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Serial Experiments Lain Predicts Our Connected World Serial Experiments Lain Is The Perfect Cyberpunk Anime
There is one anime series that is incredibly influential, but for some reason remains little known, despite being considered by many to be a masterpiece of the cyberpunk genre, and that series is Lain Serial Experiment. A mind-bending mystery filled with suspense, crazy conspiracies, and the dark side of humanity, Lain showed what a not-so-distant future world where everything is connected could be like. It also happens to be one of my all-time favorite anime, and it has only gotten more relevant since its creation.
Serial Experiments Lain opens with a rather shocking suicide, followed by the victim’s classmates receiving emails from their deceased friend, urging them to join her, as she has found a new existence on “The Wired,” aka the internet. Lain Iwakura is one of these students, and despite having little interest in computers, she is curious to investigate this strange message. Things only get stranger as Lain discovers that the Wired is connected to almost everything, and the line between the Wired and the real world becomes increasingly blurred.
While it may not be entirely literal, it can be argued that the dissolution of that boundary has happened in real life.
Lain's Serial Experiments Predict Our Connected World
Lain's Criticisms of Wired Still Hold True
Serial Experiments Lain is a series that focuses more on ideas and concepts than plot, although it does have a plot that slowly develops along with those ideas. These big ideas revolve around concepts like the collective unconscious and how the Internet can reflect that collective. It was a bit over the top in 1998 when the series was made, but with the prevalence of the Internet today, it has become chillingly accurate to reality. The Wired is almost considered a separate world, one that parallels the real world and rarely intersects with most people.
That was pretty much how the Internet was used at the time; people had an online name by which they were known, and could live a completely different life as someone else online, hiding everything from their name and appearance to their gender and identity, creating a new persona for themselves. Like many people who grew up on the Internet, I myself had multiple personas over the years, being part of many online communities and fandoms under different names that no one knew were related. However, that kind of thing is no longer possible in the world of “Web 2.0,” as it’s called.
Nowadays, thanks largely to Facebook and other social media platforms, there is no longer a distinction between a person's online persona and their real identity. While it used to be considered ridiculous to share your real name online, today it is the norm.. They have become one and the same, and what a person does online can have real-life implications. With the advent of smartphones, the Internet has become more ingrained in everyday life, to the point where actions taken online can instantly impact the career of a famous and powerful person in a matter of minutes. Just ask anyone who has ever been canceled how it works.
That's all that remains without going into the self-destructive element of all this; Lain, spending too much time online, begins to lose track of her true self.represented by her different characters, who all have slight differences in the way they're drawn and animated. This was especially disturbing when she was younger, but even that represents exactly how Gen Z is growing up. Online and always connected, there's no longer a distinction between reality and the Internet, and what happens in one can affect the other as easily as you can breathe.
The kids of Lain do all sorts of things they shouldn’t, and there’s even a nightclub, Cyberia, that’s frequented by these middle and high school kids. While they may not be physical locations, apps like TikTok have become the unsupervised nightclubs of the modern world, exposing kids to all sorts of things they probably shouldn’t be dealing with—both real and made up. When information is so thoroughly mixed with misinformation (and even disinformation), is there really a distinction between the two anymore?
Serial Experiments Lain is a Perfect Cyberpunk Anime
The series features themes of the Cyberpunk genre.
Of course, Lain isn't the first work of fiction to address the growing importance of the online world, and it fits into the history of the Cyberpunk genre, which has always been concerned with how technology will shape the near future. While Lain's idea of the Wired is somewhat dated, its menacing omnipresence is absolutely spot-on for the modern world. The series has a strange presentation, sometimes more art than anime, and it deals with topics you'd never hear in any other anime. Yet the ideas it presents are so compelling and ultimately so accurate that they're still compelling even after all these years.
Lain isn't your typical Cyberpunk protagonist, a young girl with little to no knowledge of technology to begin with. And while many modern Cyberpunk series seem to miss the point of the genre and almost worship technology, Serial Experiments Lain is more in line with the genre's roots, warning of the dangers of becoming so attached to technology that one begins to lose touch with the other people around her. Ultimately, it's her friendships that shape Lain's ending and drive her to make the choices she does. In that sense, it also carries some typical anime themes.
If you are not familiar with Lain Serial Experiment but if you love the Cyberpunk genre, or if you just want to see a new perspective on how technology can affect our lives, then it's definitely worth checking out, but be prepared for a scary ride that might hit a little close to home.
