~*~ 2026 | 05 | 29 ~*~
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uh oh. i am going to start typing about the internet again. that's right, "the internet," "connecting people together," "a place where you can make friends,". the same thing i have written about quite a few times on here. i just can't bring myself to stop.
pulling friends out of the internet is a pretty interesting phenomenon. it's definitely one of those things where you get out what you put in - it's part of that phenomenon i've described in earlier blog posts as most people only wanting to use the internet as a passive consumption tool rather than an active, creative tool. the same could be said of the relationships forged using that same tool. materially, one of the few things that has changed about the internet over the last 20 years has been the communication tools/devices used to access & post on it. it's become quite common/passe to romanticise desktop computing - there was a point a fair few months ago now about desktop computing as a special "place," where you'd have to go put conscious time into posting on the internet, as if nobody ever walked past a computer & posted on it without giving a damn. personally i don't really buy into the whole psychogeography of the comptuer desk sort of deal - whilst i see it as generally true that the technological systems only grow more exploitative with time, i would say that is more an inevitability of capitalist consumerism than anything else.
the consumer of a product is the exploited. to open up & consume a product is actually to let it consume you, at least in its impermanence & necessity for replacement. it varies amongst commodities - when considering the whole wide market of commodities, including commodified experiences & identities solicited in the "marketplace of ideas," (more like "marketplace of images,") the internet as a communications network is often romanticised as an idealistic, immaterial layer that enhances reality, enabling such a miraculous world of creation that leaves consumers wondering what/how/why they did anything before it. it is no wonder then, that people find a mysterious or enchanting sense of community, or communities past, pervading the internet, obscuring its meaning, excluding the user as the sole & singular beholder in a sea of other potential numbers of people, who are also sitting there on the other end operating the radio apparatus, as normal as anybody else would. the idea was sold to me as a teenager through fiction like serial experiments lain. serial experiments lain is not science fiction, it is a ghost story told about computers. in it, the internet is about as real as heaven or hell. its ability to influence reality is cartoonish & exaggerated. there is not much actually articulated about computing so much as its theory & practice as much as its american government origins & a few psychedelic lampoons of what reincarnation might be like if it could be had over internet protocol - & not even real internet protocol, magical internet protocol from the world beyond, so sayeth the psychedelic delusions. within minutes of runtime, the show establishes a very clear dreamlike or delusional quality to the scenes, lest the audience believe our titular high school heroine naturally has the ability to produce smoke from her fingertips in class. that night, her dead schoolmate speaks to her through her magic computer. there is no fancy hacking occurring here. this is just yuurei banashi for children, adult children who are looking to peruse for a japanese adult (not in that way,) cartoon, who might cotton towards an image of a young girl using a computer.
regardless, though, i was pretty hooked, & for quite a long time i couldn't really figure out just what about the story was centrally important to me, just that it was this cool anime about a girl & computers & a bunch of pseudo-philosophical babble about the internet & death. i guess for a while i was pretty convinced nobody else understood it - & i still to an extent think this was true until a certain point, perhaps i myself am delusional, but i think it's not really too wild to suggest that in amongst the myriad of confusing things occurring onscreen during the show, most viewers will find themselves lost either as to why things are happening the way they are, or in trying to keep track of any semblance of consistent plot - at least without ascribing much of it to magical computers. now that i think of it, most people probably didn't even watch the whole thing. there it goes again, that phenomenon of idealising oneself as the lone seer of an immaterial reality accessed via keyboard. what's interesting to me about it now is that i wonder whether or not i was just being dramatic/emotional. it's hard to place a reason for exactly why i felt a certain way about the more ephemeral & mysterious components of the show. i think that is the nature of dogmatic material itself - once the cracks start to show, the illusion shatters soon after.
i still think it is a pretty good mind-puzzle of a narrative, being admittedly a sucker for stories of any kind of intrigue, & i think being a very haphazard & freeform mixed-medium artwork gives it a sort of aloof charm where it is allowed to relax its narrative consistency for the sake of posing a deeper question, or to simply add drama or suspense. there is also something to be lauded in what is not divulged, which i have always thought of as reminiscent of japanese language & culture's indirect & inferral airs & attitudes, although it is communicated in all cultural modes & langauges. the japanese association is one purely borne of my own subjective nostalgia for discovering, & falling in love with, stories, circumstantially & coincidentally of that nature by japanese anime. the powerful ability of an author to capivate attention & paint evocative scenes, only to leave the meaning of it all to interpretation is something that was taught to me by lain & other texts, so perhaps the reason why it sat so neatly in my mind is because i have more of a zest for fiction & storytelling, aka role-play, than any sort of woo woo government conspiracy or computer hacker trivia. the narrative, as well as the animation itself, may as well just be anything when it is just another product in a planned media-release franchise funded by pioneer electronics, the same as the ps1 game or whatever else is in the "franchise". it's a nice, curated dvd, tape or laserdisc you have on the shelf. it's a piece of money, an object. the images contained therein are almost somewhat of an afterthought, although a very expensive & crafted afterthought.
anyway, i have more to say on this, but i am going to post it to the website as-is anyway, because i have had this file open in my editor for many days. as usual, i don't have much to say other than "bluh bluh i am planning to write more stuff later,".
:) :) :) ty for reading :) :) :)
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