Altered Carbon

This is a Netflix series ostensibly about a man brought back from limbo by a wealthy man to solve his own murder. In reality it is an SJW masterpiece about equality.

In this universe, humans discovered the remnants of an “Elder” civilization and their technology that allows the mind to exist independently of the body in something called a “cortical stack.” Bodies are referred to as “sleeves” and may be exchanged at will, though also at a price. The only way someone can “die” in this universe is if their stack is destroyed, and no backups exist.

It is assumed in this series that someone restored from a backup, and that a stack copied into a cloned body is the same person that was backed up or cloned, and not an entirely new being. It must be assumed since no one with a backup fears the current instance of their stack being destroyed, as when Rei sacrifices several of her sleeves and stacks to subdue Ortega.

I see different layers of pantsuitedness in this work. There is the superficial skin color layer - Kovacs and Rei are half Japanese, half Hungarian. The rainbow cast also includes a swearing-in-Spanish Hispanic female cop, a wise Hispanic grandma, an Arab, an Asian police chief, an evil, wealthy, white married couple (with an inexplicably jewish son), a black female martial arts expert/rebel cult leader running a commune in some secret hole, a living AI with feelings and rights, and a black female lawyer. Women routinely defeat much larger men in frequent hand to hand combat. The Russians are evil. Kovac’s father was an evil wife killer. The brilliant hacker is a blond woman (though in this case a woman in a man’s body) married to a black man. They have a phenotypically black daughter who is, you know, impregnated by the elite white dude whose wife then beats her sleeve to death.

The second, deeper layer of pantsuitedness comes in with the sleeving. Since the soul (or “stack” as it is called here) exists independently of the body, it may be sleeved in either a male or a female body. This seems to feed the trans narrative that insists that the body is incidental and one can actually be anything on the inside.

Despite the fact that this series is an evil work of propaganda, it was beautifully produced and extremely faithful to the tradition established by Bladerunner.

Leave a Reply