Serial Experiments Lain

Being terminally online and a niche internet micro celebrity really does start to plant a God complex in you. Serial Experiments Lain is the Japanese Cyberpunk Movement answer to Evangelion and in turn becomes both timeless and encapsulates the time it was made perfectly. Lain represents something truly fascinating that has aged quite interestingly. There's no doubt it's incredibly ahead of its time and it's depiction of the internet, social media, and it's consequences are truly unsettling and what's even more unsettling is revisiting it in a post pandemic world. There's no doubt that our existence online, or in the language of the show; in the Wired, has been accelerated in the last few years and that puts this show in a totally new light. Elements of the show still feel timeless of course, the way it depicts the nature of social media and our online presences, the division between that and reality are still relevant today, but in new ways. When I first discovered this show it spoke about online forums, Facebook and anonymity, early cyberbullying and urban legends, rumors, about the internet as it was when I knew it at the time, and many parts of the show feel timestamped in that era from the way it depicts people who are online, how they use it and how they access it, what kind of information seems to be on it and the language they use around certain things. But the way the show predicted those borders blurring and how it comes more and more ubiquitous stay relevant. The way the show deals with radicalization and indoctrination, it was never about regular internet use by the general population, at least at the time, it was about 2chan, about early adopters, and that has somehow evolved and morphed into the general public today. In the last few years indoctrination and radicalism and the ubiquity of the internet in peoples' lives, the ability for it to BE their lives has become more and more of a regular thing and somehow, the aspects of Lain that initially seemed to speak to a niche idea, the themes and scenes that were almost more about Jungian psychology, the Alice in Wonderland metaphors, have suddenly become the parts that speak the loudest in the series. The ones that land heavier than the social media parallels, parallels that weirdly enough are starting to feel dated in a way. But yet, Lain persists. In a way Lain has now aged into a weird limbo, a work of art that has found itself in flux of relevancy in its themes. A series that was once talked about for how it was foretelling and predicted so much still has more to say 25 years later when the ideas we applauded it for 15 years ago now seem so simple. Ya know, Lain is like an e-girl, she's relevant to this weird group of extremely online individuals, she dresses funny, she's weirdly knowledgeable about the internet and computers, uses her clout to get things from her white Knights and develops an unhealthy God Complex.