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.
yeah I mean that was one of the themes explored in the film
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
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.
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.
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.
It can be interpreted that way. That doesn’t mean that anybody who doesn’t see it that way is wrong.
Its an allegory 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.
Indeed.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
― Edward Bernays, PropagandaWe are controlled through encouraged habits.
I submit that the only antidote to propaganda which is capable of curing whole societies, is the conscious manipulation of one’s own beliefs and perceptions. We must abandon the desire for objective reality, and instead become masters of our personal unrealities. Great responsibility can only be fulfilled with great power. We must become better than we are. We must take hold of the power of unreality for ourselves.
Exactly right. Neo expressed true freedom when Agent Smith, enraged, asks Neo why he keeps fighting, and Neo says “because I choose to”.
Our world is full of people who have been programmed like robots, that don’t examine their programming. Freedom from the Matrix starts with recognizing our programmable nature, and learning to see clearly how it’s exploited by the system. Only then can we begin to program ourselves.
One of the failures of the Soviet Union is that they didn’t deprogram themselves. They defeated capitalism in the material plane, but they remained inside a capitalist consensus reality. Thus, they simply became capitalists.
I believe that a successful socialist revolution requires sorcerery. We must create a socialist multiverse using techniques of mysticism.
Red pill side effects include cave raves, bad clothes, and new zionism
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.
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.
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!
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 🤣
Mouse figured that out but Switch was a wet blanket.
It’s an excellent point, but that would only work for those awoken. The “genuine children of zion” have no ports.
…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.
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? 🤔
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:
To be fair he doesn’t even have his monitor on.
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
This was 1999; it was standard.
You mean choosing whether to live with purpose or just continue to exist?
You have never dated a punk. You have never been in love with anyone adapted to poverty who had any sense of adventure.
You’re an odd morpheus.
Yeah but at least I’m part of an armed resistance trying to win back their freedom.
So terrorists. You’re saying that’s a good thing?
One person’S terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
Nuh uh!
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.
If Zion lets me sleep in, then unplug me from the jelly-pod.
developer version
