Serial Experiments Lain: 20+ years later, still present day, still present time

Where does one even begin with Serial Experiments Lain? About the only thing I know for sure is that, whatever I end up writing here, it’ll be far, far, far from the last word about this show.

Summary

One night, a young girl named Chise jumps from the roof of a high building. A week later, some girls in her school, including Lain, receive electronic messages from her over what they called the Wired. These messages frighten most of these girls.

But it piques Lain’s interest. Up to this point, her personal computer, called a Navi, has been of little interest to her, but she soon finds herself immersed in the world of the Wired. Maybe too immersed. And, maybe, she’s no longer herself. And, maybe, Lain is someone else entirely on the Wired. And, maybe, the Wired has more than one Lain. And, maybe, the real world and the Wired are not so far apart as everyone thinks they are. And, maybe….

Connections

I remember having some small contacts with the internet back in the 90s and around the turn of the century, which was about the time Serial Experiments Lain was being created and released. It actually wasn’t until the early 2000s that I started to really get into the internet, finding things like debate forums to join and enjoy and maybe get into some pretty heated discussions, too.

Today, the internet is everywhere. Not that I’m complaining. What with playing chess online, watching cat videos or anime series like this one, reading e-books, or just enjoying a bit of social media, I rather like the internet.

Now, I don’t know if I would like what was going in Lain; that people would be connected to the Wired even if they weren’t on a device, that they could in essence never escape the Wired, the internet. That would be, I think, a bit too much of a good thing.

To use a bit of an analogy, the internet is like water; it’s good, it can be fun, it can be useful, but if you get too much of it, that can cause problems.

Wired

Transhumanism is the idea that man is merging with technology.

Jason Sosa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ugo2KEV2XQ

One of the stranger aspects of a story that has no shortage of strange aspects is the idea that there is a god on the Wired. This god-being turns out to be the result of one man essentially uploading his personality to the Wired, something like what is called the singularity. But, then, this gets further complicated by Lain herself. Where did she come from? Is she a human girl who has a presence on the Wired or did she exist on the Wired when it was first formed and before her human, or human-like, body was even thought about? What is the connection between the young human girl Lain, who is shy and socially awkward, and the Lain of the Wired, who is much more brash and assertive?

Transhumanism is something I know very little about, having read a bit about it a few years ago. Some parts of it I can understand and even support, such as how to use technologies to help people with diseases and physical problems. Hearing aids, artificial hearts, and bionic limbs seem like potentially good applications of technology.

Still, some of the more extreme ideas, like the singularity, seem both far-fetched and based on bad thinking. Is a human really just a collection of data and information that can be uploaded to the internet? Are our bodies really just needless biological junk that we can shunt aside to reach some kind of higher level? And what about the practical problems of maintaining the tech used to keep Uncle Ralph floating around on the internet, making sure his personality doesn’t get hacked or injured by the kinds of viruses we all know hackers would create, and just making sure his server doesn’t break down or even that the internet will still be around once everyone shoots EMP missiles at each other?

Because in the end this wouldn’t really change or solve anything. If it were possible to put a person’s mind on the internet in such a way that the person himself or herself is alive on the internet, well, what then? Will that person act right? Will they always do what is good? Would we have to deal with crimes committed by internet-persons, either in the physical world or in cyber-space? Could one internet-person murder another internet-person, or steal from them, or lie to them? Would an internet-person act like Lain does at one point, spying on her friends and bullying them with the secrets she’s learned about them?

Looking at it as a Christian, it seems significant that when the Bible speaks of the next life, it speaks of the resurrection of our bodies. Our bodies may well die, they may well cease to function and even rot away, but those who repent of sins and believe in Christ are promised new, glorified bodies, this present body but better in ways I doubt we could very well explain by our current understandings.

But at the least, Christian teaching is different from the ideas of eastern mysticism, gnosticism, and transhumanism; the body is not the problem, but sin and evil do affect the body. I think the posthuman aspects or transhumanism are like magical snakeoil elixirs promising eternal life or a rumored fountain of youth, ideas that promise the things we desire but that deliver or will deliver so very much less .

Conclusion

I feel like I’ve barely begun in even hinting at all the things in Serial Experiments Lain that could be talked about. Heck, they even work in the events of Roswell, for that little bit of X-Files flavor.

This isn’t a kid’s show by any stretch, there is plenty of disturbing imagery, though strangely the closest it gets to fan service is in the ending credits. And, yes, if you do watch it, you’ll spend most of your time wondering what on earth in going on.

But I can also suggest it pretty highly. Though it’s a series that’s over 20 years old, the ideas and problems it brings up make it seem like it could have come to us from next week.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Audie.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Audie.