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Serial Experiments Lain was a 1998 cyberpunk anime series directed by the late Ryutaro Nakamura, with a screenplay by Chiaki J. Konaka, character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe, and produced by Yasayuki Ueda. It remains among the most distinctive anime TV series of the late 90’s with its heavily experimental style, deliberately confusing narrative, and existential themes. The show has long since been a critical darling, winning an Excellence Prize in the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival among other accolades, and is also a fan favorite among the intellectual crowd. It is a milestone of the medium, and a consummate work of science fiction. The series was so well regarded that in 2012 Funimation released a lavish Blu-ray/ DVD special edition which included a book of concept art and another of colored illustrations, something that the company had not done for any of its previous Geneon acquisitions.

This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used to create or digitize it. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details may not fully reflect the modified file. Serial Experiments Lain is a speculative bit of sci-fi that looks at the way people communicate and interact, and combines it with the, then nascent technology of the Internet. A lot of what this show predicted never came to pass, but you also have to remember that Serial Experiments Lain was made when the Internet was but 5 years old or so.

It is also an interesting example of how a piece of art can be reflective of modern trends and issues in spite of its age. The show was made in a time when the internet was still in its early stages, and technology was a far cry from what it is today. A time when computers were still clunky and intimidating, and things like iPhones were at most a distant daydream of a concept. Yet its themes concerning communication and identity through digital interface remain as potent as they were when the show was first aired. In fact, given how prevalent digital communication is in modern life, the series may be more relevant than ever.

Connection through Digital Means

One recurring theme in Serial Experiments Lain is connectivity through the internet, or as it is called in the show, the Wired. Through the Wired, people are able to communicate with each other through computers (called Navi), or other digital devices, some eerily similar to modern smartphones. This allows people to communicate with one another or search through the Wired from virtually anywhere and at any time. While they are in class and cannot speak with one another, the titular character Lain and her friends communicate with each other using their digital devices. Gossip on the Wired spills into the real world, often becoming part of casual conversation. People use the Wired to vent their feelings, or spread rumors. This is a strikingly reflective of how people utilize digital communication; what with all the forms of social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. which people use to share their thoughts and communicate with each other. Sure, the formatting of the Wired may not look the same and perhaps might not function in exactly the same way, but the parallels are clearly there.

At the beginning of the show, Lain was shown to be reclusive and not at all knowledgeable about the Wired. She spends a lot of time keeping to herself and seldom talks to anyone outside of her family except a girl in her class named Alice. Lain is occasionally teased by some of Alice’s friends for being ignorant about the on-goings of the Wired and told by her father that she ought to learn how to use the Wired to keep in touch with other people. In a sense, Lain is being left out because of her ignorance concerning digital communication. As the series continues and Lain becomes more adept at using the Wired as a means of communication, she is shown to be both bolder and more social. She ultimately becomes more knowledgeable of the Wired than any other character in the show. By learning to utilize the Wired, Lain has become more socially savvy, more connected to everyone else. This is something we see very often on the internet nowadays, people who use social media are up-to-date with all the little trends and social happenings while people who do not are left out of the loop. A person’s online presence and awareness of the on-goings of the internet have become a large factor of their social standing in the modern world. In the first episode, Lain’s father says “You’re in junior high now. Your friends are leaving you in the dust, right?” referring to Lain’s unfamiliarity with the Wired. The irony of this statement is that we are now living in a world where kindergarteners play on tablet computers.

One interesting aesthetic of the show is the Wired itself, which Lain seems to literally dive into. The Wired is typically depicted as surrealistic world filled with black space and half-formed images. Users in the Wired are usually shown as incomplete human bodies or parts of human bodies (except Lain, but we’ll get to that later).

This indicates that only a portion of a person can be seen on the Wired, and therefore a person cannot truly be known through digital communication. At the time the show was made, the internet did not have the functionality it possesses today, meaning there was very little capability for personalization. Granted, this a depiction of the internet that is not entirely relevant today, after all we see peoples’ names and faces on sites like Facebook. However, there still is a great sense of anonymity online. Rarely do people use their actual names on forums or even on popular sites like Youtube. More often than not, you will not know the mass majority of people you come in contact with through the internet, you will only see who they present themselves to be. Even when someone is using their actual name and real photos, they can still alter the content of their profile to present themselves in a manner of their choosing. The incomplete forms Lain encounters on the Wired are a fascinating visual representation of the obscured images we have of people that we only interact with online.

Oversaturation of Information

As mentioned earlier, Serial Experiments Lain is a very confusing show, and deliberately so. It is a show rife with technobabble, philosophical ramblings, conspiracy theories, psudoscience, and extremely strange imagery. As Lain investigates the strange occurrences on the Wired which are affecting the real world, and whether or not there is a god in the Wired, she comes into contact with an endless stream of uncensored thoughts, ideologies, and rumors. The show throws so much information at the viewer, and yet remains vague about what it all means. This makes the show a difficult one to navigate.

However, by doing this, the show is able to depict a network that oversaturated with information. The Wired, like the internet, is a network made to connect people and allow them to share their ideas and knowledge with each other. It is a forum where someone can state their innermost thoughts, views on the world, or just about anything else freely, while also staying anonymous. This is both a wonderful thing and a dangerous thing. It is convenient to have such a fountain of information at your fingertips. If you are curious about something, you can simply look it up online. If you are seeking a second opinion on a certain issue, you needn’t look further than the screen on your digital device. There is a downside to this, of course. With so much information floating around the network, it becomes difficult to tell what is credible and what is misinformation. Only extensive research can give any assurance; however, as Lain’s search for answers in the Wired demonstrates, even then things may not be completely clear. This is an even bigger conundrum now than when the show was made because the internet is a much bigger place. The show was made in the midst of the dot-com boom of the late 90’s, so the internet was certainly growing but the use of it was nowhere near as wide-spread as it is today. At the time, the internet was a nesting place for conspiracy theories that came from uncertainties of the incoming new millennia. Serial Experiments Lain‘s focus on these theories is what makes it timely to the late 90’s. However, the information overload depicted in the show is reflective of the information available on the internet in the modern day.

Identity in the Wired

In the Wired, only Lain seems to be able manifest a full human-form avatar. Furthermore, it seems as if there are multiple versions of Lain floating around the Wired, and Lain herself seems to be constantly present on the network. Indeed, every other character in the show has a different perception of Lain. At the end of the series it is revealed that Lain is anything but the shy middle-school girl we met at the beginning of the show, possibly being a sentient computer program or even the god in the Wired she was searching for. It is a strange conclusion that leaves itself open to an infinite number of interpretations.

This might sound very strange, and it is, but it is also oddly relatable in a world where people are at least somewhat defined by their actions online. When Lain is confronted with the possibility of another version of herself on the Wired, she is understandably rattled. This idea sends her into a state of existential dread, as she tries to reassure herself is the one and only version of herself, even as doubts start to haunt her thoughts. Rumors and gossip about the exploits of this other Lain spread like wildfire through both the Wired and the real world, giving her a reputation the truly precedes her, which only further feeds her doubts and worries concerning her identity. Lain is even accused of sharing her friend Alice’s sexual fantasies on the Wired. This all culminates in Lain losing her sense of belonging amongst her peers in school, and in the real world in general.

Though perhaps more extreme than any real-life cases, Lain’s story is indicative of how social media can affect a person’s self-perception, relationships and reputation. When we post something online or have something posted about us, it is put out in the open to be seen. We create an online persona, becoming digital beings in a sense, yet our conduct on the web can have consequences in our real lives. The things we say online can be perceived and interpreted in any number of ways. An off-hand comment about an acquaintance can have serious repercussions depending on how it is taken. Online rumors and gossip can damage a person’s reputation. The consequences of what is said and done on the internet are not confined to the internet, they can have effects in the real world. Online harassment and online bullying has become a serious issue in the world of social media, and has even lead to some individuals to commit suicide. This is because by participating in social media and creating an online persona we are essentially making an extension of ourselves, our identities and egos are attached to our Facebook and Twitter and any other online accounts even if we say otherwise. While Serial Experiments Lain’s depiction of the consequences of online communication are strange and certainly not entirely accurate, they nonetheless resonate with the modern issues involved with social media.

Serial Experiments Lain is a complexly layered and multi-faceted work of animated art, and I’m only scratching the surface of it here. Yes, it is a confusing and perhaps even alienating experience but it’s also a deeply fascinating contemplation of the effects technology can have on identity, personal relationship, and society as a whole. This article is not made to imply that the creators somehow foresaw how social media would evolve as technology improved, after all, there are quite a bit of differences in the technology of the show with that of the modern day. Instead, it is meant to illustrate how a work of art can be interpreted in light of the current social, and in this case technological, state of the world.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

Update - 6/7/2016

End Update

Preface: It's been a very long time since I've written anything. I've deliberately avoided writing about politics because I didn't want to feed into the Trump Vacuum, and outside of that, there isn't too much that's going on that I really want to write about. So I decided that I would go in a completely different direction.

Serial Experiments Lain Game

Not a lot of my readers are anime fans, but I felt like revisiting one of my first--and favorite--anime series and explaining what made this series so good. Serial Experiments Lain has been largely forgotten to anime history, and I felt it necessary to explore what it had to say about technology, and the ways it got the Internet right 17 years ago, at a time when so many cyberpunk/technologically-focused stories (like this, for example), got technology so wrong.
Serial Experiments Lain is a 13-episode series that centers around a young, socially isolated 14-year-old girl who receives an email from a classmate who committed suicide, urging her to follow in her footsteps and live in the 'Wired' (the Internet). Intrigued by this email, Lain asks her father, who works at the Tachibana Labs computer company and is himself an early adopter/power user/tinkerer, who is excited to take her under his wing, to upgrade her computer. Lain uses a 'NAVI', which is based on a variety of Apple products (the artists working on the series at the time loved Apple), but I find that the top-of-the-line model resembles more of a cyberdeck than a traditional desktop computer. It isn't long before we see Lain switching out parts, and her setup grows immensely throughout the series.
There are some important things to note in episode one: The shadows in the series are colored, and this is deliberate. The shadows represent the world of the Wired, underpinning Lain's 'reality.' The buzzing of the power lines in the beginning episodes eventually become distinct, though muffled speech, delineating Lain's ignorance of the Wired to her power over it. During her commute to school, we get a very eerie scene where the power lines start to bleed. Others have said that this represents Chisa's suicide, but I don't think that's accurate: It is foreshadowing the central theme of the series, that is the Wired and the 'Real World' becoming one and the same, as we shall see.
One of the most interesting comparisons to make here is between Lain and The Matrix, specifically The Animatrix and the second film. In 'Kid's Story,' a teenager is contacted by Neo and commits suicide by jumping from his apartment building with the goal of reaching the Real World. A great deal of effort is made by Lain's classmates and another character to convince Lain to kill herself and enter the Wired. It's worth noting here that Lain came out in 1998, The Matrix came out in 1999, and The Animatrix after that. I have no doubt that the Wachowskis saw Serial Experiments Lain.

The Knights of the Eastern Calculus

In Layer 03, Lain receives a chip called a 'Pachuke,' and inquires at the rave about its function and manufacture. Taro, one of the kids who hangs out at the club, informs her that the chip was manufactured by the Knights and is extremely rare, bestowing powers and privileges to its user well beyond that of normal denizens of the Wired. The Knights are one of the most intriguing things about the series, as they are an anonymous group of hackers/renegades who seek to govern the Wired and are responsible for a deadly computer game. Few people know who the Knights are, and few people familiar with the series quite understand the brilliance of their existence in the series. Watching SEL in 2015, it is quite obvious that the Knights are analogous to another [A]nonymous hacker collective. SEL deserves some serious credit for its predictions, and its accuracy well beyond its time. In the series, the Knights have spliced a dungeoncrawling survival game not unlike many horror games seen today (think Slender: The Eight Pages) with a scientific experiment that sought to harness latent psychic energy from children called the Kensington Experiment, presided over by Professor Hodgson. The experiment was terminated because all of the children involved in the experiment died. Professor Hodgson explains to Lain that he sought to destroy all of the material involved in the experiment, but someone 'dug it out of the trash' and incorporated it into the game (Episode 6)
This hybrid allowed other players to play as the monster, and any player who loses in the game dies in real life. The Knights are also able to use the technology in their game (called PHANTOMa) to kill other users. A housewife orders a Knights-manufactured PCI card and uses it to kill a person walking in the street wearing a headset and mobile wifi gear. Later, we find this same card, fried, in the garbage. In one scene, also in episode 6, after Lain discovers what the Knights did, she verbally abuses them by calling them trolls. They retaliate by--I think--uploading malware to her computer that causes her coolants to fail and her system to explode, which would have killed her had she not left her room. On top of all that, the Knights are also propping up a second suicide-turned-digital-consciousness named Masami Eiri.
Masami Eiri was an employee at Tachibana Labs, and he was tasked with creating IPv7 (Protocol 7; we are currently on IPv6). He included bizarre conspiracy theories involving psychic research and electromagnetic fields into his construction of the protocol, and aimed to insert himself into the Wired as its god. He wanted to move all of humanity from the Real World into the Wired, and allow people to communicate seamlessly, 'without devices.' The best comparison I can make for this is to the Human Instrumentality Project in Evangelion, which was also aimed at merging human consciousnesses beyond that of the flesh, albeit for religious reasons. When Eiri's managers discovered this, they fired him immediately, and he killed himself by running in front of a train. His consciousness lived on in the Wired, where he did become a god, thanks to his believers: The Knights. Eiri also claims responsibility for creating Lain. Eiri himself became god, basically, by using memes perpetuated by the Knights (think, for example, 4Chan or Reddit), and he lives on simply because people believe in him (similar to American Gods, where belief gives power). This is the same reason why aliens appear in the series: Because urban legends (Roswell, mentioned in episode 9, for example) become 'fact' through collective belief in conspiracy theories (TVTropes.org notes that the alien who appears as Lain's avatar in Alice's room in Episode 11 is wearing a Freddy Krueger sweater). Episode 9 opens with the line, 'For now, conjecture has become fact, and rumor has become history.' While I am aware that The X-Files also heavily dealt with conspiracy theories around the same period, it did not address the way that these theories proliferated in real life through the Internet the way Lain did. In fact, I would argue that the very reason why they are discussed at all in SEL is because of how the Internet gave them a way to propagate freely in the underbelly of the Web, treating them as an artifact of belief, instead of addressing the possibility outright that aliens could be real. It's less 'The truth is out there' and more 'The expansion of the Internet has created a seedbed for all kind of crazy stuff!' Again, this series came out in 1998, and this is 2015, when conspiracy theories thrive on the Internet and have leaked into real political discourse.

Who are the Men in Black (not Will Smith and TLJ)?

The Men in Black are two mysterious figures who at first have an ominous presence as they stalk Lain from a black car, but they are not there to hurt her. At first, she suspects that they are working for the Knights, but the Men in Black are there simply to spy on her for an unnamed employer. They suspect that Lain is the Lain of the Wired (the 'evil' one), and later, when they take her in, they discover that she is, and reveal that they do not want the Wired and the Real World to merge. However, they are ordered to back off by their employer, and only resurface after Lain publishes the list of Knights members, whom they assassinate. In Layer 12, the Men in Black are betrayed by their employer and killed by an avatar of Lain (ostensibly with the same technology as the Knights with PHANTOMa). It turns out that their employer was in contact with Eiri, which may be why Lain killed them.

What happened to Alice, and why does Lain have three personalities?

Alice is Lain's best friend, and her story arc is both depressing and slightly unclear. But first, we must explain Lain's three personalities. Lain in the real world is socially isolated, quiet, and generally passive. She discovers, as people recognize her in the club in episode 2, that there already exists a Lain in the Wired. This version of her is evil, and has spread embarrassing information about Alice, specifically, that she has been sleeping with one of her teachers. This is devastating to her (obviously), and is a major impetus for Lain's actions later in the series. It's worth noting that this is something SEL gets exactly right: That information on the Internet (The 'Wired' in the show) can be found and used against people in the real world, with real consequences. On the Wired, Lain (the persona that the Real Lain has adopted for herself on the Wired) is assertive, belligerent, and quick to verbally attack other users, which reflects current reality: Many socially isolated people adopt a more forceful personality on the Internet.
It is also possible that Eiri had dummy copies of Lain on the Wired without her knowledge. 'You wanted to pass off these dupes as me!?' (Episode 8)
In episode 12, when Lain is about to give in to Eiri and Chisa's demand that she forfeit her physical form and live in the Wired as a disembodied consciousness, Alice shows her the value of a physical body by letting Lain feel her heart beat. In fact, it is Alice who comes to her aid at the end of the series and saves her from making the same mistake Eiri and Chisa made. Here, Lain also discovers how much she had hurt Alice, and this is what causes her to hit RESET.

So what does Lain do? How does she become a god?

Is Lain a computer program? What happened to Mika? And why is her family fake?

Further Questions

Serial Experiments Lain Kissanime

Final Thoughts and Analysis

'This afternoon, the firewall of the Information Bureau's Information Control Center was cracked by some unnamed renegade party. As a result, the Information Network System of the Wired is in total disarray. And furthermore, be advised that although it is actually a live broadcast and is being sent out at this very moment, it is quite possible that it may arrive tomorrow, right now, or perhaps yesterday.'

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