Using imaginative special effects to combine martial arts mysticism with a look of near-future high-tech grunge, The Matrix brings metaphysics to a mass audience, perhaps for the first time in Western history. This particular (solipsistic) metaphysics is quite old, dating back to Descartes; but the film-makers cloaked it in a story that made it accessible to teenagers – the children of baby boomers – out for an evening’s entertainment. What had originated as obscure ideas accessible only to highly educated philosophers working at the limits of their intellectual craft has become transformed into entertainment delivered through the vicarious physical thrills of a scifi action movie.
In the mythology of The Matrix computers represent, not only the oppressive Establishment that has been the object of fear and anger since the counter-cultural sixties, but the fabric of reality itself. Human beings have become prisoners in a giant machine that cultivates them for its own use. Humans need to “trip” – our hero takes a pill prior to being freed from his incubator – to see through the virtual reality illusions the machine spins for them. The object is to break free of the computer-supplied fabric and come to see the world as it really is. Drugs, mystical knowledge, and the martial arts have become a way of escaping and, perhaps ultimately defeating, the machine.
Meanwhile computing has become all but ubiquitous in the world at large. Many households have more than one PC, and many people use them to surf the world-wide web and devoting substantial amounts of time to interacting with other people online. One might thus argue that the world of The Matrix is but an extreme extrapolation from the role that computing does in fact play in the lives of many people. Before dancing down that rabbit hole, however, we should remind ourselves that many citizens of cyberspace use their computers to create conversations and communities that are alternatives to the Establishment symbolized in the movie. The movie uses computing to present a metaphysical fable, but that fable does not necessarily depict how computing technology is actually used by its target audience.
Selected Milestones:
- 1990: The world-wide-web was proposed by Swiss researchers.
- 1991: Desert Storm, the first war televised live and in real-time. Now real war is at our fingertips, just like a video game.
- 1994: Netscape was founded, with its IPO in 1995. This is the first company created by the world-wide-web, and it started the dotcom bubble that was to burst in 2001.
- 1999: Inventor and businessman turned futurist guru Raymond Kurzweil publishes The Age of Spiritual Machines, a manifesto about a future in which machines will surpass the accomplishments of their human creators.
- 2000: Detroit Electronic Free Music Festive draws 1.5 million people in its first year and is dedicated to genres of music which cultivate trance states.
- 2003: Anti-war organizers used the world-wide-web to organize world-wide protests against the American-led war against Iraq.
- 2003: Two major books about psychedelic drugs and mysticism are published, Rational Mysticism, and Breaking Open the Head.
Coda: Bodhisattvas and Philosopher Kings
In Buddhism a Bodhisattva is one who has become enlightened, and thus is free of the cycle of rebirth and its attendant suffering, but elects to remain among the unenlightened so as to help them achieve enlightenment. A Bodhisattva is thus like Plato’s Philosopher King who, having freed himself from the cave of ignorance and illusion to bask it the light of The Good, chooses to return to the cave to help others find their way out. The challenge for today’s youth is to become cultural Bodhisattvas and Philosopher Kings, to return from the metaphysical wandering that has so crippled many of their elders – who, in fact, mistakenly believe themselves to be culturally, if not necessarily spiritually, enlightened.
To achieve this end, emerging generations will need to arrive at a new understanding of the sacred – the challenge bequeathed by psychedelic culture – and of the methods and implications of computing. It is by no means clear how either of these issues will unfold. While the religious Right in America has succeeded in forcing the body politic to deal with religious issues, those are not the only ones that are relevant. We also have the revival of paganism in various forms – whether the shamanism of Native Americans (cf. Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head) or the wicca of the old European tribes (prominent in, e.g. the television program, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) – the continuing influence of Eastern religion, and the growth of trance-oriented music.
Steven Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is perhaps the most obvious place to look for a consideration of the implications of a computational worldview. This very long and difficult book has sold over a quarter of a million copies and kicked up controversy in both the scientific and general press. Within the cognitive sciences, a second generation of thinkers is bidding to displace the thinkers who emerged in the fifties and sixties and whose intellectual hopes have not been fulfilled. Will the neurosciences come to the rescue? It is impossible to predict the outcome of these debates. Indeed, to the extent that Wolfram is right, our only recourse is to live them through and see what happens.
In the words of that peculiarly pagan and Christian poet, the anonymous medieval author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
In destinies sad or merry,
True men can but try.
* * * * *
I wrote my original book proposal – on which this series of articles is based in 2003. If I were to re-work the proposal and present it now, how would I change it? That’s not clear, but a place to start would be to look at the Japanese influence on The Matrix, which I didn’t know about at the time or, if I did, I didn’t fully appreciate it. The movie drew much of it’s imagery, & something of its premise, from Ghost in the Shell, an anime film that had achieved cult status both in Japan and in the USA. After releasing Matrix trilogy, the Wachowski brothers released Animatrix, a set of nine anime flims they’d commissioned to complement their live-action films. This is a screen shot from one of them, entitled “Matriculation”:
I hesitate to say that that shot is typical of this little film, which is visually varied and rich, but it makes a point. The imagery is classic psychedelic imagery – a mystic voyage of some sort, a “trip”—but it is taking place in some cyberspace in a future reality. The imagery itself, of course, was realized on computers.
Whatever else the story of computers and psychedelia has become in the 21st century, it has become international and transnational. Which it always was, after all, LSD and the world-wide-web were invented in Switzerland and the computer owes a debt to, among others, a British mathematician, Alan Turing, and a Hungarian immigrant, John von Neumann. Rock and roll is an important part of the story, and it went international in the late 50s and early 60s, and so forth. Arguably the story I intended to tell was an American one because America is where it all came together. Those days are over. Perhaps America’s days as a locus of unique and potent cultural invention are over. If so, that is not so much because America has fallen on hard times – though there are those who worry about America’s inventiveness – but because the rest of the world is taking an increasingly active role in the cultural mix-and-match that will reconstruct human society and psyche in the 21st century.
We have met the inventors, and they are everywhere.
The series:
Mind Hacks R Us: The Psychedelic Computer
Mind Hacks 2: Adventures in Fantasia
Mind Hacks 3: 1956 – The Forbidden Planet Within
Mind Hacks 4: 1968 – 2001: The Crazy Computer Trips the Light Fantastic
Mind Hacks 5: 1982 – Tron
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