No.2371
I watched lain for the first time in 2016, and to me at the time I drew a lot of connections with the politico-cybernetic dimension of social life and I think lain was actually supposed to be more of a speculation about how we would relate to the internet as a collective group in the future. For example, to most people outside of 4chan before 2016 the alt right probably seemed like something mysterious and contingent to them, kind of like lain at her computer, but as time went on physical outbursts occurred in the more obvious public space that were the result of these mysterious contradictions in the internet, laymen started to become aware of what places like 4chan are and how the internet is cultivating Nazi terrorism at a crazy scale. As a student of Hegel I think the parallels between Lain and the alt-right are because they’re both a very dialectical motion from things that once seemed contingent and mysterious becoming necessary and unavoidable in the public consciousness, in particular for the case of the internet and how it relates with the rest of public collective experience. I think even today a lot of the people are unaware of how they’re being ideologically manipulated by algorithms and driven into an ignorance that might result in an eventful outburst in the real world again, changing our Zeitgeist and making us more aware of these same contradictions. Lain to me is more or less an allegory for a Badiouan truth-event that the internet experiences as a subject.