Quote Originally Posted by Ryllharu
If you watch a whole hell of a lot of Ghost in the Shell, and the various movies, and browse through at least some of the manga sequels (Man-Machine Interface) it makes a little more sense.

RD just skips all the terrorism and police work and goes directly for the existentialist elements that are much more pronounced in the three films and the Tachikoma character development parts of the two series.

Let's see if I can work this out, since it only made any sense to me after about 90% of the episode.

- Humanity developed the Meta Real Network system. A networking "society" as the description states, but more of a super high level internet. This allows nearly everyone, especially those equipped with cyberbrains to connect all the time and interact. Not too different from the networks of GiTS, but somehow deeper than that.

- Problems develop, sometimes manifesting themselves in the real world, sometimes flooding people with an overload of information, as we saw in the opening sequence and at the end with the hospital.

Metal wasn't even built/finished in 2012. Whatever happened then though is the same thing that happened in 2061.
Metal might be a subnetwork or the successor to the network they were diving in in the beginning (if they were even in a network).
at any rate, the sea we see in 2061 seems to be artificial...

btw, the animation is really top notch and I like shows that go this deep! and how world could look like that VERY soon!