Serial Experiments Lain
“Conjecture has become fact and rumor has become history” - Serial Experiments Lain
Baudrillard talks of the idea of the hyperreal. Online spaces don’t mask our selves they reveal it. Whether we want it to or not. Serial Experiments Lain exists as a simulacra of the present. A future that had not come to pass yet in 1998 and still hasn’t now in 2024. yet the ghost of Lain’s predictions continues to haunt the present.
The Internets omnipresent force revealing the obscene spectacle that had always existed but underneath the mask of cordial news broadcasts and the stage play of refined gentlemanly politics. The Internet has pulled this rug of Imagined core beliefs, true intentions, and guiding principles from underneath our feet Only leaving us with a confused mix of signs and narratives that whether we believe them or not are impossible to avoid.
How can one attach themselves to anything or anyone to any idea to any group to any belief system? What’s real? What’s a conspiracy? What’s only half true or false? The rigid walls keeping ideas from spilling out and becoming diluted have been melted away by The Internets ability to show all ideas and all information at once creating a flowing river where anchoring oneself is nearly impossible.
No wonder people are isolated. All people and ideas swept up and melted together. One feels helpless to the point that one can’t even recognize themselves. Who is the real Lain?
The end of history? Or simply another chapter? A world of blown out highlights and digital noise with nothing to grasp.
Is there hope for a solution to all this? Transcendence through technology? A grassroots rebellion against the structures of communication and information? Who’s to say. 26 years later and we still don’t have an answer. What defines our age now is trying to find that ground to cling onto in the landless ferocious ocean of signs we find ourselves in.
Serial experiments Lane is the single best piece of art about not just the Internet. But of an age in which it seems history has won.