The Matrix. I’m not the only one who said it, but what is so wrong with living in a simulation? The Matrix is not doing anything that inflicts net harm to people. And besides, the real world is in a post-apocalyptic state, it is objectively better to be in the Matrix and live in a safe environment, however both monotonous it can be and fake, than fighting for food and resources and you don’t know if the next moment will be your last. I think the last Matrix film kind of acknowledged this plot hole and had humans and technology co-exist.
I mean, couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens? People were cabbies, truck drivers. Neo’s best life was working a 9-to-5 so he could party sometimes?
They took people’s choice to live and stuck them in a 90s status quo. It’s not “churn them into bone bread straight out of the womb” evil but it certainly hasn’t stepped into “neutral” territory either.
From Agent Smith’s monologue to Morpheus in the first movie:
Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. 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 that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. 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.
From The Animatrix, Neal Gaiman’s Goliath, and across the three movies, I recall that the machines did try putting humans in paradise. Their goal was to use human flesh minds to perform calculations they could not, so, to an extent, if the human could be tricked into thinking they were in paradise with a small fraction of their mind, the machines could occupy the rest (presumably to control fusion reactors, but mostly to augment the machines’ cognitive abilities). The narrative implied that human minds consistently rejected utopias and paradises, spawning rogue entities like Neo and Trinity who possessed destructive abilities the machines couldn’t comprehend but could empirically measure.
Basically, human cognitive abilities most valued by the machines also were inextricably tied to chaotic destruction of whatever medium the humans occupied. Like how uranium is useful for generating electricity but turns its container radioactive, melts down if unmoderated, and can create thermonuclear weapons.
IIRC this was partially elaborated on in Matrix 4, where
spoiler
machines harness the psychological stress/torture of Neo and Trinity by putting them in a situation where their lives are entirely different, yet they occasionally interact and subconsciously remember each other.
The hope is that one day the fight will end and the real world could be rebuilt. You’d have to ignore the movie’s canon and point out that, for example, using humans as batteries makes no sense, and recycling corpses for food makes little sense. So there actually is enough food and energy for everyone, they’re just captured in a system where nobody has political power.
The Matrix. I’m not the only one who said it, but what is so wrong with living in a simulation? The Matrix is not doing anything that inflicts net harm to people. And besides, the real world is in a post-apocalyptic state, it is objectively better to be in the Matrix and live in a safe environment, however both monotonous it can be and fake, than fighting for food and resources and you don’t know if the next moment will be your last. I think the last Matrix film kind of acknowledged this plot hole and had humans and technology co-exist.
I mean, couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens? People were cabbies, truck drivers. Neo’s best life was working a 9-to-5 so he could party sometimes?
They took people’s choice to live and stuck them in a 90s status quo. It’s not “churn them into bone bread straight out of the womb” evil but it certainly hasn’t stepped into “neutral” territory either.
From Agent Smith’s monologue to Morpheus in the first movie:
From The Animatrix, Neal Gaiman’s Goliath, and across the three movies, I recall that the machines did try putting humans in paradise. Their goal was to use human flesh minds to perform calculations they could not, so, to an extent, if the human could be tricked into thinking they were in paradise with a small fraction of their mind, the machines could occupy the rest (presumably to control fusion reactors, but mostly to augment the machines’ cognitive abilities). The narrative implied that human minds consistently rejected utopias and paradises, spawning rogue entities like Neo and Trinity who possessed destructive abilities the machines couldn’t comprehend but could empirically measure.
Basically, human cognitive abilities most valued by the machines also were inextricably tied to chaotic destruction of whatever medium the humans occupied. Like how uranium is useful for generating electricity but turns its container radioactive, melts down if unmoderated, and can create thermonuclear weapons.
IIRC this was partially elaborated on in Matrix 4, where
spoiler
machines harness the psychological stress/torture of Neo and Trinity by putting them in a situation where their lives are entirely different, yet they occasionally interact and subconsciously remember each other.
It’s the Misery Nexus we were warned about.
The hope is that one day the fight will end and the real world could be rebuilt. You’d have to ignore the movie’s canon and point out that, for example, using humans as batteries makes no sense, and recycling corpses for food makes little sense. So there actually is enough food and energy for everyone, they’re just captured in a system where nobody has political power.
If you watch the Animatrix, you’re more likely to side with the robots too.