Red pilled by the Matrix

 

"The Matrix" from 1999 isn´t just the best film in the Matrix saga. It´s arguably also the best film ever made. At least I considered it so for a very long time. In many ways, I still do. I´m fascinated by its peculiar mixture of science fiction, conspiracy thinking, Buddhist-Gnostic allegory and, ahem, kung fu. The Matrix is maya, the illusory world well known from some Hindu and Buddhist teachings. The "agents" and "machines" are the demons or archonts of Gnosticism, evil entities who keep humanity in thrall to the material world. Neo is the siddha, the Tantric superman, who can change the illusory world at will when reaching enlightenment. It´s also interesting to note that "The Matrix", despite the Buddho-Gnosticism, can´t entirely escape the Christian meme. The invention of AI is the "fall" of humanity, and Neo is of course the "Christ" heralding an apocalyptic confrontation with the forces of evil... 

Watching the film again last night, I was also struck by how "1990´s" it feels. This was in the beginning of the Internet, when the web could still be seen as somehow mysterious, both for good and for ill. The same was true of AI. Even the dystopian vision of a world ruled by intelligent machines trapping humanity into one gigantic interactive computer program is really based on the Western idea of progress - those smart robots, after all, were presumably built by clever human scientists. 

Today, cyberpunx dead. Both the film´s techno-pessimism and its implicit techno-optimism look equally utopian, the real future probably being one of gradual decline of all things techno. As for the web, it has turned into a trivial house hold appliance, office aid, and an instrument of the same establishment censorship as the old media (but less efficient). The film´s globalism and implicit libertarianism, Neo telling the machines that he is fighting for a world "without borders", also looks ridiculously optimistic and utopian today. And yes, the Wachowski brothers (who made the film) have "transitioned" and are now known as the Wachowski sisters, simply falling for the latest ridiculous fad...

"The Matrix" was good, is good still, but it seems we have all been "red pilled" by the last two decades. 9/11, the finance crisis, the migrant crisis, the climate protests, Donald Trump, COVID-19...all that stuff was still in the future when the film was released. It struck me that the red pill versus blue pill as described in "The Matrix" might be a false dichotomy. It´s the choice between being enslaved by the globalist-cyber-world and ostensibly controlling the very same globalist-cyber-world. But what if it can only be destroyed? Indeed, what if it self-destructs whether or not we want it to? 

Perhaps "The Matrix" was just another control program built by the Architect...