- (electronic music) - What’s up Wisecrack? Jared here. My love of the original Matrix is no secret,
but I can’t deny that I found the last two films pretty baffling. You might’ve seen our previous videos covering
what went wrong with my favorite franchise, but given the announcement of a 4th Matrix
film, I wanted to look at the series with fresh eyes. This was driven by one specific comment from
Lana Wachowski: In a Variety article announcing the new installment, she said “Many of the
ideas Lilly and I explored 20 years ago about our reality are even more relevant now.” What does she mean by that? Is it because robots are stealing our jobs? Are dusters coming back in style? Is Elon Musk talking about being trapped in
a simulation again? While all of these might hold some kernel
of truth, especially the part about how cool dusters are, we think we figured out what
the Wachowskis were trying to do, and why it may resonate today more than ever. Like the title of the Rage Against the Machine
song that closes the film, the original is about waking up: -♪ Wake up! ♪ - about seeing past the wool that has been
pulled over our eyes, of shattering the grand illusion. While it might have been a little obscured
by weird rave scenes, we can better understand the latter 2 films with the question of “what
next?” Once we’ve become awakened to the true reality
behind the lies of the world, what other dangers lurk behind the red pill? And how does this speak to today? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on The Matrix - Is Real Freedom Possible? And as always, spoilers ahead for all three
Matrix films. And now for a very brief recap. The original Matrix follows hacker Neo as
he learns that the world is a digital illusion, and that machines have created a vast simulation
in order to use humanity as a renewable energy source. Neo joins the human resistance in the “real
world, ” and after some self reflection, realizes his destiny as “The One”, a prophesied
super badass who will use his powers to free humanity from the Matrix. In The Matrix Reloaded, no such liberation
has happened because it turns out that The One is nothing more than an inevitable anomaly
in the system that the machines have planned for. In other words, Neo’s exceptionalism is
just part of the greater project to keep the human race enslaved. At the end of the film, Neo makes a choice
to avoid perpetuating the vicious cycle of human oppression, and risks the lives of all
humans to save his love, Trinity. He also somehow has powers in the real world
now. In Revolutions, we see Neo’s choice resulting
in the Matrix deteriorating at the hands of Agent Smith, so a now blinded Neo who can
still see….something... strikes a bargain with the machines. He will sacrifice himself to destroy Agent
Smith in exchange for liberating all the humans from the matrix who want to be. - “What about the others?” - “What others?” - “The ones that want out.” - “Obviously they will be freed.” - Before we get into the muddled message of
the second and third films, let’s revisit one of the most obvious and well-tread interpretations
of the original film. In this interpretation, Neo’s journey from
the green-tinged and illusory world of the matrix into the dystopian real world is a
version of Plato’s allegory of the cave. To summarize: a person spends their entire
life trapped inside a cave where all they see is shadows on a wall in front of them,
but because this is all they’ve ever known, they take the shadows to be the one true reality. One day, that person, like Neo, is set free
to discover the reality behind the shadows. For Plato, that person was a philosopher,
and hence would help others free themselves from the cave. So for Neo, the cave is the matrix. And he’s led out by Morpheus. - “You take the blue pill - the story ends,
you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. “You take the red pill - you stay in wonderland,
and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” - It’s all more techno-dystopian than Plato
could’ve ever imagined, but for both Plato’s cave dweller and Neo, the transition to the
actual real world isn’t easy. For a lifelong cave-dweller, the sun-soaked
world is blinding. For Neo, robots are trying to kill him and
the food tastes bad. Plato’s allegory of the cave has inspired
countless philosophers for thousands of years, but there’s something uniquely timely about
it today. Now, more than ever, cultural and political
movements seem obsessed with stepping out of the cave of one’s imposed ignorance. Whether that’s using Matrix’s own “red
pill” as a metaphor for one’s awakening, or staying “woke,” people with radically
different politics frame their movement in terms of pulling back the curtain of social
domination. - “Welcome to the desert of the real.” - In the original film, it’s hackers that
are presented as the brave souls who are able to use their technical abilities to identify
and exploit the digital cracks in their false reality. And while in the nineties the internet was
still in its early stages, the feeling that the right subreddit or Google search can set
you free from your ideological shackles has become commonplace. So if the original Matrix film tried to wake
us up from our various dream states by asking us to question our realities, how did the
sequels try to push this a step further by getting us to wake up again? Or in Christopher Nolan’s terms, how can
we wake up from a dream that’s already taking place within another dream. Besides being pushed into a bathtub full of
water, obviously. The Matrix Reloaded explores the limits of
this initial level of woke-ness by showing how larger systems of control are often designed
to limit our freedom, and in particular, how these systems can control us via the guise
of freedom. We’re first introduced to the central conflict
of the film, the tension between freedom and control, during Neo’s late-night chat with
councilor Hamaan about the relationship between seemingly free human beings and seemingly
determined machines - “Down here sometimes I think about those
people still plugged into the Matrix. “And when I look at these machines… I can't help thinking that, in a way, we are
plugged into them.” - While Neo is quick to point out that humans
are ultimately in control as they can simply hit the off switch, councilor Hamman points
out the opposite truth, that if they did turn the machines off, the residents of Zion would
no longer have air or water, and they would die. - “But we control these machines, they don't
control us.” - “Of course not. How could they? The idea is pure nonsense...but it does make
one wonder just...what is control?” - The appearance of absolute human freedom
is a thin veil over an underlying dependence on machines. This dichotomy goes even deeper when Neo meets
the architect, who informs him that this is actually the sixth time he’s had a meeting
with an iteration of Neo. How is this possible? Well, because Neo isn’t as free as he thought. He’s actually a necessary feature of the
matrix itself, a systemic anomaly, “You are the eventuality of an anomaly which
despite my sincerest efforts I’ve been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony
of mathematical precision.” - He is a necessary part of the very system
he is working to destroy. - This is very heavy in its implications,
as the Wachowskis seem to be implying that even after we wake up from various illusions
and ideologies, we might still be caught in a higher-level system of control. And unfortunately, Plato’s allegory of the
cave is of little use here. Sometimes, raging against the machine is exactly
what the machine wants. And if we want to understand why, we need
to look to philosopher Karl Marx. Now, already the ideas of Marx map pretty
easily onto the Matrix. Marx argued that society had two fundamental
classes, the workers of the world, and the owners of capital, the people who had the
actual factories and machines to make stuff, who were, in his view, vampires living off
the life force of workers. Tweak this a little bit, and you’ve got
literal machines enslaving humans to live off their bodily energy while the humans get
to dream of eating steak. We should note here that the Wachowskis thought
they were making a movie about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, a philosopher that, while
heavily influenced by Marx, greatly diverged from his ideas. In particular, Baudrillard thought that while
production a la Marx’s workers and factory owners was a useful category in analysing
industrial society, the consumer revolution of the late twentieth century made it necessary
to shift to the category of consumption. To over-simplify, modern capitalism is not
so much defined by production lines as it is by Disney lines. But, they got it kind of wrong, Baudrillard
himself said that the Wachowskis use of his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings.” He thought the Wachowskis were missing the
point in large part because they got trapped in a Marxist line of thinking. Marx, like Plato, thought that most people
experienced an obscured version of reality. But Marx’s word for it was “ideology,”
which gets a lot more complicated. But importantly, whereas Baudrillard thought
that there was no deeper reality behind the spectacle of modern capitalism, no way to
escape our metaphorical Matrix, Marx thought there was hope for piercing the veil. Marx thought one of the symptoms of ideology
was a kind of upside-down worldview. Whereas many would argue that ideas, politics,
and cultures are the things that drive our material reality, Marx argued that it was
the reverse. Our material reality was what determined our
ideas, politics and culture. To put it simply, if you thought your boss’s
respect for “timeliness” and “honesty” shaped how work was done, you have it backward:
how work is done shapes our need for timeliness and honesty. For Marx, the foundation of a society is formed
by relations of labor and production - that’s called the base. So in an industrial society, the base is the
production of consumer goods which requires the distinction between employees and employers,
or, owners and workers. In the Matrix, that base is the need to extract
energy from human batteries - for whatever it is they’re trying to build or do. The place where ideology rests he called the
superstructure — it’s composed of things like culture, religion, politics, and rituals. In industrial society, the superstructure
helps reinforce base relations - like the virtue of “hard work” getting you through
the day as you monotonously tighten your thousandth nut for the day. Or, in the canon of this bizarre powerade
commercial, your craving of electrolytes to fuel your robot overlords: - “The point is, to keep generating all
that energy, your body needs to be replenished, so drink your Powerade, we have quotas to
meet.” - This superstructure reproduces itself to
perpetuate the base conditions. However, it’s not until the Matrix Revolutions
that Neo is able to fully grasp that the superstructure is not just the Matrix. If human ideology is dictated by the means
of machine production, so is machine ideology. He meets three programs in the train station
named Rama Kandra, Kamala, and their daughter Sati, and learns that the war oppresses machines
too, as they are trying to help their daughter evade deletion. - “I love my daughter very much.” “I find her to be the most beautiful thing
I have ever seen.” “But where we are from that is not enough.” “Every program created must have a purpose,
if it does not it is deleted.” - Therefore, The Matrix isn’t just a system
in the sense that it’s a computer program. The superstructure births the idea that humans
and machines must be perpetually at war, to ensure the material base of energy production
goes untouched. So, in an ideological sense- THAT is the Matrix. This brings us back to the tension between
freedom and control, as in Marx’s analysis certain types of freedom are just superstructural
illusions that enable a deeper level of control in terms of an economic base. Remember that Neo’s entire existence, including
his role as the one who will lead a rebellion to free humans from machine control, is a
necessary part of the system itself. But the Matrix argues it is when one thinks
they are free from ideology that they are most immersed in it. - “I’m going to hang up this phone and
then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see.” “I’m going to show them a world without
you.” “A world without rules and controls, without
borders or boundaries.” - If we thought Neo threatening his machine
overlords and flying off into the sky as Rage Against the Machine plays was peak rebellion,
we were sorely mistaken. In the architect’s control room, he learns
he’s actually doing precisely what previous versions of his code have already done five
times previously - what was already pre-planned. - “The function of the one is now to return
to the source allowing it temporary dissemination of the code you carry reinserting the prime
program.” - And isn’t this precisely what is happening
to us when we both consume and produce ideas and content on digital platforms? As each time we tweet or repost an article
that exposes some societal injustice or buried knowledge, we are providing more data for
algorithms that are figuring out how to better serve us ads and sell us goods and services. And unlike Neo, these illusions are all taking
place within our own world. We are even creating our own myths to avoid
acknowledging how wrapped up we are in these systems. For example, the stories about people’s
devices “listening” to them and serving them ads on Facebook and Instagram. This is, of course, false. But the truth is more horrifying, which is
that algorithms have done such a good job of constructing data sets about each of us
that they can accurately predict our desires. Which brings back to this tension between
control and freedom: are we really free when we exist in digital spaces? Or are we just the unknowing cogs in a digital
marketing machine? - “The one was never meant to end anything,
it was all another system of control.” - And while Neo’s Matrix-power while seeing
Gold shit in the third film still doesn't make sense, maybe the Wachowskis were trying
to go for something like: his power derives from his ability to see behind the final curtain,
the ideology that dictates the human/machine war. The ability to break through an all-encompassing
ideological system ends up being more valuable than the ability to dodge bullets. And maybe this is why Lana Wachowski has said
that the themes of the Matrix films are more relevant now than ever, as we live in a digital
culture that is obsessed with becoming woke to cultural injustice and red-pilling their
way to higher forms of knowledge, but all too often this attempt to wake up from the
dream is just a higher function of the very ideological structure we think we’re escaping. If there is a consistent theme from these
films that applies to this contemporary problem it seems to be the imperative to constantly
interrogate ideological systems with the understanding that the moment we think of ourselves as free
from ideology is likely when we are the most fully immersed in it. So will the next Matrix introduce us to some
new illusion we’ve been indoctrinated into? Will it explain some of the shortcomings of
the trilogy? Honestly, I’m just really really hoping
it’s good. In the meantime, we’ll be trying our best
to remember that even if we don’t have sockets in our spines, that we might be plugged in
to ideological power structures without even knowing it. So good luck in staying awake. And as always thanks for watching. Peace!
