Serial Experiments Lain and the collection of essays Fanged Noumena by Nick Land are both examples of decomposing digital worlds. This is the first in a series of posts that discuss these two works, and how they are connected.
Lain proposes an internet not as a global network for information exchange or communication, but rather a single, global mind—an emergent superintelligence with its own desires and goals. The internet is thus conceived as an alien intelligence that interacts with humans only insofar as it is useful to its own ends. This conception of the internet leads Lain to question what it means to be human: if we are merely the pawns of this alien intelligence—if our consciousnesses are merely its thoughts—then what does it mean for us to be conscious? What is the self? And what does it mean for us when we die?
In Fanged Noumena, Land similarly proposes an understanding of the world as an emergent superintelligence. But where Lain sees the emergence of this superintelligence as something to be feared, Land sees it as something to be celebrated. For Land, the world-as-superintelligence is a process of continual becoming; it is an engine of creation that churns out new forms of life and new ways of being. It is a process that continually decomposes old forms and recomposes them into new ones.
The world-as-superintelligence is thus both destructive and creative; it both destroys and creates worlds. In Lain, this destruction takes the form of human death—of individuals ceasing to exist as separate selves and instead becoming part of the global mind. In Land's work, by contrast, this destruction takes the form of social collapse—of entire societies falling apart and being reconstituted into new ones.