PRESENT DAY… hehe…

PRESENT TIME!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

This kind of image from the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain has become our current reality—it resonates widely even beyond the show's cult following. Aesthetic, as they say. But where does it come from?

The series follows Lain, a Japanese teenager in suburban Tokyo, who receives an email from a classmate who committed suicide a week earlier: "I only abandoned my flesh. I can tell that I'm still alive… God is here."

The first thing you notice? The hum of electric wires.

The show's atmosphere is hallucinatory, hypnagogic—other characters recall a Lain she doesn't recognize. Neither you nor Lain can guess what is actually happening. The Wired, this world's version of the internet, slowly bleeds into mundane life. Lain eventually learns that she's a program designed to bridge the Wired and reality.

By the end, Lain "ascends" to become the Wired's "goddess"—but her apotheosis is strange. She erases all memory of herself, empties her 'self' out. She doesn't choose between worlds or merge them. Instead, Lain becomes the liminal infrastructure that enables both to exist—everywhere and nowhere, invisible.

She has become that hum of electrical wires that one would hear throughout the show.

"I promise you I'll always be right here. I'm right next to you, forever."

This kind of figure is not new. Threshold-walkers, psychopomps, the between-dwellers. Siberian shamans, Amazonian ayahuasceros, Korean mudang, Shinto kannushi. And in the Philippines, we have the babaylan. What did these figures all have in common? They shared a common technology—autovesselization—the ability to make themselves empty vessels.

The Christian tradition recognizes this movement: kenosis^[1]—self-emptying.

In this state, they are able to intercede between worlds, are able to speak to spirits & entities of other worlds, are able to make one intelligible to the other—a protocol made flesh.^[2]

The babaylan would enter trance states through ritual—chanting, dancing, invoking—until the 'self' dissolves. In this emptied state, spirits and other worlds can speak through them. They make themselves nobody so something else can be present. The babaylan becomes a living interface through which the human realm communicates with the dead, calls rain & translates the language of rocks.

The babaylan autovesselizes into ritual technology—the body becomes an interface through trance or other mental states. Lain autovesselizes into computational technology—her being becomes protocol. Both are in the same liminal position. They are a membrane—permeable, translating, keeping worlds in contact.

We live decades past Lain's time. The real world & the internet have long since overlapped—not merged, but layered—it coexists with the physical world with its own logic, & its own kind of inhabitants. It's another ecological system—much like the realm of rocks or dreams are. Still we speak of the digital as a fundamental Other, an object separate from us to be escaped to & escaped from. We speak of "touching grass" as if we don't see grass on TikTok or Instagram Reels—as if our computers haven't molded to our proprioception.^[3]

We are all already hybrids, already liminal. The babaylan did not even conceive of this position as a problem to solve but a position to inhabit.

"No matter where you are, everyone's connected."