“What do you mean real? Give me a definition of the real, ”Morpheus asks a bewildered Neo in one of the topical scenes from Matrix, the iconic Wachowski sisters movie, which it has by now over 20 years on the shoulders. Neo, who has not yet become the Chosen One to lead the rebellion against the machines, is confused by the question. After swallowing the red pill that allows him to see beyond the digital simulation in which humanity lives unaware (while it is actually imprisoned in factory farms from which the machines draw energy), he has to deal with the new reality that is being brought to him. para in front. On the contrary: with “The desert of reality”, as Morpheus himself says.
This same term appears on the first page of Image from imposture, essay by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, first published in France in 1981. The book is explicitly mentioned in Matrix: Neo himself, before meeting Morpheus, uses it as a hiding place in which to hide the illegal software he sells on the black market. If he had read it instead, he might have caught the quote on the “desert of reality” and also became aware with a little advance of the Matrix that surrounds it.
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In some ways, Simulacra e impostura is a real red pill: the explicit point of reference from which the Wachowskis started for the theoretical construction of the quadrilogy (Resurrections is in Italian cinemas from January 1st 2022). Indeed, it is in this essay that Baudrillard argues that the consumer society of the late twentieth century is a society in which simulations or imitations of reality have become more real than reality itself. A condition which Baudrillard gives the famous definition of “hyperreal”.
Consumer culture has now reached a stage where our lives are filled with simulations, objects and practices that seem to represent something else, but have actually replaced the reality they seem to refer to. Ours is a society where there is no longer a need for to walk or run as a means of displacement, but in which the running it has become a recreational and healthy activity to be carried out with special technical equipment: the simulation of something that we actually did before. Likewise, through labels such as “bio”, “km 0” and more, we simply simulate the experience of what was previously our normal nourishment.
In this way, the world of simulations increasingly takes on a life of its own, while reality is being eroded to the point of becoming “a desert of reality”. From this point of view, the entire first trilogy of Matrix it can be interpreted (and in fact has been interpreted) as a critique of the consumer society, which distracts us from the reality in which we live and from the exploitation to which we are subjected. A a criticism that could also be defined as Marxist: not only because Karl Marx is one of Baudrillard’s main references, but because the exploitation of the working class, for the German thinker, is made possible by the fact that he does not realize he is being exploited. It too lives, forcing the comparison, in a Matrix generated by the ideologies and religions that Marx hated so much.
From Karl Marx to the metaverse
Marx’s class struggle is replaced, in the post-industrial era and according to Baudrillard, by the problem of simulation: it is also for this reason that Baudrillard is not brought up only when it is analyzed Matrix, but also whenever reference is made to the social impact of technologies such as virtual reality. That what would Baudrillard, who passed away in 2007, think of the metaverse? Of that digital and immersive world, to be experienced in virtual reality and in which the giants of Silicon Valley (starting with Facebook) aim to transfer a growing part of our everyday life, from work to fun, from sport to socializing?
A digital world that, if that weren’t enough, is being designed just as our planet is rocked by the climate crisis and grappling with a pandemic. One could defiantly argue that the metaverse is being built to lock us up in a reassuring virtual environment which replicates the world as we knew it, hiding from our view the less and less hospitable reality in which we truly live.
From this point of view, i literary references of the metaverse would no longer be the only novels Snow Crash (where the term “metaverse” first appears) or Ready Player One (in which the metaverse takes complete form), but also its own Matrix, which significantly raises the level of dystopia by imagining a society in which people immersed in the simulation are not even aware that they are.
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Baudrillard’s attack on the Matrix
In light of the relationship between Baudrillard’s analyzes and the narration of Matrix, the Wachowskis had contacted the French philosopher to provide advice for the two sequels, Reloaded e Revolutions. Baudrillard peremptorily refused, explaining how his philosophy was grossly misunderstood by the film. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, he said this: “There have already been other films that have dealt with this growing indistinction between real and virtual, such as Truman Show, Minority Report or also Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s masterpiece. Here in Matrix, ed) the device is more crude and does not really cause disturbance. Either the characters are in the Matrix, that is, in the digitization of things, or they are radically outside, that is, in Zion, the city of those who resist. Indeed it would be interesting to show what happens at the junction of the two worlds ”.
Not happy to have diminished the revolutionary reach of MatrixBaudrillard continued: “What is embarrassing in this film is above all that the new problem posed by simulation is here confused with the very classic one of illusion, which was already found in Plato. The real misunderstanding is here “. Summarizing, Baudrillard argued that the Wachowskis’ true philosophical debt was with the famous myth of Plato’s cave, in which human beings who have seen only shadows cast against the walls think that this is reality, and only after freeing themselves from the chains that force them into the cave do they get to know the real world.
Instead, according to researcher Randy Laist, “Baudrillard’s fundamental intuition in Image from imposture is that the Platonic duality between reality and representation has imploded in the real world, resulting in a hyperreal condition in which the criteria of truth and falsity no longer apply ”. Reading Matrix it would therefore be not very refined, in some ways antiquated and above all not up to the standard of films like The Truman Show The Mulholland Drive (you could also add They live by John Carpenter), who had better investigated this fusion between reality and representation. In MatrixIn a nutshell, a dichotomous reading would be proposed again, which in our society has already been overcome.
There is however another aspect that Baudrillard did not tolerate of Matrix. In some of his works, the philosopher has analyzed the way in which, in our society, protest and rebellion have been increasingly absorbed and exploited by what he called “the symbolic system of capitalism”. And the same actually seems to happen with the film Matrix, exemplary product of that same world that criticizes: “Matrix it is absolutely within this mechanism – said the philosopher in the interview with the Nouvel Observateur – Everything that belongs to the order of dreams, utopia, fantasy, here is given to us to see and is realized. We are in full transparency. Matrix it’s kind of like the Matrix movie that the Matrix could have made itself “.
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