I would be interested in a postmodern evaluation of an indeterminate character like the Laughing Man.

I think that while anime explores often very different and complex issues, it is also very ungrounded, which occasionally leads to very poor reasoning and analogies being drawn. Flights of fancy are only as useful as they relate or analogise to useful real dynamics.

On the other hand, limited scope is harmful too.

The Laughing Man is really the postmodern self taken to its logical conclusion: there is no core, everything is socially constructed, he may not even have a single meaning except for what other people impose on him in their interpretations. The Puppetteer in the original manga was very much an individual self, although it was striving to become a kind of networked society of mind rather than an atomic entity. But the Laughing Man can never become atomic, because he really just exists as a meme. As the information exchange of society becomes intense enough, self-propagating memes might start to evolve into teleological threads that acquire mental resources and skills from people who believe in them to achieve real-world goals, including propagating themselves further.

What I like about this anime is that it is grounded in at least some world-building and a sense of what may and may not exist in the world. Perhaps this is just because Shirow's sense of design and detailled descriptions constrain the current creators. It is still rather unlikely in many respects, but given the number of interesting details it does not really matter.

"The Puppetteer [sic] in the original manga was very much an individual self, although it was striving to become a kind of networked
society of mind rather than an atomic entity."

I do not have the impression of the Puppeteer from the original manga. It didn't even give me the impression of the converse--as if
absorbing such a self-constructed creature as Major Kusanagi would provide an ego to a networked piece of weblife. The manga gave me the
impression the Puppeteer existed as a "networked society of mind" and simply sought another node of novel type.