>>745187I guess, but my point is that Eiri's isn't criticized for ignoring the sociological laws of the society he lives in in favor of the Wired, he's moreso criticized for trying to upend the old society at all, since him doing that makes him want to become God. It's the typical reactionary cry of all antagonism to current society just being a ploy by wannabe Kings.
Also, Internet was never ultra-leftist. During the 90s and early 2000s the main focus by people online was on freedom of speech more than anything else. Libertarianism, and mostly the right wing kind of just wanting to get rid of states without bothering any of the underlying social relations in society. The dominant face of cyberpunk were US College students of elite Universities.
And there was never a chance at the Internet being anything more than a tool of the state and capitalism even from the start, which Lain doesn't really address. The cyberpunk dream was completely detached from the reality of the Internet, and viewed it as some newly discovered metaphysical blanket around the world rather than an invented materially-existing network, literally created by the US Army. Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer, was quite open about him not actually having a good understanding of the Internet. But Lain is interspersed with all sorts of references to their strange hypotheses, like with Lain herself being the consciousness hypothesized by Rushkoff once the number of people online is akin to the number of neurons in a brain (I might be misremembering the specifics there). So it does seem to legitimate their strange ideas, only criticizing them playing God when they should be going back to working for bossman.