Lain screenshots

Computer wiring tunnel inside an abandoned coal power plant.

Serial Experiments Lain traces the emergence of the Internet and the transformation it has brought about in the technologies of subjectivity that govern human forms of self-reference, categories of perception, and forms of communication. One of the most commonly accepted ideologies of cyberspace, at the time Serial Experiments Lain was first aired on Japan’s TV Tokyo network in the late 1990s, portrayed the Internet as a zone of unbridled democracy and freedom of expression, yet Serial Experiments Lain offered a counterdiscourse, linking the digital realm, referred to as “the Wired,” to surveillance technologies and a control society. In Serial Experiments Lain, the world of cyberspace is haunted by the anonymous eye of the Panopticon. What was all too often ignored by early Internet theorists in their enthusiasm for the “egalitarian” open-endedness of web surfing was the extent to which the reader user is subjected to the preprogrammed constraints and filtered selectivity of Web site nodes constituting a virtual network of links. Choices and options, no matter how decentralized, exist only to the extent that web programming and search engine algorithms make them possible. As the Internet spread to every corner of the world and was embraced as a sort of “digital democracy,” Serial Experiments Lain warned us of the need to be more attentive to the new “technologies of the self” enframing the subjectification of Internet users.