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Present Day, Present time: An anime prophecy
TW: SUICIDE
So I'm more or less done with this analysis and its core themes, and will probably just buff up the other sections later down the line. But now we come down to the core of why I wanted to write this analysis.
3 years ago, I saw SEL for the first time in my life. And it was one of the most profound moments of life. My mouth lay open as I saw this anime written in fucking 1998 talk about so many things that happened to the internet as I grew up. To put it into perspective, in the late 90's to early 2000's (around 25 years ago) the internet was a weird place populated by nerds and tech geeks. Data plans were expensive and you had to boot it up like this:
And now in 2023, the internet is a whole different place. In fact , you could consider it an "information universe", too big to actually fathom. That's the magic of connecting a billion people to each other. Youtube wan't a thing, reddit wasn't a thing, social media didn't happen until 7 years later.
And yet even so, Lain is distubingly accurate with some of the trends it seems to capture, even if ironically the internet superintelligence didn't work out in its favour (LMAO). I'll first explore some past and current trends that Lain is very spot on with, along with a few other things that make Lain STILL ahead of its time.
Superhackers (5 years after SEL)
When you talk about the real world parallels between SEL and our world, the first one that came to mind is the eerie similarity between the Knights and Anonymous+ 4chan.
To the uninitiated, Anonymous was an online super-hacker group that evolved from multiple internet messaging board sites such as 4chan and more. These individuals claimed to fight for the right causes and took down government machinery. They have enacted multiple large scale attacks on government machinery, such as when they took down the indian governments Telecom wing website. You can see a list of their exploits here.
In contrast you have 4chan, notorious for conducting immeasurable pranks to meme the public. One of their most infamous ones was, in a dedicated attempt to bully celebrity Shia Labeouf, they used ancient astronomy and triangulated flight paths to track down his flag so that they could replace it with their own joke flag in under 24 hours.
Why? Apparently its just for the funnies. Of course, SEL does draw its hacker inspiration from previous hacker groups such as the Legion of Doom and the Masters of deception, but I believe the religiosity, globalization and decentralization of the Knights is more in line with 4chan and Anonymous than with the aforementioned.
Influencers (12 years after SEL)
Although not a direct prediction, SEL's comments on god, distance and an increasingly isolated society does point towards the rise of mindless sheep followers who "enact" the will of their masters in the real world. Influencers can be seen as microcelebrities with near-infinite reach, but because influencers can talk directly to their followers, they can incite any sort of action from those who worship them blindly. Influencer's as a phenomenon became a widespread term around the early 2011's with the rise of social media.
One great example is the cult of Andrew Tate. By asking his followers to constantly repost his pyramid scheme "hustler's university", Andrew like Masami Eiri was able to force his beliefs across the world through the actions of his gospel spreading across the internet. This is also the case with online "grifters", people who falsely believe in highly controversial things because such topics would get them a lot of attention money. This also kind of applies to the BTS phenomenon.
The scale of views is unprecedented, and with each increasing amount of views is an ever growing distance between a god and his followers, making them ever more holy and ever more powerful.
Social media only wears the motto of "connection" as its mask. It's true offer is something more sinister: your chance to become a god in the real world.
Cancel culture (19 years after SEL)
Cancel culture entered the collective consciousness of the internet around 2017, but SEL did it 23 years prior in Layer 8 rumours.
As SEL says, "the flow of information does not always go both ways". People are crucified in witchcraft style stake burnings and vindictive justice, based on things they said many many years ago when both they as people and the world in general were different places.
SEL's themes of the Wired becoming a hotbed of religions, in addition to the way information travels at light speed and things getting recorded permanently create a recipe for this phenomenon occurring.
Suicide games (17 years after SEL)
Around 2015, a new game on the internet was causing children to apparently commit ritualistic suicide. In fact, the rumours became so commonplace in the real world that the Bangladesh government announced an internet ban for 6 months following investigations.
The entire incident is extremely similar to the events in SEL, where the Knights and Eiri spread a game on the Wired that makes kids commit suicide.
Hivemind Cults (14 years after SEL)
Although there are probably a million different religions that have propped up on the internet since its inception, the most prominent one which I feel meshes really well with Lain's themes is the online manosphere cult called the Redpill, a subreddit where men discuss dating strategies.
Transcending to the Wired and leaving the material world behind, in Lain was an allegory for gnostic enlightenment, similar to how in the Matrix, Neo can choose to remain in a false illusion created by Machines, or Neo can choose to see the real world by taking the red pill, which is where the "truth" lies.
In the same way, r/theredpill espouses its global truth of SMV, a religious doctrine that will "save you from your life of suffering" if you enact and religiously follow their explanation of how things are.
This in turn ties into SEL's themes of religion, dogma and children. Religion and their adults who espouse them target children fisrt because it is children who are most easily indoctrinated into religion when young. More than anything, the appropriation of meme culture by certain political entities seeks to radicalize a younger generation in its own interests more than anything. Like a million provisionary Knight's members. I know this better than anyone else, as an ex-redpiller indoctrinated at the age of 17.
Websites like reddit do not help this with their tendencies to become religious hiveminds, as people in these subreddits only upvote the comments and answers that align with their beliefs and not those that go against it.
Algorithm reality (18 years after SEL)
Society is increasingly being manipulated by machine-learning algorithms that flood their content feeds. People are slowly being tuned into a personal sense of reality when ML algorithms show them content based on their previous preferences. Kind of like how Eiri planned to rule the Wired by flooding it with information as he says in Layer 10.
Chatgpt (22 years after SEL)
Somewhat of a stretch, but Chatgpt could be considered an AI embodying the collective knowledge of the net. As a collective consciousness of the net, many people already fear the large scale implications of such a powerful tool. Even more powerful and scarier is the upcoming GPT-4, which is destined to be even more powerful. Read the paper outlining it here.
Have we finally met the true God of the Wired?
Tech CEO's with a god complex (always)
What I find most interesting about SEL is the way it uses Eiri, the head of a high profile tech company who wants to play god, as a very sharp observation on the nature of American Tech CEO's. From Mark zuckerberg's power fantasy to control a metaverse (which also tries to imitate Roblox and appeal to children) stemming directly from delusions of relating to the roman emperor Augustus, to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman trying to change the fabric of society by eliminating all jobs.
SEL does a very good job at analyzing the psychological motivations of Tech CEO leaders, who try to stand in as the guiding light of humanity, all the while inadvertently harming society through their actions because they cannot think outside of their own power fantasy.
Dopamine hijacking (15 years after SEL)
The Netflix documentary The social Dilemma talks about how the product designers at Facebook have designed it in a way that is extremely addictive by complete accident. However, do not be fooled, companies have intentionally engineered these systems and services to be addictive as heck.
The book Hooked: How to build habit forming products literally uses something called "hook cycles' where designers of these apps take advantage of human psychology and biology and abuse the dopamine reward mechanism inherent to brains, much like how Eiri and the Knights hijack the teenager who took Accela (a literal machine drug) in Layer 2 by altering his brain chemistry.
These people literally cross reference anthropology, psychology and human biology all with the intent of making sure you don't take your eyes off your screen.
Surveillance Capitalism (20 years after SEL)
Shoshana Zuboff makes a case for surveillace capitalism in her book of the same name, whereby companies such as Google and Meta (formerly facebook) exploited the data of their users in manner unprecedented by the legal framework. From the book:
"Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data which are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence', and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later."
Google and Facebook's ideas are very similar to Eiri planning to become omniscient by absorbing all the information in people's to become far more powerful than he ever could be. Layer 7 also does have someone in the Wired talk about how the control of information is why companies in SEL are so competitive and sabotage each other in the firsrt place.
Dead internet Theory (25 years after SEL)
In January 2021 on the forums of Agora Road, a user made a startling claim: The internet actually died in 2016 and that everything you see now is content perpetuated by bots and reposts. At one point this was taking to be fringe nutcase conspiracy, but it soon proved to be a horrifying prophecy with the rise of people posting chatgpt generated content everywhere.
Some people say that by 2025, 99% of the content on the internet will be fake. "I think it’s entirely obvious what I’m subtly suggesting here given this setup," IlluminatiPirate wrote on the thread. "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population."
In SEL, we can verify things that happen in the real world through our body to a reasonable degree. However on the internet, everything is through word of mouth, which means you can trust this less and less. In the end , the internet becomes a spirit world full of ghosts, spirits, bots and rumours. (Yes, I know that this one is a leap, don't @ me)
Internet jobs and remote work (25 years)
The idea of individuals making money via internet freelancing seems like a very normal concept to us today, but in 1998, barely anybody had a personal computer, and high network bandwidth was very expensive. Fast forward to today, and both these aspects are very normal in today's society, with some people working in fully remote roles and some countries even offering "digital nomad" visas.
The spatial web (25+ years after SEL)
The spatial web is the upcoming evolution of web 2.0 to web 3.0. With this evolution, faster internet connections, cheaper smaller and more powerful chips and transistors that have halved in size would allow the merging of the entire web into one big connected network. With technologies like augmented and virtual reality, Brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, the Internet-of-things and 5g/6g, we will see the entire planet connected in one big network where both the physical and digital worlds collide. This is called the spatial web and its arrival will happen around the late 2020's and early 2030's, considering how these technologies are much more well dispersed in the enterprise sector.
However in SEL, the Wired itself was more Spatial Web than the world wide web, considering how we see these technologies feature very prominently in the show. Everything on Earth, in the show, was "wired together"
Things I think SEL will predict.
I think at some level we all understand SEL's idea of the internet seeping into our daily lives, but I believe SEL is still around 10 years ahead of its time. When you have articles like these which showcase how users become quickly accustomed to perceiving VR bodies as their own, to augmented reality being a new age way of controllable schizophrenia, AI bots that straight up hallucinate, to the ever increasing proliferation of Brain computer interfaces that allow you to control things in the aforementioned technologies,
I truly think Serial experiments Lain is STILL a show way ahead of its time and whose full extent will only be witnessed in 10-15 years time when we reach the full extent of the Singularity.
And so that brings me to why I made this website. We are increasingly in a society that is increasingly controlled by false information on the Wired, which is actively being perpetrated by both malicious actors as well as clueless individuals.
When the speed at which information travels is faster than the time it takes to clean it , are we doomed to live in the complete opposite: An age not of information leading to a new age Renaissance, but misinformation leading to a world of Darkness?
If a company like Apple makes augmented reality glasses and the physical and digital worlds merge, will our sense of reality remain the same?
And do we have the ability to recognize as well as prevent this before it happens?
At the risk of sounding like an old geezer, we truly are moving to a dark age of technology that poses great danger to the fabric of society, and Lain's prophecy of the Wired interfering with the real world will only grow more relevant with time.
And to be honest I don't know what we can do as a society to stop this inevitable march to doom.
But I think we have free will. that we can have a future of truth, rationality and open-mindedness.
And that will take people across the board doing everything they can. Neuroscientists, designers, developers, artists, lawyers and the general public at large.
We still have time.
We can still turn things around.
Because the Wired should only be a subsystem that reinforces our real world.
To end this analysis, I want to say that SEL is an anime masterpiece. From the soundtrack to the symbolism, from the plot to the themes, and most importantly of all the surprising depth of its characters. It's 100% gold down to the marrow of its bone. The sound design and music score captures that eerie ghostly feeling, the art direction and colour pallette is great at communicating that haunting sense of loneliness and the characters are surprisingly incredibly deep when you get to know them.
It's not easy to make something as unique as Serial experiments Lain. Making something this complex and yet organically coherent is difficult. The mark of a true masterpiece is its essential timelessness, which I believe SEL will continue to carry forward well into the future.
Present day, present time indeed. If you made it this far, thank you for sticking it all the way through.
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