"At least now you’re free to become anything you want."

"...No, I guess you were actually free all along."

"...Perhaps."

It can be said that the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain has been prescient about many aspects about our current reality in 2026—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, Filipino 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]Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself (ekenōsen heauton), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name… (Philippians 2:5-9, NRSV) 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]And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14, NRSV)

The shaman 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 kannushi 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]"I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we're tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn't look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that's what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds." —Steve Jobs, from "Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress" (1990) https://youtu.be/6kalMB8jDnY?si=pl-v5EadrdMcogMb&t=209

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."

///END TRANSMISSION///