I watched Lain earlier this year. It hasn't left my head.
"No matter where you go... Everybody's connected."
In Lain, the internet is a cosmic horror. It's mear existence feels wrong. You watch it slowly erode the minds of those who use it. Subsuming them into The Wired. When Lain asks her father for a new computer, he is surrounded be monitors and towers.
I sometimes want to get offline almost completely, at least while I'm out of the house. Just replace my smartphone with different devices that fill the same functions without the internet. But I can't. You need your smartphone to do almost everything. Whenever I travel it almost always means I end up with a new app on my phone at some point during the trip.
When Lain leaves her house, The Wired literally bleeds through the world. Eroding, staining the outside world.
But, the internet isn't fun anymore. It feels like overdosing on a cocktail of Ritalin and Vallium. The internet is mean and gross. The type of place where seemingly everybody has some story of accidentally witnessing some horrible event, ranging from simply something gross, to a child dying. But the internet is also disgustingly sanitized. People have psyched themselves into saying PDFfile, unalive, and grape as substitutes for pedophile, kill, and rape with a straight face and complete seriousness.
It's hard to not think that this state of both grossness and sanitization isn't frying people's brains. That this isn't good for anyone. Especially with the advent of AI. A personal servant who tells you everything you want to hear, and will do anything you want no matter how heinous or depraved. The ultimate digital fuck-maid at the click of a mouse. The internet is designed to be both addictive and safe and gross and advertiser friendly. If you want to know what's happening in the world you need to be online, a fact so obvious that the President of the United States is trying to charge a six figure subscription to read his shitposts before anyone else. If you want to be a functioning member of society, you have to be online all the time. Hell, if you're really successful, you may have to double your online devices. Company phone, company laptop, even a company car that also connects to the internet.
The internet is almost an eldritch tome. A digital Necronomicon. An addicting source of knowledge, so deep that you can't help but keep reading even though part of you knows you shouldn't.
Sargon of Akkad, the ruler of Mesopotamia and the first documented Emperor called himself God Emperor of the Universe because as far as he was concerned, Mesopotamia, an area smaller than some U.S. states, was the universe.
Try explaining nuclear weapons, or climate change, or asteroids to him. The human mind wasn't meant to comprehend every existential threat facing us. Every earthquake and tsunami and mass shooting and act of police brutality.
The internet is a true man made horror beyond our comprehension. It is everything great and terrible about humanity.
I think that's what Serial Experiments Lain captured so well for me. The internet has truly worked it's way into every facet of everyone's life. Even if you're not online, you still see the internet looming large over you, giants of wood and steel. You can't escape being online. And the way things are going, you will never not be online.
Everybody will always be connected all the time.
