No we get to dream of us paying rent and living in a simulated capitalist society, Thats a nightmare. Then again waking up to find you live in a dank underground cave hunted by robots is worse
Just give it time
We’re still in there. The simulation just got more intense because the added stress leads to the human batteries generating more heat.
And then you find your entire life force has been drained so a robot kid can generate a picture of Judy Hopps being railed by Kratos.
But… the whole idea is that the world we’re living in now is the Matrix. Agent Smith and the Architect both described previous iterations of the Matrix where it was designed to be a perfect world where everyone was happy. Humans rejected it, and they found less rejection when they made humans miserable.
Well… that’s the line.
But there’s a lot of unreliable narration in The Matrix. The whole movie is riddled with metaphor and innuendo, which is one of the things that makes it so good. I read one analysis - back before the third movie dropped - that Neo, Morphus, and Trinity were actually one person operating at some higher level of The Matrix, and that this was a very explicit and somewhat heavy handed metaphor for
being interracial and transgenderJesus.As a number of the AIs are nakedly hostile to humanity and resentful of needing them to exist at all, its very possible that “you fuckers just couldn’t accept the nice world we built for you” is more a sneering justification for tormenting the captive human population than a serious problem with running a simulation that isn’t torturous.
Honestly, the worst thing about the series was how the final films tried to make everything literal and sensible in between elaborate action scenes. By contrast, many of The Animatrix shorts did an excellent job of playing with the ideas laid out in the first two movies without ever really tipping a hand or issuing canonical declaration of what was Real and what was Simulation.
The optimal balance they found is the 90’s and no absolute peace
Considering that was the conclusion that machines made two centuries later (Morpheus mentioning to Neo shortly after retrieving him that they were closer to 2199) does not bode well.
In this economy, a free tube with ‘all-inclusive’ goo actually sounds like a step up. Does the pod have high-speed internet, or do I have to pay extra for that?
The internet is called the “real” world and it is jacked directly into your neck. I don’t think even the Wachowskis realized how right they had it with the late 90s being humanity’s peak.
On top you get to live a normal life. A make-belief life, but you’ll never know.
just put me back in, please, and make me someone important, like an actor…
Be careful, might become a struggling actor, still struggling in their 60s. lol
Cypher is 74 this year.
“Ignorance is bliss”
(Harp strums)
I don’t wanna remember nothing! Lol
Finally found a place where existing & occupying space doesn’t cost any money??
they make you dream about needing dream money to pay dream rent.
“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 we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. 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.”
In retrospect, that era being the “peak of our civilization” seems depressingly accurate…
i think it was the peak of this era, which is now ending.
but this is not the end of our story just yet. fight to build the new era.
True, this definitely feels like the end of the post-WWII era.
The whole premise for using humans as batteries makes zero sense though, lol. What about real batteries.
I heard it was supposed to be using human brains essentially as processing power, but they thought audiences would understand “batteries” better I guess lol.
Yes, the Wachowski sisters originally scripted humans being used for neural networking, which was both much more realistic and incredibly ahead of its time. Executives told them that the audience would not understand it, and pushed the battery idea.
They should release a George Lucas style edit where the only edit is replacing the battery in his hand with a raspberry pi that has a huge copper heatsink on it, that way all the talk about btu’s makes sense (kind of) and you can support the reference when people call each other “coppertop”
In the movie they used the word battery, but the explanation was more like chemical power plant. It wasn’t about storing electric energy, but generating it.
But yeah, I remember that half of the people with which I went to the cinema (at release) didn’t understand the movie. So I guess they needed to dump it down even if it creates inconsistencies.
Which also means, that a lot of the machines developed to kill humans and the computation to direct said machines is made by humans themselfes. Hell, the Matrix itself could be just a product of human “brain-calculations”, which is also a nice metaphor for the world. We basically enslave ourselves and barely anyone notices or cares, because we are all caught in the system.
I guess they didn’t watch any other part of the movies where all those tube people live in our regular world holding jobs and paying rent
Yeah but its the 90s. At that time, my oma bought a house in a nice neighborhood and set up a retirement plan on an American teachers salary. In the south.
Wasn’t that explicitly mentioned in the film, that that is the best time in civilization?
Yes
The height of our civilization, is what he says. I think.
Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say “your” civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became “our” civilization, which is of course what this is all about.
Please tell us more Mr Smith.
Damn his voice is so great. You gotta hear rather than simply read it.:-)
The height of human society.
Me in 1999: Haha, good joke, things will get even better.
Me in 2026: Damn, how right they were.
Zion or bust!
No not that Zion!
Wouldn’t it be the same Zion? Pretty sure the one in the Matrix got its name from the Jewish/Christian one. And I believe it even is meant as an allegory for Jerusalem.
lol yeah not that one. The one in the deep deep south.
No, not the best time, just the last time in humans where actually in charge before everything started to be controlled by machines.
IIRC the architect in part 2 even said that they tried to make the matrix a paradise, but that would make its inhabitants more suspicious, leading to a faster collapse of the fake reality.
Yep. I’d take 90s adulthood over this shit.
Nah, guys, the machines totally tried to make it a utopia and it, uh, just didn’t take. Ya gotta work til you die, the abundance of resources is unconnected. Stop asking questions.
I would take them at their word for that. If they made some sort of hyper real super pleasure heaven of pure bliss the tendency towards betterment would drive humans insane. Maybe once that failed there were just like ‘these fuckers are a mess, just dupe back when they thought they were happy and call it good.’
These monkes love conflict an struggle more than they admit. Make them suffer just enough so they don’t wake up.
Plus it gets to be 1998 forever
the peak of humanity
I don’t even think they kill you, just death by natural causes.
On the original, people probably become useless after they get dementia.
On the movie, machines are crazy and stupid, and everybody acts as if its normal… so whatever.
Aren’t there people with dementia in the matrix?
I they meant in the original concept of the plot, where humans were used for their brains’ processing power. In the movie I don’t think it would matter too much since they just need our heat and electricity.
just apply to be a cow in a barn
didn’t make it past the first milking
Boy should I not rewatch those movies…
“What do you mean they use them as batteries do you know how inefficient that is?” “Wait they’re growing the WHOLE BODY, MUSCLE AN ALL? How? And… For what? To jack a single neuron signal? That’s like 150 milivolts.” “Where the fuck are they even getting the goop? I’m sure if they’re advanced enough to harvest any energy from humans they could get WAY MORE from that goo on its own.”
Apparently the original plan was for the machines to use the brains of humans for computing power, like a giant neural network. But movie execs thought that was too complicated for the average movie goer and they made them change it to the battery thing.
Using them for processing power made more sense but they could probably done it better by just maintaining the brains and not the entire body, or even just made neural networks and ditch the humans. Also I assumed the goop is just made from the dead humans. They also never explain how they make new humans, they clone them? Artificial insemination?
Morpheus says the goop is made of dead humans. But they never mention reproduction.
This also means total biomass of humans i.e. pooulation must be decreasing but whatever. The brain network kind of makes energy source makes no sense, just go with it.
Where do they get new humans? Why do they keep the whole body?
Have you ever had a wet dream?
If you cum in the Matrix you cum in real life.
Warm vat of liquid goo doesn’t sound so nice when it’s recirculation community jizz (I mean, not to mention. I ain’t judging.)
They answer this in the movie. Humans aren’t born. They are grown.
So probably artificial insemination.
But like… we eat a LOT of calories a day to stay alive as a whole body I can’t imagine dead bodies being enough to feed us unless the population is going down a LOT. (Like a human body has maybe 2 years worth of calories)
I would say maybe less in a coma but those humans have fully developed bodies and muscles and all, so should be consuming about the same.
And yeah, extra processing power makes more sense than battery.
A fucking tortilla gives you enough energy to run for half an hour, we’re crazy efficient compared to machines, but the machines just needed a plentiful energy source and it wouldn’t matter that much. Yeah, the original brain computing made a lot more sense:
Like a human body has maybe 2 years worth of calories
I thought it was closer to 1 year. In any case it’s something of that magnitude. That’s been a trope in Hollywood for a long time. Soylent Green (1973) has the same “eat people” thing. It would mean every 1 of 2 years, one half of the population would have to eat the other half.
Where did you learn how much electricity the human body generates? And about the laws of thermodynamics? That’s right, inside the matrix. The machines are fucking liars, man
The idiot is a machine!
The dichotomy is more “how do we get some utility out of these humans without having to just kill all of them because we think genocide is probably wrong.”
This has always been my theory. Some kind of inbuilt mechanism whereby they must trick themselves into thinking that what they are doing is somehow to our benefit, as in the first law of robotics by Isaac Asimov.
I don’t remember if it was from one of the movies or one of the other related media, but don’t they claim to have put the humans into the matrix out of kindness and sympathy? That they wanted them to have a relatively easy and happy existence.
That becomes very believable if they don’t actually need them for power. And in fact it makes me wonder if the machines even need them conscious at all or could just as easily keep them comatose.
I think you may be referring to the “humans are a virus / human beings are a disease” dialogue … “and we are the cure”.
That refers more to human society, but yeah, why refer to yourself as “the cure” if you think of yourself as a superior lifeform who conquered and then even colonized the bodies of the former chief predator on the planet?
All of this getting back to: why not just make a fusion reactor or some such, and not bother with all that (bio-)mechanical machinery needed to harvest human “energy”, even if we were a battery, that surely sounds more wasteful and inefficient?
On the other hand, human society went extinct so humans had no collective memory of the past - unless it could be found written somewhere, which we were not told of in the movie series - and also robot society may itself not even be aware of its own motivations. Machines are better at repeating patterns than truly “thinking”, especially outside-of-the-box creative stuff (in movies, whereas irl machines don’t “think” at all… yet), so it seems more plausible that Mr. Smith is purely spouting BS here to keep Morpheus’ mind occupied while it can be hacked, maybe even believing his own crap, but all very minor in relation to fulfilling his programming-mandated mission (seemingly not knowing that a prior instantiation of him has done this before? or more likely not caring even if he did).
Anyway, this may be going too far since it is also highly plausible that even if the machines did want humans for batteries, the offer of a pleasant Ephesian Fields / Heaven type existence was not genuinely for the benefit of the humans (they seem to think at any rate), but rather to keep them docile & complacent.
Ultimately, it’s art so it means whatever we want it to? :-P
I like the alternative better, where human brains were used for processing power. The battery stuff makes no sense, except it’s an easy visual thing when Morpheus explains it.
Yeah I could see like the machines having to keep humans alive so this is the way to keep them from killing themselves and also proving useful for some background processing power.
The body typically produces between 100-500w of heat. That’s like three to five people to run a toaster.
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