics of the first two Patlabor movies is right up there with GITS.
Honestly I wouldn’t recommend Patlabor to someone who only likes the GITS movie and Cowboy Bebop. It’s going to feel too slow and cheezy (in a way many anime fans including myself enjoy).
I’d probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.
I think the aesthetic/pacing/art of particularly the first two Patlabor movies would probably be appreciated by somebody who's a fan of the first GITS movie specifically. There is a common cyberpunk thread running through both those Patlabor movies and GITS. Patlabor 1 has a plot that easily could have been a GITS plot and spends a lot of time dwelling on the ways apparent progress leaves many people feeling abandoned and worthless.
The Patlabor TV show is definitely much lighter material, a lot more accessible to children.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely check them out. Maybe it's my age, but a lot of what I have seen like Deathnote or even the GITS SAC didn't click with me. Cowboy Bebop was just fun, and I forgot I was watching an anime.
I think maybe it's the high-concept, almost frightening, aspects of GITS that resonated with me. But I understand why it's not popular with most people.
There's also the Patlabor OVA series that came before the show and movies, and takes place in the same universe as the movies. I feel it's tone is in between the movies and TV show.
Patlabor is slow, sure, and purposefully so (it has and deserves the reputation as being the "boring" mecha show), but cheezy? I haven't seen the TV show which I hear is a lot more comic, but I wouldn't call the original OVA/first 2 movies cheezy.
Akira is not as iconoclastic in its philosophy as it was in its technical and artistic attributes at the time. It was also heavily influenced by and can be seen as a modern-day retelling/rewarning of the hiroshima/nagasaki incidents.
NGE can be philosophically heavy at times but is too diluted by its action sequences and fan service moments.
The first GITS movie is a philosophical tour de force and a piece of art that transcends time. A masterpiece.
Yeah, I'm definitely not trying to begrudge what other people like. Some people might not like a movie that is mostly cerebral. The art and action of GITS is almost secondary to the concept it's exploring. I've seen quite a lot of anime that looked fun and interesting, it just wasn't something I could get into.
It may also be that a lot of anime are series, and require a time investment.
It's less a retelling and more an expression of a culmination of factors in post-war Japan. Japanese media in that era really had a lot of fear about the post-war state, especially the loss of culture, baked in.
One of my favorite little nuances in the original GITS anime is a scene in the middle that immerses the viewer in the world. This video[0] goes into detail about this and how it relates to aspect-to-aspect transitions in comics.
Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.
The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.
looking at the video today on how its portrayal of Hong Kong's struggle with it's identity and existence is somewhat surreal because the Hong Kong protesters in gasmask gives me an eerie cyberpunk vibes
One of the strongest elements in that scene regarding the concept of 'identity' is completely missed by that video: Kusanagi briefly sees someone in an office building that looks exactly like her. It's a great nod to the book, which briefly explains that her face is made to look like a cheap factory-line model, belying the astronomically expensive military grade hardware she's made of.
Nothing better than having a bunch of people look exactly like you to make you believe in dualism, if only as a straw for your identity to hand on to.
In the Stand Alone Complex timeline, Kusanagi is literally several different people throughout the story. She assimilates memories from a few different sources (the tank in episode 2, the Laughing Man, and Kuze, Puppetmaster in the SAC:SSS movie). It's implied (and made explicit in other GitS timelines) that the only reason she is able to do this and maintain her sense of self is because she was "cyberized" as a young child and had to figure out the answer to the question "who is Motoko Kusanagi?" independently of her physical form.
She even has a line towards the end of the SAC:SSS movie that says something like "next time you meet me I might be a completely different person". But there is indeed a "base" personality that she tries to hold on to (e.g. via her watch) despite the wide range of memories she acquires.
He did mention at the beginning he could almost do an hour video just breaking down scene by scene. I think he kept on target even in the face of numerous enticing rabbit holes.
For those who are wondering why it's no longer on wikipedia: "Non-encyclopedic content; a personal essay, a hotchpotch of fan speculation and original research."
I think the GitS material is probably best treated as individual installments. The second movie was some sort of weird art film I struggled to watch. What I got out of the first one was that Kusanagi may or may not actually be a person. There may be one (or more) instances of Kusanagi in the world and the ambiguity the movie plays with is "Is she a person in a cybernetic body or is this a convenient lie to the AI inside the body?"
If we assume she's an AI - at what point does she become individual "enough" to be a defacto "person"? There's a lot of Asimov in this question. The puppetmaster adds a level of abstraction to this by not requiring a 1:1 mapping between a ghost and a body.
If we assume she's a person - do we count her as a human because she only briefly had a body of flesh and bone? What does this "internet in her head" do to affect her psyche and personal development?
I think my favorite part of Stand-Alone Complex by far (aside from how incredibly prescient much of it is) are the Tachikomas. I really love the idea that the first AGI we develop will necessarily have to pass through a pretty childlike level of understanding about the world while having some unsettling levels of intelligence and competence in some aspects. I love the episode where they're trying to hide the fact that they're developing individuality/sapience but are fairly inept at doing so.
Also, just the psychological warfare aspect of having a military tank with an adorable personality is great.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadThankfully, the Wayback Machine preserved it.
Incidentally, to the degree there's irony here, archive.org's modification of the content seems more relevant than it's deletion. Forgotten isn't wrong, it's just forgotten.
If there is a serious issue with an article, then fine, quarantine it or somehow set it aside. But to remove a well-written, well-cited and interesting article for dubious reasons really seems unnecessary. Maybe if they had incorporated it into the regular article on GiTS, it would make sense. But there is zero mention of the philosophical content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell
A similar article might stand if it had good citations for literally every phrase, but this article doesn't have that, it looks like original work.
Mildly irritating
There have been a lot of articles deleted over the years. There was a great porn purge where they removed a ton of porn stars and history of pornography unless topics were considered noteworthy. The linked article probably didn't have enough sources or too much original research.
Honestly, the first thing you should look at with any current or controversial article is the Talk Page .. and the history on the talk page. It's often way more useful and has current theories that may not have the best sources.
There is also Deletionpedia, but honestly archive.org is probably a better bet for deleted articles. Deletionpedia didn't really get started until a lot of stuff had been purged, and it still has a lot of gaps.
https://deletionpedia.org/en/Main_Page
Character pages were deleted in bulk even when they were properly sourced, individual episodes pages were all merged together.
Administrators and moderators are pushing all this stuff to Wikia/Fandom, the sister project that is riddled with advertisement, user tracking and bad design.
I wonder if the people removing articles on fictional works are moving it to Wikia by themselves.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120224113551id_/https://en.wik...
What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
"...A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar, the result being that the potential increases exponentially for copycat behavior that forms a Standalone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is indefinitive."
> "[...] You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." [...]
The full version is something like 20 minutes long, but basically the AI argues that digital communication leads to the decentralization of 'truth' and that the solution is employ narrative shaping algorithms against the general public.
GITS is an absolutely brilliant ode to emergence and second order effects.
>we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.
The anime has some problems; namely pacing and the density of narrative. There are two episodes dedicated exclusively to exposition with no action, and they can be really hard to follow due to the mediocre translation. But if you can see past the very real flaws, there is a gem of a story about the nature of what it means to be human in a connected society.
The show is divided into 2 types of episodes; about half are one-shot episodes that are only loosely referenced by the main story arc (but they usually explore an interesting theme). If you watch the episodes in the order they were released it can be hard to follow the overall plot.
(For German readers I recommend the German sub, the used the same people who dubbed the Stargate series which did a really good job in both cases.)
That being said the English dub is pretty good too.
Unless SAC is one of those incredibly rare pieces of Japanese animation where the voices were recorded prior to the animation being completed, the Japanese voiced version is just as much a dub as the English version.
>https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dub>dub verb (2)
>dubbed; dubbing
>Definition of dub
>(Entry 4 of 5)
>transitive verb
>1 : to add (sound effects or new dialogue) to a film or to a radio or television production —usually used with "in"
>// They dubbed in the music.
But for my money, I think GitS has been one of the most prescient pieces of futurology. It's depiction of the impact of omnipresent telecommunications and technology on society is eerie.
I wouldn't call those problems, in that those are the hallmarks of the entire Ghost in the Shell franchise: relatively slow pacing, extreme density of information/concepts, and lots of exposition. If you're getting into a GitS work either you accept those and enjoy it or you don't and have a bad time. It's like saying Naruto has too much fighting.
Otherwise, I completely agree about Stand Alone Complex, and to me Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG was even better. It's astonishingly prescient, it seemed to absolutely nail how the 2016 election would go down to having a Steve Bannon figure who uses manipulates the media and intelligence information to achieve his goals.
I still think the show is worth watching despite those issues. It's easily my favorite anime series (also agree that 2nd Gig is the better half of the show; they're only separated because of how anime was funded in blocks of 26 episodes in the early 2000s).
The original is more of a love letter to technology [SPOILER] and ends with the first merge of human and AI in to something new [/SPOILER] (it's not about technophobic humans policing the bad runaway machines).
American live action Death Note was the same: I was hopeful since they cast Willem Dafoe and he's usually in good stuff, but no, it was also pretty bad. It seems like American film companies are just trying to capitalize on the popularity of anime without grokking what made the best anime great.
Both films mentioned were commercial successes, but I think in the long run they burned audiences for this sort of film. I won't see any more American remakes of anime for some time.
Don't bet on it. Also the live action Akira is currently on hold, but Taika still seems keen to do it.
The other American live-action remakes mentioned were profitable, but by much more narrow margins. If what people are saying about it being truer to the source material is true, then it seems that producing better remakes does in fact produce greater profits. We only have a narrow data set to look at for this, though.
I really don't know what a live action Akira would look like. The body horror scenes are going to have to be CGI, which could go really badly.
J. J. Abrams is the living embodiment of this approach, which is why his Star Trek and Star Wars movies look gorgeous and individual scenes are awe inspiring, and the overarching story arcs are all fantastic on paper, but the world building and and actual in-world logic of the setting or character decisions in it just don't make any sense whatsoever. Zack Snyder is just as bad.
But now they've devolved into beautiful looking action movies which exist just for the sake of action, with the story being secondary.
I’d probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.
The Patlabor TV show is definitely much lighter material, a lot more accessible to children.
I think maybe it's the high-concept, almost frightening, aspects of GITS that resonated with me. But I understand why it's not popular with most people.
Obligatory Patlabor 2 opening title sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMTpSDAGxM
Patlabor is slow, sure, and purposefully so (it has and deserves the reputation as being the "boring" mecha show), but cheezy? I haven't seen the TV show which I hear is a lot more comic, but I wouldn't call the original OVA/first 2 movies cheezy.
NGE can be philosophically heavy at times but is too diluted by its action sequences and fan service moments.
The first GITS movie is a philosophical tour de force and a piece of art that transcends time. A masterpiece.
It may also be that a lot of anime are series, and require a time investment.
The only other (comparable) anime that jumps to mind and something I can definitely recommend to you, is Serial Experiments Lain.
Wikipedia link (warning: spoilers ahoy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_Agent
http://web.archive.org/web/20180514064448/http://ghostinthes...
Looks like the following is the original author. They mention it on their portfolio page:
https://www.michaelolaya.com/portfolio
Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.
The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw
She even has a line towards the end of the SAC:SSS movie that says something like "next time you meet me I might be a completely different person". But there is indeed a "base" personality that she tries to hold on to (e.g. via her watch) despite the wide range of memories she acquires.
If we assume she's an AI - at what point does she become individual "enough" to be a defacto "person"? There's a lot of Asimov in this question. The puppetmaster adds a level of abstraction to this by not requiring a 1:1 mapping between a ghost and a body.
If we assume she's a person - do we count her as a human because she only briefly had a body of flesh and bone? What does this "internet in her head" do to affect her psyche and personal development?
Also, just the psychological warfare aspect of having a military tank with an adorable personality is great.