Serial Experiments Lain
If you fall into darkness, you can only wait for your eyes to adjust
About twenty years ago, Serial Experiments Lain premiered on TV Tokyo. Around the same time, Microsoft released Windows 98, Google had just been founded, and the Internet was barely taking shape. No one imagined that their lives would one day be threaded together by network cables, pierced open by ports, overturned by information. Overshadowed in its time by the similarly experimental Neon Genesis Evangelion, Lain entered my field of vision two decades later, carried by its opening theme, “Duvet.”
In truth, even today, twenty years on — though I consume both soft and hard science fiction with ease, and came prepared for experimental animation — watching Lain, I was still thoroughly overwhelmed by its conceptual daring and intellectual depth. In the realms of film and anime, works this ahead of their time, this radical in their thinking, are vanishingly rare.
Before entering the main discussion, I want to offer a few words of caution to those interested in Lain: because of the nature of experimental animation, Lain the series is itself an experiment. Its richness of detail and extreme economy of dialogue are designed to keep the work in an open state, able to accommodate more interpretations, associations, and imaginings. For this very reason, some viewers outside the target audience may find it incomprehensible or even unwatchable. (To my eyes, this work contains many cult elements, so those uninitiated may not be able to accept it.) Treat it as having had a nightmare, and do not force yourself to continue — spend your finite time on what truly interests you.
Present Day, Present Time
The story of Lain unfolds across three planes: the first is the world carried by physical, material bodies; the second is the world of the network, carried by fiber optic hardware; the third is the world of consciousness, where all things sense one another in mutual resonance.
If one were to explain this work in the simplest possible terms, it would be this: the girl Lain affixed several tabs of acid to herself, and everything is a hallucination. Truly. Two words sum up the entire series: “Fake,” “Pale.” The pallid imagery — everything is false. This work is less science fiction or suspense than it is philosophical horror. A story like psychedelic noise music. The indeterminate ending leaves more room for imagination; every ending is correct and every ending is wrong, because there is no true right or wrong in this world. In this respect, it succeeds — it has already successfully conveyed to me what it set out to convey. Transpose this dread into the world of today, and it loses nothing; on the contrary, it multiplies. A moment’s reflection is enough to chill me to the bone. And this story is precisely a guide toward reflection, toward inquiry. Fortunately, I chose to study politics; at times like this, I can only silently recite Lin Zexu’s lines — “For the good of the nation, I would sacrifice even my life; how could I shrink from danger for personal gain?” — to calm my heart. To probe the “self” is insoluble; it only plunges me into a vortex. To search for the self is the same as to search for the cosmos — follow that path of deep thought to the end, and it will drive you mad.
In the tedium of daily life, we are always forced to regard ourselves as existing entities. When the events of others enter our lives, we begin to care about the connections between us, to reexamine ourselves, and then to worry or rejoice over others’ opinions of us. Lain, however, accepts the proposition that “a person exists within the memories of others.” And so Lain accepts that she is a program, that her way of existing takes many forms, and she wishes to extend this thesis to Alice. For Lain, Alice is a special person, a bond — and in truth, she symbolizes all others.
But just as all convoluted false syllogisms are defeated in an instant, so the simplest, most ordinary phrases often possess a lethally destructive power: “Thump, thump” — the sound of a heartbeat. We are all living beings. Connected or not, existing or not, real or not — we all possess a heartbeat.
The true self is singular. All that talk of dual personalities and multiple personalities, of split selves and fragmented selves — every person condenses from many selves into one. Like those two circles I once imagined: as our understanding of the outer world expands infinitely, our understanding of ourselves contracts infinitely. Every facet of you is you. However many ways of existing there may be, it is still one life. Whoever’s memory your existence depends upon, they all know only one you.
The outer circle’s boundary is boundless; the inner circle’s core grows increasingly refined — and at last, there is only stillness. This perhaps resonates, in some way, with Fei Xiaotong’s concept of “differential patterns of association.”
Future Day, Future Time
Though one can glimpse from it, however partially, reflections on consciousness, on the direction and resistance of human evolution, on the ultimate questions of “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?” — here, through the lens of Lain, I also wish to consider the future shape of society and the relationship between humans and machines.
After the implementation of real-name policies, the Internet lost much of its mystery. Now, with economic globalization advancing, various financial and IT monopolies are gradually taking form — because this vastly increases efficiency. The pie keeps growing. Megacity afflictions worsen by the day; centers of power coalesce. During the Cold War, the United States designed the Internet — originally named ARPANET — to prevent its computers from being wiped out in a single strike. (The well-known server software Apache also derives its name from this lineage.) Why that name? When colonial invaders captured the Inca emperor, the empire quickly crumbled. But indigenous tribes were much harder to systematically eliminate. The purpose of inventing the Internet was decentralization, and so it was named after the last Native American tribe to surrender to the United States.
Perhaps it is precisely the anonymity of the network that allows people to do online what they could never do in daily life. In Death Note, there is an episode: after Light Yagami begins punishing criminals, though people are unwilling to express their true feelings publicly — voicing only relatively moderate opinions in the open — in private, and especially on the Internet, they wholeheartedly endorse this extreme method. Under the daily influence and control of government and major media, the collective is, to some degree, unconscious — or at the very least, merely drifting with the current.
In the earliest days, I believed it was possible that, in the future, supra-governmental organizations might form on the Internet. Just as early file downloads required a specific website, but later P2P, eD2K, and BitTorrent protocols enabled peer-to-peer transfers without a central server — as long as someone still held the resource, there was no need to panic about the server hosting it being shut down. Even later, the emergence of virtual currencies in the real world, led by Ethereum and Bitcoin, pushed reality a giant step further in this direction — no central bank needed to regulate and issue currency, transactions completed directly. Perhaps in the future, anyone with a device will be able to exchange information. When people begin plotting unimaginable things online, this is a subversion of traditional social forms.
Later, as books deepened my understanding of society, it seemed that individual profit-seeking and collective development are perpetually at odds, and so those earlier notions — the entire subject, even — were shelved. To this day, I still feel I lack the capacity to continue that discussion.
Now, with the second explosion of generative artificial intelligence and robotics, the conversation about human-machine relations has once again been placed upon the table. Yet, aside from the early, robot-targeted Asimovian solution of the “Three Laws of Robotics,” humanity seems to have forgotten about itself.
Adding to the human. The most influential work in this vein is Ghost in the Shell. A robot’s mode of thinking can grow ever more human, and a human can become as indestructible as a machine. Artificial organs, mechanical limbs — this is already achievable, and it is nothing less than a form of evolution. The problem that follows is the collapse of ethics and the very motivation for human existence. At the end of the day, humans are biological organisms. The two most fundamental properties of a living being are: reacting to external stimuli — that is, the will to survive; and producing offspring capable of reproduction — that is, sexual desire. These two things have brought me so much suffering, and yet I remain alive to this day — only to enjoy those fleeting moments of pleasure. The imprint of the biological is indelible. As for what robots might think, we cannot predict. But once humans no longer rely on hormones for their responses, once they are fully converted into bodies of steel — what meaning remains in living? Reproduction would be nothing more than generating another copy. Where would the distinction between human and machine lie?
Subtracting from the human. I had thoughts along this line even before watching Lain; afterward, my mind was blown wide open. As long as the dream never ends, you believe you are in the real world. As a line from the anime puts it: “If the relevant memories are erased, one can say that event never happened.” The current trend in information storage is toward ever smaller physical volumes with ever greater capacity. What if the human body could be entirely removed, leaving only the mind and the carrier that houses it, stored within a sufficiently secure container, requiring only minimal energy, or capable of absorbing energy from the outside world? If it could move, if humans could interconnect — that would be even better. Just as the loss of desire can bring tranquility, and abandoning all hope can bring equanimity, humanity’s interaction with the world has two great attributes: understanding nature and transforming nature. If we largely give up on transforming nature, we come to understand it more. Words are written on paper; data is stored on disks. Can information exist without a carrier? If it could, we could replicate our own information, penetrate every corner of the cosmos, and form a unified whole. Such an act would be virtually indistinguishable from godhood. I like liveliness — but I prefer to watch it from a distance.
Let me close with a line from Saya no Uta: “Is it because reproduction has become too effortless? As a result, humans produced love. In another sense, the concept of love could be said to hinder biological reproduction. If, in nature, mutual affection were required to bring forth the next generation, I fear over ninety percent of species would vanish. Given that, must the beloved of a human being — encumbered by love — also be human? So long as the soul is pure, does outward form matter so little? Does so-called love ultimately arise from the spiritual, or from the physical?” Then my own question is this: like reproduction itself, does the meaning of human civilization’s development lie solely in preserving its own civilization while exporting its civilization and values as far as possible?