Fun fact: The human battery thing is actually a retcon the Wazowskis did at the last moment because they thought the American public would be too stupid to grok the actual understanding of the Matrix.
Humans are an entropic species, they consume more energy than they produce - any synthetic race that tried to harness energy from a net negative energy producer is an idiot.
What the Matrix is, is actually a distributed simulation MATRIX that uses individual human brains as nodes in a shared, hallucinogenic dream, indistinguishable from reality.
The real simulation isn't so primitive, it doesn't require people to be popsicle tubes in some crazy dystopian cyberpunk black and red tower attended by insectoid robots.
Instead the entire universe is contained on a single state machine, compromising a [redacted] amount of memory, running in [redacted]. Simulants are never aware of being inside of the simulation, except for rare instances where outsiders occasionally post on Lemmy.
Why they do that, we don't know. We suspect that it is [all further content redacted].
I thought I remembered seeing that the reason for the retcon didn't come from the Wachowskis but from a studio note
I think top comment is a reference of some kind.
I heard something similar; the studio didn't think the movie would be popular if they used too many computer terms so they made them change the function to "battery". Initially the reason Neo has powers is because his node happens to have admin access.
The distributed computing explanation for purpose of the Matrix doesn’t seem to make much more sense than the power plant one.
All of the nodes are continuously occupied by living in the simulation. Unless the machines had a desperate need to understand human society circa 1999, there is nothing useful the machines could do with all the brain power.
The Animatrix (prequel) goes into further detail as to why the machines did it -- it's an act of mercy for their creators. They refused to fight humanity, and it was mankind who darkened the skies, in an attempt to disable the solar power that the machine race relied upon.
It's not a prison, or some kind of torture device, or an experiment, but a way for humanity to continue living on a world that they made uninhabitable for themselves / incompatible with organic life.
Agent Smith : 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. 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.
Conscious thought and perception occupy a pretty small amount of our brain power. If you could offload computational tasks to portions of the brain that wouldn't actually need to do anything if you were in the matrix, you could have a surplus.
The visual processing portion of our brains, for example. We have a blind spot over our optic nerve and we're colourblind at our periphery. Our eye hardware actually kinda sucks and we have this massive software layer running on dedicated brain hardware
I don't think there is a satisfying explanation in the movie, it wasn't really the point of the film to give one either.
But i think there is one that's would have been a good fit.
The world getting empty of resources and our planet's condition worsening, we could have made the simulation for ourselves.
Our brain could be fueled by a renewable enough energy and creating all the comfort of modern society inside of the simulation.
That would have been a better plot for the following films too, trying to understand what was Asimov type of rules we put into the AI and how to hack it.
Yep, humans weren't supposed to be batteries which would be wasteful, and they might as well use cattle. They were supposed to use human brainpower as CPU for the machines.
humans are an entropic species
You make it sound like there is an alternative
Yeah let's get atrophic, baby
This single fact that I learned a few months ago, finally makes many things in the movie make sense since the whole thing about being able to manipulate the simulation by being aware of it and how programs can "be installed" in the meat machine.
Rewatched the 3 movies the other week actively thinking about this and yeah it helps a lot.
tldr: read the invisibles
For anyone wondering this is a series of 7 comic books, which I have not yet read but am now interested in after your commwnt.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who calls them the Wazoswskis lol
It's easy to spell when you realize it's a Polish last name. And you speak Polish.
I want to make a Wazowski / Wachowski joke but I'm not sure if that implies "Mike" is a deadname.
I love this types of joke where an entire story is told just as setup for a single joke (or pun)
don't let this man distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
And why would the machines need humans to harness energy anyway? Aren't there an almost infinite number of species on this earth that could serve the same purpose without the risk of them waking up and overthrow you? I imagine pigs don't care much about anything and you could pretty much scrap the whole Matrix thing.
And now on YouTube the Red Pill symbolizes accepting misogyny as the backbone for society.
Conservatives can truly spin everything for the worst.
Pretty sure it means accepting that you’re trans
And the blue pill symbolizes continuing to pretend to be someone else
Like the whole movie is a trans allegory, especially considering the creators.
One of the creators said "that's not the original intention, but sure, you could read it that way too" in some interview
I can certainly see that in regards to the movie. I think I read somewhere too that the character "Switch" would switch genders from the real world into the Matrix. I think it would have been real cool if it had made it to the movie.
I feel so bad for Laurence Fishburne. This pic does him dirty. It's got him looking like the cenobite Butterball
That's what not being a human battery does to you
!This propaganda was bought to you by the machines!<
He's singing.
And singing opera, no less! Thank you for sharing. That makes the picture make way more sense
Kudos to whoever found the one frame out of a hundred thousand where Fishburne isn't looking like a total badass.
This just made me realise the matrix is also an allegory of capitalism
...as well as for whether you'd choose to know harsh realities over comforting dreams. Capitalism has a few choices and perspectives in this regard.
Yep, the matrix is capitalism (a system of control) and getting unplugged is class consciousness.
I thought matrix was going to school and getting unplugged was graduating.
STEAKS ARE FAKE
REAL STEAK DOESN'T EXIST
LEARN KUNG FUUUUUUUUU
They aren't fake, they're just rare
Cypher was right. Ignorance is bliss.
He didn't have to kill three people though.
And knowledge is power.
I don't know why but him saying Neo's name a second time has me dyin
Rick and Morty
It reminds me of Charlie the Unicorn which has a similar cadence
My guess is that it's because it's completely unnecessary and thus instantly makes the whole text 50% more unhinged
I thought he didn't really have a social life.
He had enough of one to go clubbing with the mescaline guy. Let's be honest: a truly anti-social geek would never even get the invite.
He maybe a loner but he isn’t autistic so people still treat him like a fellow human being.
Porridge is delicious.
Yea, should probably look into a mirror and practice it a few times before I try it again
10/10
What happens if you take both the red pill and the blue pill at the same time?
Diareah
Purplepilled
And that is why they usually only 'free' kids. They don't know any better.
The third movie be like "Plato's cave, nah, more like Plato's RAVE"
