science fiction, in its most perfect form, works like a Mobius strip. He criticizes the present by speculating on the future. Then, years later, early adopters look back and analyze his predictions, knowing full well that science fiction set the pattern for the world they live in. Utopian or dystopian, the future always turns in on itself. Rarely, however, do science fiction creators have the opportunity to revisit the worlds they’ve built after the events they anticipated have been set in motion. In this, Lana and Lilly Wachowski are anything but singular.
When The matrix came out in 1999, it was a beautifully realized cyberpunk fable. It took the hopeful energy of the internet’s early years and imagined what might happen if humanity’s reliance on connectivity and thinking machines led to its near demise. It was a grim prediction, but one in a long line of science fiction stories that predicted the near future. The best of worlds harbinger antidepressants. Philip K. Dick warned readers about androids, and now fears of AI revolts are felt when we dream of electric sheep (or at least watch a Boston Dynamics robot dance). Surely everyone who does surveillance technology knows the year 1984. Would virtual and augmented realities exist even if it weren’t for William Gibson neuromancer and the ASU Enterprise‘s holodecks?
What the Wachowskis predicted in The matrix— a world where artificial intelligence turns people into batteries and runs a simulation to keep them docile — hasn’t entirely come true, but hints of it are everywhere. No one lives in a simulation, but Silicon Valley can’t get enough of the metaverse, which often feels just a few clicks west. Scientists are working on brain-computer interfaces that could, many years from now, send virtual experiences to our brains. AI doesn’t (probably) generate our reality, but it lives in our cars, TVs, and toothbrushes. You don’t need a red pill to experience the real world, but the conspiracy-laden right-wing internet has co-opted “red-pilling” to mean becoming aware of the many ways liberalism is poisoning America. (Or something.)
The tech geniuses who currently run the world grew up with The matrix, and now they’re trying to make the simulation real. Only many seem to have forgotten the dangers that came with it, missing the point the Wachowskis were trying to make. “Readers often assume authors are happy when they ‘correctly’ predict future events,” noted writer Madeline Ashby in WIRED’s Future of Reality issue, “but we are rarely asked about the sense of unease to see his worst vision come true. ”
(Spoiler alert: Plot points for The Matrix Resurrections to follow.)
It’s this feeling of unease that pervades Matrix resurrections. It’s almost as if Lana Wachowski saw the worst of her own ideas start to take shape and wanted to sound the alarm. Set in San Francisco, the film is set approximately 60 years after the events of The matrix revolutions, the finale of the original trilogy. Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) have been reinserted into The Matrix, tricked into forgetting their days as saviors. Thomas Anderson is now a successful video game designer at a studio called Deus Ex Machina (LOL). He is responsible for a trilogy of games known as The matrix, which bear an uncanny resemblance to the events of the Wachowskis’ first three films. He is currently working on a new game called Binary– no doubt a reference to coding language, but also a not-so-subtle nod to the red pill versus the blue pill, right versus wrong, free will versus fate, and, perhaps, the fact that gender is not one or the other.
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