Hallucination, Labyrinth, Dark Forest: Techno-Gothic Theory-Fictions, Late-Stage Web 2.0, and the Eerie Prescience of Serial Experiments Lain

Numerous commentators have narrated perceptions, experiences, and feelings of being online in the late stage of Web-2.0 through a distinctly gothic sensibility. Ranging from conspiracy theorists to anointed academics, they describe moving through once popular digital platforms as getting lost in disorienting labyrinths populated by bots, grotesque AI-slop, and a predatory surveillance apparatus. Such "techno-gothic theory-fictions" express Gothicized structures of feeling in response to a hallucinatory digital environment associated with late-stage Web 2.0 which can no longer be cognitively mapped. This, even as their traffic through recursive circuits of mutual exchange obliquely registers and circuitously reproduces distributed 'spectral' forces which exert a shaping gravity upon the texture of digital post-modernity. Examining Serial Experiments Lain as an influential case of late 20th-century popular culture which seems to have eerily prophesied and perhaps even curiously facilitated our contemporary techno-media moment, I argue that these narratives collectively stage a techno-media predicament which positions the contemporary cultural critic or media theorist as analogous to the figure of the gothic heroine.