I think the reason that it's so philosophical, and the reason that it mentions Deleuze and Guattari specifically, is due to their emphasis on "the virtual," and

I think the reason that it's so philosophical, and the reason that it mentions Deleuze and Guattari specifically, is due to their emphasis on "the virtual," and in the context of Ghost in the Shell, this "virtual" is explored conceptually, especially as it relates to systems of control, such as cybernetics. Edit: > Like Kant, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying forms imposed by the subject. He, therefore, concludes that pure difference is non-spatiotemporal; it is an idea, what Deleuze calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers to Proust's definition of what is constant in both the past and the present: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object." A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is therefore not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze > Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudoscience that appeared in the U.S.A. after World War II and also spread through other capitalist countries. Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernetics in their dirty, practical affairs.[1][2] [1] "Cybernetics" in the Short Philosophical Dictionary, 1954 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...