A note popped up in my feeds that we’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of an Anime cult-classic: Serial Experiments: Lain. Akin to Sci-Fi, Anime can get away with asking questions and playing with ideas that other forms of media can’t get away with because Anime is just… you know, cartoons. Not being a gamer or a child of the 80s, I came to Anime quite late and with no cultural reference to use to understand what I was watching. It was amazing and more than a little confusing. Ghost in the Shell, Akira and Serial Experiments: Lain were the first three that I found myself immersed in. 

I got into Lain just when I was spending a lot of time hardware hacking my PCs and Macs, trying to get them to do the cool things I saw in Sci-Fi and Anime. Lain used an audio-cue, a hum, to represent “The Wire,” the series version of the Internet. But, with my background as a telecom tech, I recognized the hum as a 40-KHz tone that comes from A/C power currents and not networked communication. I also loved that the creators slipped in references to “Copland OS,” the operating system project name that Apple and IBM had been working on but later abandoned and BeOS, another Mac-like operating system that was developed by a former-Apple engineer that had a card-type user-interface similar to the one used in the Anime. Nerd.

The series also explored Dissociative Identity Disorder, doppelgängers, differences between ones  online and offline personalities, the intrusion of the online world into the “real world,” Virtual Reality and the nature of the Self. There’s some UFO conspiracy theories, corporate/secret society/government fights to control the emerging connected world and existence as a form of memory, all in 13 short episodes. 

I rewatch the series quite a bit actually. There’s something future-retro about the dad having six giant CRT monitors on his semi-wrap-around desk with  four tower PCs all in beige, typing away on a loud clicky keyboard. Later, when Lain really gets into it, she has to drive her giant cabinet sized computers using an elaborate liquid cooling system, that eventually floods her bedroom floor. 30-years later, for me, all those CRTs are replaced by two large flat-panel  LED screens run by a Mac Studio about 2/3rds the size of a shoe box. Alas, I never developed the knack to talk to my computers or let them talk to me. Good times. 

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Tags: anime, lain, retro future tech, serial experiments lain, video Mondays 

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