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I don’t know about you but I’d rather be depressed in a mansion than in a studio.

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I loved watching it back in high school and I saw it a couple of times after. It’s one of those pieces of art that really stays with you like Ghost in the Shell, Twin Peaks, Silent Hill 2, or The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

I find myself just randomly thinking about something from these things often. There’s a real value to that kind of challenging and weird stuff and I think people should expose themselves to it more often.

I’d encourage people in the case of Lain to look past the slow pace and late 90s aesthetics and just let the experience wash over you. You’ll come out a bit richer.

I don’t think that Lain actually had an overarching theme. This is only my personal opinion but to me it was like a series of loosely connected musings on how the Internet might transform individuals and society.

There’s a lot of stuff there about the nature of hypertext (the references to Memex and Vanevar Bush) and the concepts of addressability and indexicality — this is the theme of connection and identification. But these also intimations of how the Internet could be used for control and surveillance…

If there’s one place where it all intersects I’d say it’s in the concept of technique as explained by Jacques Elul. Essentially, technology is not a neutral thing. It reshapes the world and society and makes us adapt to it.

I feel that’s a prescient warning about what smartphones and social media ended up doing both to individuals and society.

Just to be clear I am not saying this is **the interpretation ** of Serial Experiments Lain, just mine.

In the end people should watch it precisely because it’s so provocative and can be read in many ways.

With social media, the message is more relevant than ever.

It’s not an action anime, it’s basically 13-part video essay but people should challenge themselves from time to time. And especially anime fans.

Thank you Big Brother for protecting me.

Rational choice theory has been debunked over and over.