Lain, OK Computer and the brainrot

One of my favorite albums ever made is OK Computer, by Radiohead. A few years ago I was extremely obsessed with it, and I was the one who found the lost music video for Let Down, after digging through a lot of old portfolios around the old side of the internet.

OK Computer doesn’t really talk about technology, regardless of its title. The context where OK Computer was envisioned is somehow related to the old internet [1] with its nerdy dial-up fandom.

However, OK Computer is, for me, about the crippling anxiety that started consuming us as things got too fast too quickly.

Computers are fascinating machines, the internet is an amazing technology, but these tech advancements have boosted this anxiety that something is not right.

During the OK Computer release and subsequent anniversaries, Radiohead released a lot of things related to floppy disks and ZX Spectrum programs and a documentary, Meeting People is Easy, which I love a lot.

I can’t really put my finger on why OK Computer reminds me of nowadays. It was envisioned in a time where computers were bulky machines made for nerds. Companies were trying to push people into using AOL and emails, or to make their own websites, and some small companies such as Google, Amazon and eBay were showing up with its business model focused completely on nerd sniping.

Tracks such as Fitter Happier and titles such as Meeting People Is Easy (which for me is rather ironic) only reeinforce this anxiety, and Paranoid Android tells us that we should either be paranoid and anxious about the world, or maybe we should forget about it and try to live our best.

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Serial Experiments Lain was also created near this time, and the protagonist, Lain, who was rather disconnected and afraid of computers, decide to connect herself, a little too much if I must say.

The series is quite difficult to understand, but it talks a bit about not just, again, the anxiety of being connected, but also the loss of self – Lain’s personality get mixed with her Wired persona, in a way where we don’t know exactly who is she.

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We’ve been living the so-called “modern life” for almost 40 years now. To me, things were already pretty dynamic.

I love this movie, Koyaanisqatsi. It shows, as the subtitle says, “Life out of balance” – it’s rare and uncommon for us to reduce our pace now, but things have been moving uncomfortably fast for a while.

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Why am I writing about this stuff? Well, I find solace in writing, and this blog of mine is a bit of what we used to have back in the 2000s, when you had minimal Javascript on the so called world-wide web. When the economy of attention wasn’t an economy, but rather open-hearted attention, free as in freedom. Things on internet nowadays are bland, the magic of being connected is lost.

I love computers, but I hate modern internet in a way.

Anne.

[1] Internet Explorers: The Curious Case of Radiohead’s Online Fandom