I remember the first time The Matrix made sense to me. It was a sunny afternoon at a Seattle multiplex in 1999; I was about thirty minutes into watching the discombobulated world of existential musings and wacky technological discontent when suddenly the whole thing clicked: The red/blue pill polarity that divided truth and illusion, how the advent of thinking machines threatens our individuality, the epic battle between those willing to break down and understand the world in all its true colors and others willing to blindly accept it. A few months later, The Sixth Sense would leave me scratching my head for several days before I made peace with the final act twist, but The Matrix offered instant satisfaction. I left the theater energized, ready to challenge my own notions of reality and match Neo’s heroic ambitions as the One. Then I went home and played a video game in quiet solitude.
And so we arrive at the central paradox of The Matrix paradigm: Technology can set us free, but it also threatens to bind us from the real world. Today marks the tenth anniversary of The Matrix’s triumphant theatrical release (a special edition Blu-ray DVD hits shelves on the same day). A decade after directors Larry and Andy Wachowski established their fictional timeline for humanity’s enslavement at the hands of artificial intelligence, several of the movie’s predictions about our relationship to new media have started to come true.
At the time of its release, the dot com bubble was on the brink of bursting, the inventors of Facebook and Twitter were in high school, and some people thought the world faced imminent destruction from the Y2K virus. With The Matrix, the Wachowskis suggested that technology would indeed precipitate our downfall — although not quite so soon. Still, many of its imaginary conceits proved strikingly prescient. Take the following detailing of its accuracy as an exciting testament to modern progress, a harbinger of the apocalypse, or some unseemly combination of both.
Digital natives will lead the revolution.
When we first meet Neo, he’s holed up in a crappy bachelor pad, buried in books and practically married to his computer screen. But his social ineptitude is key to the character’s masked potential, hinting at his sense that the world he lives in doesn’t quite click. Neo finds solace in those enigmatic interwebs, where he finds solutions to the issues troubling his life. It’s there that he meets Trinity and Morpheus, whose efforts to show Neo the real question he must ask (What is the Matrix?) set him on a path to lead the revolution (or Revolutions, as it were). Neo figures out where his real work belongs in a manner akin to the way online social networking and peer-to-peer services arose from the work of bored young teens adjusted to the possibilities of the Internet. From Sean Fanning to Mark Zuckerberg, youthful innovators raised in a web-centric world have continually invented strategies for changing it. These “digital natives,” as scholar Mark Presnky calls them, answer to a higher calling than the drab business world — the sort of place where Neo keeps his day job, and where they would easily waste their skills. In short, they are an army of Ones, not zeroes.
Transmedia narratives capture the public imagination, but only on its own terms.
From its very first frame, The Matrix is steeped in extraordinary context. References to philosophy and religion abound, not necessarily overcomplicating the work but certainly providing plenty of tidbits for anyone willing to fiddle with the puzzle pieces. The Wachowskis eventually developed the Matrix franchise by turning this approach into a gigantic transmedia world. The details were scattered far and wide, from comic books to the Animatrix shorts and two games. By the time the third movie arrived, there was so much Matrix that existed beyond The Matrix itself that the plot barely made any sense to anyone except those viewers heavily steeped in the nuances of the big picture. “The Matrix was a flawed experiment, an interesting failure,” writes Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. “But its flaws did not detract from the significance of what it tried to accomplish.”
While its creators may have taken the gimmick a little too far, they still had the right idea. Look no further than the dense treasure-hunting for details that preoccupies Lost fans. Tiny story elements surround these stories and exist within them. Neo keeps the work of existential philosopher Jean Baudrillard on his bookshelf and later joins the crew of a ship named after Biblical ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Those are easy clues to the main themes of The Matrix, but the Wachowskis eventually alienated a large number of viewers by expanding the mythology to places where not everyone cared to pay attention. Like the girl in the red dress who famously distracts Neo from protecting himself, transmedia elements should be optional, allowing audiences to intensify the experience only if they choose that degree of immersion. In other words, alternative reality games of the sort forged by The Matrix work best on demand, not on requirement.
Avatars offer incredibly appealing vessels of escapism.
When Neo first learns that his former life in 1999 was pretty much a sham, he initially becomes crestfallen. “I can’t go back, can I?” he asks Morpheus after a brief freak-out session when the truth comes out. “No,” Morpheus replies. “But if you could, would you really want to?”
Well, maybe. As it is later revealed, some people would prefer digital fantasy to the cold facts of real life. Corrupt crewman Cypher double-crosses his shipmates by leaking information to the dreaded Agent Smith in exchange for the promise of a luxurious return to life in the Matrix. Cypher prefers comfortably living in ignorance and assumes everyone else does, too. “I know what you’re thinking,” he tells Neo. “Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”
Four years before Linden Labs launched Second Life, The Matrix predicted its appeal. On the one hand, projecting one’s fantasies onto the mold of an avatar allows for a greater potential to realize ambitions heretofore locked within the confines of the mind — “the mental projection of your digital self,” as Morpheus puts it. But it also threatens to sever our ties to the world surrounding us so that we may begin to resent it. Digital empowerment engenders a dangerously inflated ego. Cypher’s request that the Agents return him to the Matrix as a movie star seems like a retroactive spoof of narcissistic Internet celebrities.
Viral media are products of human nature.
Internet memes weren’t nearly the sensations they would become six years down the road with the advent of YouTube, but The Matrix was hip to the idea of viral media long before the term became widespread. While Morpheus sits in captivity, waiting for Neo and Trinity to save the day, Agent Smith unloads a perceptive monologue about the nature of human behavior, highlighting the innate psychological forces behind viral videos and their ilk. He begins by claiming that people aren’t actually mammals. “Mammals develop equilibrium with the planet,” says Smith. “The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.” Then he drives the point home: “There is another organism that follows that pattern…a virus. Human beings are a disease. We are the cure.”
Or, rather, the outlet. Smith’s point, while negative in tone, essentially argues that viral phenomena naturally arise from social tendencies. He was dead right.
Technology cannot defeat us as long as we defy its boundaries.
Although humanity remains fairly clueless about the machines governing their existence, The Matrix concludes by suggesting the ultimate superiority of our race: When Neo realizes his place as the One, he sees the Matrix as code. The last time a computer screen is shown, it frames the words “System Failure.” The Wachowskis understood the central fallacy of artificial intelligence, at least for now — despite the boom in social networking, alternative reality experiences and the general prevalence of online activity, we have yet to lose our grasp of one simple function: the off switch.
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