The above image is an oil portrait of Jean Baudrilliard that I modified using stable diffusion. To learn more, check out the Tezos NFT
Remember when The Matrix came out in 1999? Using slick special effects, the film told the story of a humanity trapped in computer-generated illusions while its energies were extracted to power the computer systems that kept it enslaved. The character Morpheus revealed this dystopian reality to the main character Neo early on. "Welcome to the desert of the real," said Morpheus, after showing Neo the terrible truth.
This 2018 piece by Aziz Ali Dad describes the origin and meaning of this cryptic phrase:
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard foresaw the implications of the communication revolution on our notions of self, society, knowledge and reality. In early 1991, he wrote a series of three essays – before, during and after the Gulf War. The essays were titled 'The Gulf War will not take place', 'The Gulf War is not really taking place' and 'The Gulf War did not take place'. Baudrillard's critics accused him of inhumanity by claiming that the war never took place. However, this is a literal reading of his assertion. Baudrillard meant to say that the Gulf War wasn't a war because the build-up for war, the waging of a war, and post-war scenarios were more of a simulation or constructed truth in the shape of hyperreal images on our TV screens. ... Viewed from an epistemological perspective, reality in the virtual civilisation will be in excess of the available framework of explanation. Explaining the excess of reality after 9/11, Jean Baudrillard stated that "it is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath the excess". In the post 9/11 period, we see more analysis by analysts and little knowledge and understanding. Morpheus, a character in The Matrix, quotes Baudrillard when he says "Welcome to the desert of the real". This phrase refers to a cultural space where hyperreality doesn’t refer to the real solid world but to the virtual world. Baudrillard’s prognosis in 1991 encapsulates the world that we inhabit today. It is a world where the self is broken and "everyday familiarity collapses". Our reality today looks like a desert as we don’t irrigate it with our understanding and knowledge. Instead, we are engrossed in a hyperreality that is manufactured for us.
The Matrix sequels completely abandoned this philosophical foundation to focus exclusively on improbable gunfights and superficial dialog. Even so, the film contributed something important to our cultural mythology. Now, 25 years later, people who experience sudden new awareness about our manufactured reality can say they're "having a matrix moment" and we all know what they mean. At the same time, one of the film's creators is now reimagining the film to make it all about gender. In 2020, BBC ran a story about it. Here's a quote:
The Matrix films are about being transgender, the trilogy's co-director says. "That was the original intention but the world wasn't quite ready," says Lilly Wachowski, who came out as trans along with her sister Lana [in 2016]. "We had the character of Switch - who was a character who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix."
So we're now being told this film was about gender. This a clear example of celebrity messaging that encourages us to focus on personal identity instead of focusing on how we're being exploited by technological overlords. I don't doubt that Wachowski was exploring gender identity while writing the script. I think the movie would've been better if they'd made Switch present in different genders in different realities. But reinterpreting cultural mythology to obscure an important universal metaphor isn't ideal.
If trans people see The Matrix and think it's about them, that's great. If an office drone sees the film and feels inspired to leave the world of cubicles behind for a more meaningful job, that's great too. It would also be great if the film contributes to millions of people experiencing profound moments of awakening before separating their lives from the control regime's artificial world. I feel like there's room in the culture for this story to mean different things to different people.
While some believe that we're literally living in a computer simulation, I haven't seen convincing evidence of that. Danny Goler's experiments revealing language-like characters in diffracted laser light while under the influence of DMT are intriguing, but they haven't proven anything yet. A matrix made unconsciously by us out of our own consciousnesses, on the other hand, strikes me as much more plausible. More plausible and more empowering.
If our matrix is a computer program that we can't modify, the wisest course of action may simply be to keep pleasing our robot overlords. But if our matrix is instead a co-creation of all of our consciousnesses, it may be more malleable than we've been led to believe. There are many kinds of code running in our biological and psychological machinery, influencing the reality that our consciousness generates for us. But this code probably doesn't work like C++. If we want our consciousness to generate a better reality for us, the mythologies that pattern the stories we use to make sense of the world are as good of a place to start as any.
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