Lain comes from a five-seconds-into-the-future, late-90s Tokyo much like the real one, but with a sort of cyberpunk/magical realist bent. In particular, by creating telecommunication networks which link the far corners of the globe, humanity is gradually turning into a vast neural network, replicating the processes of synaptical activity in the brain. Some theorize that this means humanity is headed for a kind of (wait for it) singularity, in which all human consciousness is linked and the breakdown between the real world and the Wired (a collective term for all telecommunication from phone and television to the internet) is complete.
It's hard to take on Lain's world literally because it's largely subjective and metaphorical. The conceptualization of an "other world" created with the invention of the telegraph and telephone draws upon Industrial-age spiritualism, the same which supposed you could telegraph the dead or use a TV screen for a seance. By creating the Wired, mankind effectively creates the afterlife itself: a sort of liminal between-realm existing in the ether (or Schumann resonance, as the series draws on) and accessible by electronic device or strong will alone. Lain is someone capable of both.
To break it down more nitty-gritty, some time before the series start, a computer programmer for Tachibana Labs, Masami Eiri, wrote his own subroutine into the upcoming 7th Internet Protocol, meant to replace bugs in the existing IP system. By doing so, Eiri is able to passively monitor and shape events all throughout the Wired. He then uploads his own consciousness to the net as a digital backup. When his physical body dies a few days later, he's presumed to be out of the picture when Protocol 7 goes live, but he soon starts speaking to Lain through the electronic hum of the city itself, drawing her further into an internet addiction that soon totally supplants her life.
It becomes apparent that Lain, herself, acts as a barrier or tertiary state between the physical world of individuals and the Wired's promised collective consciousness, where thought and action are directly linked. The challenge Lain faces is which she will ultimately side with: allowing humanity to continue to struggle and grow as individuals, or forcibly evolving them into the neural network. Individualism vs consensus reality.
(If this sounds exactly like Evangelion that's because it pretty much is.)
Lain has few stabilizing elements in her life. Urban Japan as it's depicted in the series is cold, self-absorbed and cruel. Her family turn out to be somewhere between automatons and actors, simply there to provide the barest, alien semblance of family; of all her classmates, only one --Alice-- genuinely reaches out to and cares for her, and pretty much represents all that is good and worth living for in the human world. Although Lain is an internet celebrity and, by this point, a distributed intelligence, Alice remains the only actual friend Lain has ever had.
LAIN IWAKURA 2/5
Lain comes from a five-seconds-into-the-future, late-90s Tokyo much like the real one, but with a sort of cyberpunk/magical realist bent. In particular, by creating telecommunication networks which link the far corners of the globe, humanity is gradually turning into a vast neural network, replicating the processes of synaptical activity in the brain. Some theorize that this means humanity is headed for a kind of (wait for it) singularity, in which all human consciousness is linked and the breakdown between the real world and the Wired (a collective term for all telecommunication from phone and television to the internet) is complete.
It's hard to take on Lain's world literally because it's largely subjective and metaphorical. The conceptualization of an "other world" created with the invention of the telegraph and telephone draws upon Industrial-age spiritualism, the same which supposed you could telegraph the dead or use a TV screen for a seance. By creating the Wired, mankind effectively creates the afterlife itself: a sort of liminal between-realm existing in the ether (or Schumann resonance, as the series draws on) and accessible by electronic device or strong will alone. Lain is someone capable of both.
To break it down more nitty-gritty, some time before the series start, a computer programmer for Tachibana Labs, Masami Eiri, wrote his own subroutine into the upcoming 7th Internet Protocol, meant to replace bugs in the existing IP system. By doing so, Eiri is able to passively monitor and shape events all throughout the Wired. He then uploads his own consciousness to the net as a digital backup. When his physical body dies a few days later, he's presumed to be out of the picture when Protocol 7 goes live, but he soon starts speaking to Lain through the electronic hum of the city itself, drawing her further into an internet addiction that soon totally supplants her life.
It becomes apparent that Lain, herself, acts as a barrier or tertiary state between the physical world of individuals and the Wired's promised collective consciousness, where thought and action are directly linked. The challenge Lain faces is which she will ultimately side with: allowing humanity to continue to struggle and grow as individuals, or forcibly evolving them into the neural network. Individualism vs consensus reality.
(If this sounds exactly like Evangelion that's because it pretty much is.)
Lain has few stabilizing elements in her life. Urban Japan as it's depicted in the series is cold, self-absorbed and cruel. Her family turn out to be somewhere between automatons and actors, simply there to provide the barest, alien semblance of family; of all her classmates, only one --Alice-- genuinely reaches out to and cares for her, and pretty much represents all that is good and worth living for in the human world. Although Lain is an internet celebrity and, by this point, a distributed intelligence, Alice remains the only actual friend Lain has ever had.