Warai Otoko (笑い男) Animated Logo

by 0xADADA

The Laughing Man 笑(わらい) い 男(おとこ) (warai otoko) is a fictional character in the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

This lil’ project is an animated SVG using CSS transforms to rotate the text.

The Laughing Man logo is an animated image of a smiling figure wearing a cap, with circling text quoting a line from Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, which reads:

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.”

This character deeply resonates with me; he/she is a corporate hacktivist infiltrating micromachine manufacturing corporations that hide an inexpensive cure to a debilitating disease in order to profit from their more expensive but proprietary micromachine treatment. They are able to hide their physical presence by editing themselves out of video feeds and surveillance systems in real-time by by superimposing the animated logo over their face.

The Laughing Man logo has been co-opted by pop culture in advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the loose hacktivist collective Anonymous (using the latter’s motto We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

Code is up on github