In 1994, a 17-year-old Boy Scout named David Hahn tried to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's garden shed in Michigan.
He came closer than anyone expected.
After earning a merit badge in Atomic Energy, David became obsessed with building his own breeder reactor. He had no way to get real nuclear fuel, so he improvised.
He pulled americium out of hundreds of smoke detectors, scraped radium off antique clocks, and took thorium from camping lanterns.
To learn how to assemble it all, he wrote letters to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pretending to be a science teacher.
It never became a working reactor. But by the summer of 1994, the radiation in the shed was 1,000 times higher than normal, and could be detected several houses away.
David realized he had lost control. He took the reactor apart and loaded it into his car.
But local police, responding to a report of suspicious activity, searched his trunk. He warned them that some of the material was radioactive.
The FBI, the EPA, and a federal nuclear emergency team were called in. Ten months later, men in protective suits tore down the shed and buried it in the Utah desert as radioactive waste.
David refused to be tested for exposure.
His life fell apart after that. His mother died two years later. He joined the Navy and served on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but was banned from going near the reactors. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
In 2007, he was arrested again. He had been stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building.
David Hahn died in 2016, at 39. The autopsy found alcohol and fentanyl in his system. It had nothing to do with radiation.
If you think about it, this is a highly symbolic bookend to the 1989-2001 ‘End of History’ period that Fukuyama described.
Lain is about the End of History and people responding to it by escaping into the ‘wired’, the ‘DigiAnarchy’ of Web 1.0 where you could say/be/do/create/etc anything that you wanted - Which Lain speculates as evolving into this Cyberpunk future full of things like full-body VR/AR and ASI amongst other things.
After 9/11 came Web 2.0 & 3.0- The walled garden / ‘Eternal September’ of privacy killing legislation, Facebookification (“A literal book of faces and personal information to sort people by, the opposite of Anarchy”) and the sublating of forums with things like discord etc.
Lain/SEL is used as a calling card by ‘Landian Accelerationist’ types because they like those things it speculates about - But now Lain is getting close to ~40 years old and stands as a reminder of a ‘Lost Future’ that 9/11 severed from existing.