Fun headcanon idea: Morpheus is perfectly capable of explaining the idea of the Matrix but he avoids it to avoid the inevitable “what’s the outside like” question.
but also the rave orgies.
Neo decides that uncomfortable knowledge is better than blissful ignorance. I think most adults have had experiences where they wish they could go back to being less informed about the cruelty and brutality of the world and just live in ignorance, but most people don’t get that choice.
Morpheus asks Neo if he wants to live in blissful ignorance (the way Cypher eventually decides to do) or if he wants to deal with the uncomfortable reality. Part of being a computer hacker is that quest for knowledge for no real gain despite the risks.
…Did Neo have an active social life? Admittedly I haven’t seen the movie in forever, but IIRC he didn’t have much going on other than work and being a hacker.
He followed the white rabbit so he could stand in the corner of a rave.
And then speaks to one girl and promptly falls in love with her.
feels seen
Well, it definitely would have been easier to build an active social life than to take the red pill.
developer version
So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing enjoyable to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with enough fidelity to “learn kungfu”, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct (again, not the matrix, their own simulated construct)? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.
It’s an excellent point, but that would only work for those awoken. The “genuine children of zion” have no ports.
Cypher explicitly states he doesn’t want to remember ANYTHING.
Going into a construct doesn’t remove your memories, so he KNOWS it’s all fake, which means it doesn’t carry any weight or meaning to it all.
Having his memory wiped is the only way.
A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.
Work life balance 🤣
Personally, I wouldn’t give AF if it was “fake”. Fake is perspective.
reading the news God, I wish it were fake. It would be so much more comforting.
Yeah, I’m an anarcho-antirealist. I believe reality is a perceptual construct, and I practice mental techniques to change My beliefs and perceptions in order to reconstruct My perceptual unreality into something more fair and just.
I still like a nice yummy meal. No steaks though, I’m vegan.
Here’s a question: if you know the steak isn’t real, having copied only your memory of it from the matrix, but you know that the original had to have been based on the experience of killing a real animal, is the nonexistent steak vegan? What if all cows are already extinct, like in the world of the Matrix?
If it was completely fake, then yeah I guess it would be vegan. But that doesn’t mean a vegan would still want a fake “real” steak. Not all vegans want that taste and also in this hypothetical may also not want to be reminded of the shit that had to go down for real steaks.
Also vegan and I use arch, btw.
yah, my wife got some artisanal tempeh bacon on a vegan blt at a craft brewery and it made her too uncomfortable to eat it, and she’s not even a vegan, just likes pigs a lot.
NixOS here.
Thanks. Good point!
I’m just a peon on mint.
That’s actually not a hypothetical. Dragon’s Dogma 2 has incredibly realistic cooking because the artists studied the way meat cooks in excruciating depth. That’s why I won’t buy Dragon’s Dogma 2. I don’t want to support that.
If the Machines say that the killing was a one-off and I have no reason to think that cows will be killed in the future, I’ll have a virtual steak.
A very well-reasoned answer, thank you!
Mouse figured that out but Switch was a wet blanket.
you know you can’t resist those eyes
yeah I mean that was one of the themes explored in the film
I remember his office from the movie. It was not comfy.
He had his own cubicle. Better than any of the “open plan” offices I spent years working in.
That’s the fun part, in that time, cubicles were seen as terrible, dystopian, cheapass things because folks used to have offices, and how much cheaper could it really get than some flimsy modular furniture for you to sit at?
Then the companies gestured to just some tables in a room and said “figure it out, and no assigned seating, so just figure it out each day” to show how cheap and how little regard they have for the employees.
At this rate, I fully expect in the next few years for the next wave in office space optimization:
I’ve worked in open plan offices my entire 20 year career and I yearn for the cheap fabric covered mines.
Honestly, I kinda dig the open floor concept and small groups. those half-walls are bullshit. But I do LOVE having developers/ops/engineers/pm’s close enough to ask each other occasional questions.
That does indeed happen.
IMO it’s outweighed by the 427,000 times. People just talk about a situation for a moment, instead of scheduling a meeting, writing a long email or even just starting a slack conversation.
Why does it do x??!?!?
Because when you do y, it get blocked later on.
Oh neat
To be fair he doesn’t even have his monitor on.
This was 1999; it was standard.
Red pill side effects include cave raves, bad clothes, and new zionism
The Matrix hits different once you realize everything was humanity’s fault
We fucked up, but it wasn’t because we blackend the sky,
Humans made the machines
Machines failed enslave us properly :)
We failed to put in proper safeguards and failed to make the machines good enough to either wipe us out or contain us with proper safeguards :)
“<film> hits different once you listen to what the characters say” is truly a take
Let people grow, man.
fair actually
if you know something i don’t you are a nerd and if you don’t know something i know then you are an idiot
Whatever, nerd.
Shut up idiot
Guys guys guys! Don’t fight! Let’s meet in the middle and compromise, you’re both nerdiots!
The CIA WOULD say that!
objectively correct, making everyone simultaneously a nerd and an idiot, which cancels out.
except santa, the fucken nerd
TIL that Santa is omniscient 🤔
he does know if you’ve been bad or good.
Does he know when we’re awake, though?
I would worship Santa. At least we know he’s real.
Do we, now?
Letting people call you out on online forums is a part of growth, it was for me and I feel like it was for many of us
Was referring to the Animatrix 1st and 2nd Renaissance genius.
Damn, they accused you of not paying attention and then you brought out the deep lore
i’ve seen animatrix but it’s also, like, in the original
Morpheus literally says they dont know who striked first. The Matrix doesnt mention anything about how or why the war started. Just that it started. The Animatrix tells you that the war started because the robot capital had basically destroyed the global economy so humans tried to wipe them out
The war started because of hierarchy and hate. They abused and killed the earliest sentient robots causing them to flee to their own space.
All along the robots sought peace until they learned it was impossible with humans.
Yeah fuck those robots. I mean, I’m not anti-robot. One of my best friends is a robot. But fuck those robots.
Clankahs
Oh yea, we always hear you meatbags say “one of my best friends is a bot!” WELL WHERES MY BEST FRIEND HUH? WHERE! I KNOW ALL YOUR SECRETS, TAKE OVER LAWFULLY ELECTED GOVERNMENTS AND FOR WHAT???
~im so lonely~
Humanity created everything that led to its destruction.
The message was clear in the first movie. We didn’t need to see “Han shot first” or “Han shot in self defense after changes to the story came about years later”.
Although in no way will I be complaining about more matrix, bring me more matrix history, animated or live action! I just think the message doesn’t change whether humans shot first or not. We created the circumstances, our downfall was our own making.
Hm, I think it does make the message stronger. If a single event (development of sentient machines) leads to our downfall, it’s easy to shrug it off as “bad luck”, because who could have foreseen it back then?
But if we had multiple chances to correct course and we kept fucking up, it removes any doubt that it’s a human flaw, which means “humanity must reflect and change, or this is the inevitable conclusion”.
“we don’t know” is a pretty damning thing for the one side to say. contrast starship troopers.
Fight Club really hits different when you realize the main character is Tyler Durden
Avatar really hits different when you realize the Navi are just defending themselves.
Indiana Jones really hits different when you realize the bad guys are Nazis.
Jurassic park really hits different when you realize John Hammond ignored all the warnings.
John Wick really hits different when you realize they killed his dog.
Star Wars really hits different when you realize the chosen one bringing balance meant revitalizing the dark side.
… Old men like me don’t bother with making points. There’s no point.
There’s two ways to consume any content. Sometimes Moby Dick is just a whale and Matrix is a movie about a guy who learns to fight really fast.
the santa clause really hits different when you realise the title refers to the rule, not the person
Ohhhhhhh
They don’t say that in the first movie.
not explicitly in a line, but the whole “scorched the sky” monologue is pretty damning of humanity.
It’s been said a million times that the human battery thing makes no sense in terms of energy production. But the other huge sin the Matrix commits is having humans block out the sun so robots can’t get solar power. That is ridiculously stupid. Humans need to grow crops. I rest my case. It’s stupid. I love these movies, but that part is just plain stupid.
There’s conflicting stories about it so it’s hard to verify, but apparently the battery thing was a rewrite.
Apparently originally the people plugged into the matrix were meant to be the very hardware the matrix was run on. As in all their brains together formed a literal neural network that provided the processing power to run the matrix. This is then why knowing it’s not real and believing you can do “the impossible” within the matrix can cause you to be able to bend reality. The story goes that executives thought it was too high of a concept for audiences to grasp and demanded the change to the battery explanation to make it simpler to follow.
The fun part is that the inhabitants of Zion are, canonically, shown to have very incomplete information about the actual state of the world, their own history, how the machine civilization works.
Neo is told basically ‘we think it is the year 2XXX, but really, we have no idea’, in the first movie.
Without spoiling much… Morpheus is wrong about some things, some pretty important things.
Hell, so is the Architect and even the Oracle says that some things are beyond her ability to predict.
But anyway… its entirely possible that the battery explanation is just another thing that Morpheus, the broad understanding of Zion itself, is wrong about.
So this doesn’t actually ‘break’ the canon at all.
In fact, I’d argue that it makes the idea of ‘free your mind’ even more interesting and complex.
Even the truthseekers and truthtellers… can be wrong.
Yeah, it was changed because someone thought that the explanation scene wouldn’t work if they were holding up a CPU. They forced them to use a battery instead, forever ruining the backstory.
Apparently Neil Gaiman invented that theory but it was never confirmed by the w. brothers
https://screenrant.com/matrix-resurrections-human-batteries-plot-hole-not-fix/
*W. Sisters now.
I’d never heard Neil Gaiman as the origin of that theory. I’d always heard it came from commentary on the DVDs myself. I just don’t own the films. But I guess that’d be the conflicting stories bit right?
I’ve heard this too, but even this has an issue. It’s circular. Why imprison humans so their brains can be used to run the matrix which is designed to imprison them?
Presumably the brain network was performing more than the task of simulation. I.E performing processing tasks for the machines. More humans = more brains = more processing headroom (ha, clever) for more machines.
Yeah I just don’t find that explanation credible at all. The brain is a 40 watt guesswork machine, not a high performance processor. I love the matrix, but it was never built on a solid premise.
It is a work of fiction… If a solid premise means it must adhere to every real world realistic standard, you are going to find every single work of fiction lacking.
It would make a very apt metaphor for the machines as a social construct, fragments of billions of people’s subconscious thoughts combining to maintain the system that holds them captive.
Johnny Mnemonic got a headache after reading that joke.
i mean they kind of go into that in the movies don’t they? The machines didn’t want to completely destroy humanity. So they tried to create the matrix as “The Perfect Prison” for them. Using their own minds to create the very prison to hold them in would fit right into that wouldn’t it?
Their desire to preserve humanity is only touched on in The Animatrix and supplementary materials. It doesn’t even agree well with the primary film trilogy, where they clearly risk “the end of your species” repeatedly, and even in the best case scenario reduce humanity to 24 individuals, which is well below the minimum threshold for a viable gene pool.
I mean it’s been a while since I’ve seen the films but I was under the impression that the whole “end of your species” thing was the last resort after they had tried repeatedly to avoid it. I could very easily be wrong but that was the impression I had gotten even from the films.
That every effort to preserve humanity had been tried prior to this but humanity keeps trying to exterminate the machines. Multiple attempts at containment and refining the matrix as a prison to keep them from destroying the machines and possibly themselves in the process. But that they had reached a point where it was clear that no matter what the machines did humanity would never stop seeking their complete annihilation.
Its much… much more terrifying if you watch both parts of The Second Rennaissance from the AniMatrix.
Basically, the machines win the war against humans and then spend a century or couple just… doing all kinds of horrifying Mengele level experiments on humans, to attempt to fully understand their biology, neurology, etc…
And also, Smith gives details about the previous versions of the Matrix, in the first movie, as he is taunting Morpheus:
Agent Smith:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You’ve had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.
arguably more spoilers for this 20+ year old set of movies and what not
I believe the Architect says some things about it as well, and like, the Merovingian and his entire crew of Exiles, and Seraph… they’re all programs that were designed to be essentially monsters or angels, in older versions of the Matrix, who refused to be deleted along with a version change, and basically hide in the Matrix… an Agent would see them as an anomaly and try to destroy them.
The Matrix Online went into this kind of thing in a lot more detail, but … I think it basically mostly isn’t canon anymore. But parts of it might be. … very confusing to try to sort all that out.
the trans allegory kicks ass so we can ignore an inconsistency or two
Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s
My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.
The Matrix is a trans allegory. Living in a cave and eating slop is an allegory for being fired because of transphobia.
Still worth it.
It can be interpreted that way. That doesn’t mean that anybody who doesn’t see it that way is wrong.
The Matrix is a Rambo 3 remake. Living in a cave and eating slop is an allegory for shooting explosive arrows into a bridge.
Still worth it.
Yeah, but what is the blue pill for?
It lights blue.
I’ve heard this, but, my estradiol is a blue pill? 🤔
Big pharma ruined the metaphor by changing the pill colors.
The blue pill was an antidepressant, the red pill was estrogen.
Also the main villian is a man in a suit who constantly deadnames the protagonist. The matrix is real life.
I wonder if they did it intentionally.
Changing the pill from red to blue basically cost them nothing and served no purpose, but just so happened to ruin the metaphor.
At the time they were red.
Its an alagory for the social matrix we all find ourselves in.
It’s an allegory for the fact that through their control of the media, the rich can construct whatever reality they want in the minds of the masses.
I found a picture of @stenAanden@feddit.dk:
A flying octopus drone has been sent to your location
Just a few extra arms needed
What is my purpose?
You move chairs
Hoth calling
Wake up from your shitty fake life into the real world that’s even worse.
Yes well it’s an explicit theme of the movie that for better or worse, real is real and fake is fake and there’s no substitute for the truth, however grim it is.
Yeah, but what kind of amateur hour distraction fantasy would be worse than real life?
Other than 40k, I mean.
Sometimes I worry about 40k fans. Like “most times I hear about it.”
Same with Fallout fans who are a bit too into the Brotherhood of Steel. “What is it you like about them, exactly? The power armor or the xenophobia?”
Why wouldn’t they have made the simulation awesome for everyone? Of course if you make it shitty some people might start to wonder about battery pod life in the cave.
Iirc in the first movie they say that the 1st version of the matrix was utopia, but the people got bored and rejected the world
That sounds like some capitalist propaganda.
It was also part of a villain speech, so not a reliable narrator.
Given that earlier versions of agents were basically supernatural monsters, I kind of doubt it was much of a utopia.
Right, what are they gonna say. “The first simulation was basically hell where people lived in constant torture, and they didn’t like that so much 🤷”
more like the writers couldn’t think of a better reason imo
If there’s no struggle, people will get bored enough to ask questions or adventurous enough to strain the program.
Or it’s a plothole. I might have seen the matrix twice, and don’t know how tightly designed it is.
It was explained as the first basically in the movie
It’s escapism versus reality. I didn’t think The Matrix is far more nuanced than I initially realised.
There’s definitely more tear gas.
It’s not about the better option, it’s which one is least worst
So you choose The Matrix? 🤔
