Serial Experiment Lain: Wandering Through Digital Identities
No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.
Japan can take pride in having produced some of the most intriguing dystopian cyberpunk acts out there. There must have been something inside the wires keeping the city awake all night that turned this little island into a Pandora box of strange, avant-garde shenanigans that gathered a cult fanbase.
If I say Neon Genesis Evangelion, chances are most people will have some recollection of what the show is about. However, not the same can be said about Serial Experiment Lain, perhaps the more bleak but nonetheless just as existential younger sibling of the former.
The story follows a 14 year old girl, Lain, on her path to digital martyrdom after she is initiated into The Wired, a virtual realm almost identical to the internet we use daily which contains all forms of communication between humans. After the suicide of one of her classmates, Lain falls victim of bizarre situations which happen to involve not only her, but different versions of herself interacting between the real and the digital world. This leads her to question her own identity and eventually the legitimacy of human existence itself, concerns that have followed us since forever, only shifting from a supernatural realm made of celestial entities and their whims to a virtual space of digital personae.
As her technical proficiency develops further, Lain scrapes down layers of crypticity with no certain truths: the entire burden of trying to find an answer is left to the viewer.
Released the same year of Google in 1998, the show predicted the extended usage of social media and their addictive qualities that were to follow at the turn of the century: a lethal mix of self-posting mythology built around the cult of an Identity that cannot end up in anything else but the realization of having lost self-control.
Did religions really fade away? In the West, starting from the 17th century religious beliefs were slowly replaced by scientific knowledge, and this shift became a clear way to distinguish euro-centric countries from other societies where the belief in higher entities was still systemic. Today, with scientific rationality and technological development we believe to be centuries away from a religious structure. Yet, if we really do think about it, with our on-going progression towards the digitalization of life, concrete physical reality and abstract digital reality have already merged into a space that bears high resemblance to what we’ve defined as a religion: the symbiosis between the two realms into one single reality where neither can no longer be told apart from the other.
To a degree, anyone who uses the Internet today also has a divine quality: the ability to exist and be observed by everyone else on Earth who is connected either through wi-fi or data without being physically anywhere.
PEOPLE ONLY HAVE SUBSTANCE WITHIN THE MEMORIES OF OTHERS. THAT’S WHY THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF MEs. THERE WEREN’T ALL KINDS OF MEs. I WAS JUST INSIDE ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE, THAT’S ALL.
“I’m me, right? There’s no other me but me, right?”, Lain asks herself. To believe otherwise would contradict the notion of a unitary localization of identity, i.e. that at a specific point in time, human identity exists at a specific point in space. Identity, for Lain, needs distinct coordinates, a way to situate oneself uniquely among the grid-lines of physical existence: As long as I am aware of myself, my true self is inside me.
Throughout the story, Lain takes upon different identities she doesn’t have any recollection of, and the memories of others acts as a kind of landscape for the subject of her identity.
The perceptions of others blurring our perceptions of self. A similar approach is taken in Perfect Blue (1997), where public personas – in this case coming from teen celebrities - are shown to be fully real only when they are accepted by the public we are trying to convey them to. If and when the public refuses to accept an alteration to this image we've put forth, our own personal identity is in potential danger and without an identity, what are we left with?
We’ve been warned about how once something goes online, it’s going to be there forever.
Now, if anything we post online can be considered as an extension of our identity - as it’s linked to our username -, this means that whenever someone else comes across that content we’ve published, there’s a passive interaction that allows the original poster to be perceived concurrently in many different places.
Knowing that oneself is subject to the gaze of others beyond our control can potentially distort one’s personal perception of self in tiny fragments all reflecting different nuances of the same person until that very individual is gone.
The Internet and social media have now become a corporeal/non-corporeal embodiment of Jung’s collective unconscious. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual. We’re releasing daily content that rewires itself in order to create architypes, mythology, and influencers. The internet is a place where we share and participate in as well as digest and ingest, so that our new online state of living has created an almost tangible collective unconscious which is created by us and where we are born into as well. The transcript of our online existence written in binary language maintains a divine-like nature as it develops, grows, and exists past each user personally and yet reflects within each of one of our psyche. We’re floating in a digital conscious collective unconscious.
At the end of the series Lain sacrifices her existence by erasing herself from everyone’s memory, but she does not die yet. In real life she still exists, but all the events that occurred involving her went through a factory reset So where’s the footprint of her existence?
There are concepts and entities that can be real even without having a physical presence. Numbers or geometrical figures, for instance. They are real in the counsciousness of people without actually being there, so they hold a value regardless.
A memory loss or simply not having awareness of their existence erases this possibility.
NEITHER THE OBJECTS OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD NOR HUMAN ACTS HAVE ANY AUTONOMOUS INTRINSIC VALUE. OBJECTS OR ACTS ACQUIRE A VALUE, AND IN SO DOING BECOME REAL, BECAUSE THEY PARTICIPATE, AFTER ONE FASHION OR ANOTHER, IN A REALITY THAT TRANSCENDS THEM.
- MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN BY MIRCEA ELIADE
