In this op-ed, digital entertainment editor Sandra Song critiques the cyberpunk roots of Taylor Swift's "...Ready for It?" music video.

Earlier today, Taylor Swift debuted her highly anticipated music video for “...Ready for It?”, the second single off her forthcoming album Reputation. A dystopian, sci-fi drama that sees Taylor, once again, battling herself, it’s a narrative that could have stayed in the badass action-filled lane carved out by her “Bad Blood” video, but instead unintentionally lends itself to an age-old media problem.

Ahead of the video’s release, the video’s Korean-American director Joseph Kahn tweeted out that the video was specifically anime-inspired. And while the video also features nods to other classic sci-fi films such as Star Wars and The Terminator, the biggest things people have noticed are the video's oblique references to the influential Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell — with everything from Robo-Taylor's suit to the action sequences specifically reminding people of the controversial Hollywood remake from earlier this year. And while this shouldn’t come as a surprise seeing as how the original GitS was one of the most influential animes of all time, it's a somewhat questionable choice for Taylor, a white woman, to be at the center of this particular narrative, especially bookending a year where the blatant whitewashing of the main character spurred a huge online discussion.

To make matters worse, within the video itself you also see a spate of signage sporting Chinese characters, a completely unnecessary addition likely meant to recall the aesthetics of a particular dystopian sci-fi subgenre with a very troubled, appropriative, and fetishistic history: cyberpunk. And it's this mishmashed use of vaguely pan-Asian tropes that's problematic to say the least.

“Asianness” and its aesthetics have a long history of being shorthand signifiers for the "future," and most of this can be traced to the influence of cyberpunk. Pioneered by the written works of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and definitively solidified by American-Canadian William Gibson’s 1984 classic Neuromancer and films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, cyberpunk at its core is detective neo-noir set in a troubled, futuristic setting. And as Gibson himself was once quoted saying "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.”