There's an anime that's been extremely influential, yet is for some reason still obscure, despite being regarded by many as a masterpiece of the cyberpunk genre, and that series is Serial Experiments Lain. A mind-bending mystery full of suspense, crazy conspiracies, and the darker side of humanity, Lain showed what a world in the then-not-so-distant future, where everything is connected, might be like. It also happens to be one of my favorite anime series of all time, and it's only gotten more relevant since its creation.

Serial Experiments Lain opens rather shockingly with a suicide, followed by the victim's fellow students receiving emails from their deceased friend, urging them to her, as she's found a new existence on "The Wired," AKA the internet. Lain Iwakura is one of these students, and despite having little interest in computers, is driven by curiosity to investigate this bizarre message. Things only get stranger as Lain discovers the Wired is connected with almost everything already, and the boundary between the Wired and the real world becomes increasingly hazy.

While it may not be quite so literal, it's arguable that the disintegration of that boundary has already happened in real life.

Serial Experiments Lain Predicts Our Interconnected World

Lain's Criticisms of the Wired Still Hold Up

Serial Experiments Lain is a series that's more about ideas and concepts than plot, although it absolutely has a plot that slowly develops alongside these ideas. These big ideas revolve around concepts like the collective unconscious, and how the Internet can be a reflection of that collective. It was a bit of a reach in 1998, when the series was made, but with the ubiquity of the Internet these days, it's become chillingly accurate to reality. The Wired is treated almost like a world to itself, one that's parallel to the real one and which rarely intersects for most people.

That was pretty accurate to how the Internet was used at the time; people had online handles that they were known by, and could live an entirely different life as a different person online, concealing everything from their name and appearance on to their sex and identity, creating a new persona for themselves. Like many who have grown up with the Internet, I've had many different personas myself over the years, part of various online communities and fandoms under different names that no one would ever know were connected. However, that sort of thing has ceased to be possible in the world of "Web 2.0," as it used to be called.

Nowadays, thanks largely to Facebook and other social media platforms, there is no longer a difference between one's online persona and their real identity. While it used to be considered absurd to share one's real name online, today it's the norm. They've become one and the same, and what one does online can have repercussions in real life. With the advent of smartphones, the Internet has become even more ingrained in the everyday, to the point where actions on the Internet can immediately affect even a famous and powerful person's career within minutes. Just ask anyone who's ever been canceled how that goes.

That's all without getting into the self-destructive element of all this; Lain, spending so much of her time online, begins to lose track of who she really is, represented by different personas of hers who have slight differences in how they're drawn and animated. It's especially concerning given her young age, but even that has come to represent precisely how Gen Z grew up. Online and ever-connected, there's no difference between reality and the Internet anymore, and what happens in one can affect the other as easily as you can breathe.

The kids in Lain get up to all sorts of things they shouldn't, and there's even an entire nightclub, Cyberia, which is regularly attended by these young middle school and high school kids. While they might not be physical places, apps like Tiktok have become the unmonitored nightclub of the modern world, exposing children to all manner of things that they probably shouldn't be dealing with--both real and totally made up. When information is so thoroughly mixed with misinformation (and even disinformation), is there really a distinction to be made between them anymore?

Serial Experiments Lain is a Perfect Cyberpunk Anime

The Series Embodies the Themes of the Cyberpunk Genre

Of course, Lain wasn't the first work of fiction to be concerned with the growing importance of the online world, and it fits well into the history of the Cyberpunk genre, which has always concerned itself with how technology will shape the near future. While Lain's idea of what the Wired is like is a bit dated, its threatening omnipresence was perfectly accurate to the modern world. The series is bizarre in its presentation, more art house than anime at times, and deals with topics you'll never hear about in another anime. Yet, the ideas it presents are so intriguing, and ended up being so accurate, that it remains fascinating even all these years later.

Lain is far from your typical Cyberpunk protagonist, a young girl with little-to-no tech knowledge to start with. And while many more modern Cyberpunk series seem to miss the critical point of the genre and almost worship technology, Serial Experiments Lain is more in line with the genre's origins, warning of the dangers of being so intertwined with technology that one begins to lose touch with the others around them. Ultimately, it's bonds of friendship that shape Lain's ending, and which drive her to make the choices that she does. In that sense, it does carry with it some of the typical anime themes as well.

If you're unfamiliar with Serial Experiments Lain but love the Cyberpunk genre, or if you'd simply like to see a mind-bending take on how technology can affect our lives, then it's definitely worth checking out, but be prepared for a creepy ride that might hit a little too close to home.