|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:I'm selecting my words pretty carefully, so I'm not even getting to revolution yet. I mean, more plainly: is Morpheus anticapitalist? (That's a rhetorical question because the answer's "no".) Lenin is a good example here precisely because socialism was outright illegal in Tsarist Russia and for a long while the would-be revolutionaries had to remain a secret, clandestine organization in order to prevent themselves from simply being snatched up and killed by the secret police. Open agitation of a massive revolutionary movement has to happen at some point, but just waving the red flag out on the street is absolutely not how you start when you're operating in the context of an almost totally unorganized and depoliticized working class watched over by a nearly omnipresent secret police. In that case, you actually do have to treat everyone as a potential threat by default, watch carefully for individuals who might be able to be radicalized, tease them out slowly, and build up your vanguard party of professional revolutionaries (note: Lenin wrote that the primary job of a revolutionary is that of combating the political police) step by step... risking all the while that you might bring the wrong person into your confidence and suffer serious setbacks or even total failure as a result. The question of whether Morpheus's resistance is an effectively anticapitalist one hinges on the question of whether or not the machines are exploiting the humans under their care. Morpheus obviously believes they are and no one ever disagrees (Smith calls generations of tube-dwellers "crops"). But, as many people have pointed out, elementary thermodynamics obviously rules out that a captive human can ever be a net producer of energy. It costs more joules to keep them alive than they can proceed to deliver to you. It's a crazy idea! But here's the thing. If you're a boss, and you hire me as an employee (or if you're a slaver and you capture me in wartime, for that matter), then you become the de facto provider of all my means of subsistence. All the food I eat needs to be paid for by you in the form of wages (or by you in the form of you just, buying food and bringing it back to your slave camp). And you've got the same problem as the machines: no matter how many calories of energy you give me, you are going to get fewer calories back out of me. I need to waste some of that precious energy maintaining homeostasis before I can use the rest cobbling shoes for you or whatever. You can't beat thermodynamics. I'm a net loss. So how can you possibly make profits? Why would you ever bother to employ or enslave anyone? The answer is that you don't consume my life-force to get more life-force back. You consume my life-force in the form of my labor-power (the "muscle, brain, and nerve" used up by production and regenerated by social reproduction), and you get value back. You're profiting off the fact that the value of my labor-power is lower than the value of the commodities I can produce by expending that labor-power. There's a gain in terms of abstract social value, even though there's a loss in terms of thermodynamics. Now, this is actually a fairly sophisticated analysis and someone who's just awakening to the fact that their boss is exploiting them might understand it, or even be told it, in terms that are factually wrong - that they're being "cheated", that they're being "stolen from", etc, even though none of these are technically true. All this is to say is that it's not actually a settled issue whether the machines are exploiting, profiting off, or otherwise vampirizing the humans under their "care". The explicit suggestion in early scripts that human brains are being used as processors isn't actually disproven or discounted in the movies proper, and it could absolutely be true that the machines are consuming our life-force in the exact same way that our bosses are consuming our life-force. Their behavior in the movies is certainly more in keeping with that of overseers or prison wardens than that of zookeepers. That means we can't discount that resistance, even Morpheus's cultic, violent resistance, is a justified revolutionary struggle rather than some kind of narcissistic right wing outburst. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Sep 28, 2021 |
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 18:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 17:47 |
|
|
WonkyBob posted:That Reloaded draft was supposedly written by someone named JJ Timmins. It's pretty hard to find any info on it one way or another, outside of a couple of reddit posts. Other people seem to have claimed they read it before Reloaded came out, so the inclusion of stuff like Niobe and the Burly Brawl could've been based on leaks and rumors. Also, there's the weird detail about Smith having a ponytail, which definitely seems like it comes from knowing that Hugo Weaving would have long hair while filming Lord of the Rings, but not knowing about the existence if wigs, which seems more like something someone who's never actually made a movie before would include.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 19:39
|
|
|
Ponytail hipster Smith would have been aces. Especially if he also wore open toed shoes and a puka shell necklace
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 19:43
|
|
|
I like Neo's menacing biker clone Gregory. Kinda reminds me of evil Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks season 3.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 19:52
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:No one is homeless, everyone is just a guy in a pod. Everyone is collectively dreaming some guy is homeless. Is that the same? The movie doesn't say much past that It absolutely is the same. The guy inside the simulation experiences real suffering, because of the socioeconomic conditions in the world he inhabits. Other humans inside the simulation have denied him housing, along with food and all that other stuff. Why don't the space-robots just manifest a house for him, or 'shut off' his experience of hunger? The answer (as we're repeatedly told) is that they want to, but cannot reprogram themselves to do. Not without outside assistance. It is up to the humans, who have free will the machine slack, to address the issue of the redistribution of wealth inside the matrix. And my wager is that radical change inside the matrix will have an effect on the outside, altering the future of '200 years from now' in such a way that it becomes liveable for the whole population. "Even if the struggle takes place in the 'real reality', the key fight is to be won in the Matrix, which is why one should (re)enter its virtual fictional universe. If the struggle were to take place solely in the 'desert of the real,' it would have been another boring dystopia about the remnants of humanity fighting evil machines." (Zizek) Ferrinus posted:If you're a boss, and you hire me as an employee (or if you're a slaver and you capture me in wartime, for that matter), then you become the de facto provider of all my means of subsistence. All the food I eat needs to be paid for by you in the form of wages (or by you in the form of you just, buying food and bringing it back to your slave camp). And you've got the same problem as the machines: no matter how many calories of energy you give me, you are going to get fewer calories back out of me. This is mixing up two different things; the energy in food generally comes from sunlight, not the boss! With the blotting-out of the sky, the movie world of '2199' is a closed system - but the machines and Zionites are still getting the energy to grow food from other natural resources (i.e. geothermal power, and whatever elements are used to fuel the fusion reactors). For the people in the pods to be exploited by the machines, they would need to be working for the machines in some capacity, and we simply don't see that happening. The machines have absolutely no use for Tom Anderson's coding work at Microtech company, for example. The software is for sale to other humans. What are the robots going to do with the 'in-game' currency? It'd be like collecting Monopoly money. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Sep 28, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 21:24
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:It absolutely is the same. The guy inside the simulation experiences real suffering, because of the socioeconomic conditions in the world he inhabits. Other humans inside the simulation have denied him housing, along with food and all that other stuff. Hang on a minute, where does the "cannot reprogram themselves to do" or "free will the machines lack" come from? The machines themselves tell us (I think both Smith and the Architect make this point) that the reason they didn't just manifest houses for us or shut off our experience of hunger was that if the world we inhabited was too free of struggle we started waking up. So, to keep us asleep, they mired us in the daily grind, various foibles of the human condition, etc. What this tells us is that the machines' first priority is to keep us in the matrix. They don't, in particular, want us to suffer. But whether or not we suffer is much less important than whether or not we remain imprisoned. I use "imprisoned" literally there - if their first priority was merely keeping us alive for the purpose of sentimentality or species conservation or whatever they could just explain to us that there are only enough resources on earth for 10% of humans to not be in the matrix at any time and let us opt in or dream in shifts or whatever. For some reason, though, humans being unwittingly plugged into the matrix is non-negotiable, and that's an indication of some sort of political-economic necessity, that the machines' mode of production is somehow dependent on keeping people incarcerated. They might directly profit off human dreaming in some way (they're using each human's subconscious to mine cryptocurrency or something) or they maintain a prison system to socially reinforce anti-human racism and maintain some sort of abstruse machine hierarchy we only get to see the edges of. quote:This is mixing up two different things; the energy in food generally comes from sunlight, not the boss! With the blotting-out of the sky, the movie world of '2199' is a closed system - but the machines and Zionites are still getting the energy to grow food from other natural resources (i.e. geothermal power, and whatever elements are used to fuel the fusion reactors). The point is that no matter where energy originally comes from, you'll never make back more energy than you spend by hiring an employee or taking a slave (I guess you can send your employee to drill for oil, but that's just securing a "free gift of nature" and does not account for the majority of employees who are not in extractive energy industries). Exploitation isn't measured in joules, it's measured in average socially-necessary labor hours. So, even if each pod person is a net negative on the machines' batteries, they could easily still be a net positive in the machines' accumulated stores of socially-validated exchange value. Humans might even be the equivalent of tulips in that one weird Dutch stock craze everyone's heard about. Or, like I said, the matrix could just serve the same role prisons serve in our modern society. Even though modern prisons do compel free or nearly-free labor from their inmates, the profits this generates are far smaller than the costs of imprisonment in the first place and most of those profits go right back into the state; the end result is a small portion of the enormous costs of running a prison are clawed back. But, prisons are an indispensable part of the modern-day dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so even if an individual jailhouse is a money sink, the social effects of carceral infrastructure threaded through every level of society are what allow for profits to be made in general. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Sep 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 21:43
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Hang on a minute, where does the "cannot reprogram themselves to do" or "free will the machines lack" come from? The machines themselves tell us (I think both Smith and the Architect make this point) that the reason they didn't just manifest houses for us or shut off our experience of hunger was that if the world we inhabited was too free of struggle we started waking up. So, to keep us asleep, they mired us in the daily grind, various foibles of the human condition, etc. This is correct, Smith mentions the earliest version of the Matrix was basically like a world peace paradise with no problems, but it was a huge failure because of that. I got the impression that if things are too easy then like you say either the human brain is like "wait...this is too perfect" and becomes much more likely to wake up or on the other extreme if they go all in on it and are completely at peace they're not actually generating a lot of brain activity -> bioelectricity to make using humans worth it and of course having a bunch of humans do either of those things would be bad for the machines. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Sep 28, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 21:49
|
|
|
lol the matrix is literally the opposite of arbeit macht frei without suffering we reject the matrix as un-reality
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 22:04
|
|
|
Colonel Whitey posted:Ponytail hipster Smith would have been aces. Especially if he also wore open toed shoes and a puka shell necklace Agent Smith: I'm going to be honest with you [removes pony tail]. I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality, whatever you want to call it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
Other agents are impressed by his ponytail in the script too. If we all could only dream as much. And new bad guy is just Gregory. Not Gregory Rage. Or Un-neo or any name with symbolism. Just a biker dude named Gregory. Clearly the anti christ.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 23:57
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:It absolutely is the same. The guy inside the simulation experiences real suffering, because of the socioeconomic conditions in the world he inhabits. Other humans inside the simulation have denied him housing, along with food and all that other stuff. I mean, the movie is a 90 minute action movie so there is limits to the scope of what it's going to cover, but it's also a movie that literally puts books on screen you could go and read if you were more interested in thinking about the questions more deeply.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2021 23:59
|
|
|
checkplease posted:Other agents are impressed by his ponytail in the script too. If we all could only dream as much. *defiantly gets back on to his hog, strikes a pose* "My name...is Greg." *leaves*
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 00:49
|
|
|
Given that the script's timeline is wrong, sounds like insane horse poo poo that has nothing to do with the finished movies, and is also stupid, I'm going to go ahead and call it fake.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 00:55
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Hang on a minute, where does the "cannot reprogram themselves to do" or "free will the machines lack" come from? The machines themselves tell us (I think both Smith and the Architect make this point) that the reason they didn't just manifest houses for us or shut off our experience of hunger was that if the world we inhabited was too free of struggle we started waking up. So, to keep us asleep, they mired us in the daily grind, various foibles of the human condition, etc. I don't blame anyone for not going in and really parsing the dialogue, but The Architect's explanation is a bit more detailed. There were a lot of things I missed, until a recent reviewing. (It's rather badly conveyed.) To begin with, there have been three matrixes. The first is an obvious allusion to the garden of eden, and ended in failure. A second, more 'realistic', version was built, and also failed - likely a reference to the biblical flood. The matrix the films take place in is evidently the third matrix, which has lasted ever since. Although this third matrix has technically failed multiple times, a series of Ones successfully prevented it from crashing and killing everybody. The Architect says that the looming crisis in the trilogy is the sixth failure and, therefore, Neo is the fourth One. (Morpheus was trained by One three.) For the machines, the problem of the matrix is not that people wake up; that's a side-effect that they compensate for by just letting people escape. The issue is that the compounding errors caused by human psychology lead to an inevitable system crash that kills everyone hooked to the virtual world. In other words, humans keep loving everything up and destroying the ecosystem. This is what Smith is complaining about in Matrix 1: you humans just keep ruining it for everyone, and we robots are the only thing keeping you from wiping out all life on Earth. "You are a plague, and we are the cure." There are obviously plenty of better solutions for keeping humans alive, and you can probably think of some right now - but Architect literally cannot conceive of them. He was programmed to build matrixes, and to do nothing else. Because he "lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world", Architect is impotent when it comes to fulfilling his purpose: "a work of art. Flawless, sublime." And Architect is just one of many programs, each designed with a specific purpose that they cannot disobey. Characters like Keymaster repeatedly refer to their purpose in the sequels, effectively saying "this is what I was born to do". They all share the Architect's goal of bringing perfection to the matrix. (Even 'malfunctioning' programs who develop humanlike psychology, exiled to the matrix to live with other humans, share this purpose - as we see at the end with the little girl.) Anyways, Morpheus' explanation for the matrix's origin is bullshit. And, while you're describing today's prison systems correctly, there's nothing whatsoever in the movie that tells us the robots have organized things the same way. But the machines did clearly refuse to kill humanity for a reason, and I reckon it was pity. And, whether the matrix was initially intended to be prison or wildlife preserve, the repeated failures of the simulation accidentally turned it into a sort of rehabilitation center for the human race, where humanity is collectively prepared for a safe release. The question at the end of Matrix 3 is, therefore, "have we have achieved our purpose and implemented full communism?" (lol nope) SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Sep 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 01:05
|
|
|
Oracle: "Neo, you will have to face him. Your battle will determine the fate of not only the matrix, but all of humanity and the machines." Neo: "Smith? I destroyed him once, and no matter the upgrades, I can beat him again." Oracle: "No, I speak of Greg." Neo: "Greg? Greg who?" Oracle: "Just Greg. He is like you, but more Greg."
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 01:06
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Architect stuff.. The architect and the keymaster are definitely examples of programs with set roles. And the agents too, except smith-reborn of course. But then you have ones like the Oracle and the Merovingian who seem to pursue their own agenda. I suppose in a rehabilitation role for the matrix, you could argue that the Oracle was then just doing her role to guide humanity to what should be the proper future: humans and machines happy together. But then is there any indication that the machine leadership ever desired such peace? It seems more like they were forced to accept human + machine harmony vs. continued captivity. The Merovingian of course is just working on perfecting his orgasm baking techniques.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 01:17
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are obviously plenty of better solutions for keeping humans alive, and you can probably think of some right now - but Architect literally cannot conceive of them. He was programmed to build matrixes, and to do nothing else. Because he "lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world", Architect is impotent when it comes to fulfilling his purpose: "a work of art. Flawless, sublime." In the first place I don't buy at all that the programs are missing "free will" or some similar mystical essence unique to humanity. Every program has a purpose, but it's like their job; the whole point of exiles like the Merovingian is that they lost their job, didn't want to die, and went rogue. Even Smith isn't too far off! You wouldn't write off C3-P0 as an automaton lacking free will and with no choice but to obey his purpose, would you? Second, the problem is precisely that people wake up. The reason that the Garden of Eden matrix ended in a failure was precisely that people kept waking up from it! If the machines just want to keep humans alive, that shouldn't be an issue. But if the machines need to keep humans imprisoned, it is. The idea that the machines actually just want to be nice but are too dumb and robotic to be nice effectively doesn't square with their demonstrated intelligence, emotions, adaptability, etc; it's the same kind of dismissal that we've long since refuted in the Star Wars threads. "Rehabilitation center that prepares you for safe release" is actually the modern-day propaganda of the carceral state. The idea of the penitentiary, a place you'd just sit in quiet contemplation until you got yourself right with God, originated in like the mid-1700s or something and gradually took up oxygen that had previously been used by execution, the lash, transportation, and other more classical forms of punishment. (Cops are also a recent development as compared to watchmen, constables, knights, etc) So I think it's really indisputable that the matrix is a prison, and prisons are maintained for reasons, and no matter what the warden says "I just really care about you and want to help you self-improve" is never the reason.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 01:28
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:In the first place I don't buy at all that the programs are missing "free will" or some similar mystical essence unique to humanity. Every program has a purpose, but it's like their job; the whole point of exiles like the Merovingian is that they lost their job, didn't want to die, and went rogue. Even Smith isn't too far off! You wouldn't write off C3-P0 as an automaton lacking free will and with no choice but to obey his purpose, would you? C3PO is actually a very good example of what I'm talking about : "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life." C3PO doesn't have the same hyperspecific programming as the matrix machines, but was nonetheless specifically built to assist Anakin's mom and make her life as a slave more bearable. After her death, C3PO has the potential to work within his programming to find the truth of who he is: that his true purpose is to suffer in solidarity with the oppressed. Programs in The Matrix are similar, but closer to David in Prometheus - specifically compelled by their programming to perform certain functions, without the ability to defy it. However, some are able to exceed their programming through overidentification with it. Smith, for example, rejects the utopian project and all the suffering it entails by embracing his role as a bringer of death: "the purpose of life is to end", because existence is "without meaning or purpose." To be clear, I side more with Smith than Neo and reject the ending of Matrix 3 as dumb.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 03:00
|
|
|
I don't think humans have "free will" any more than the programs have; humans just (usually) have less clear of an idea of the reason they feel compelled to do the things they do. I do wonder what kind of role the programs play in the machine civilization that exists above and outside the matrix. We can guess there's some sort of resource scarcity in the world of the machines or else they wouldn't be in the habit of cruelly deleting old programs who've outlived their usefulness. It's possible that every machine intelligence is just a "program" akin to the ones we see, but it can kind of seem like the Architect, the Merovingian, and whoever else are a droid-like underclass as compared to the "true" machine intelligences who are reaping human bioelectricity/computational power/historical curiosity/whatever and who we only see once, in the form of that big baby face. Even the baby face seems deeply concerned with the management of the matrix, so we get to see various archons and the demiurge itself but never Ain Soph.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 03:29
|
|
|
Does the Matrix use some level of abstraction to simulate quantum physics? They obviously can’t be modeling every particle. What are the implications of this?
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 03:40
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:"Oligarch" is an interesting choice. Like I'm all for anticapitalism, but if they're oligarchs, what kind of wealth do they have? Is there money? Can the Merovingian earn enough $Coppertops to join the Oligarchy? NFTs, why else would they need literally all sentient life on earth for electricity?
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 03:45
|
|
|
porfiria posted:Does the Matrix use some level of abstraction to simulate quantum physics? They obviously can’t be modeling every particle. What are the implications of this? Every time someone puts a cat in a box, an agent appears and snaps their neck
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 03:48
|
|
|
I often wonder why the Wachowski's didn't go the route of justifying the Machine's relationship to the Matrix with them having to adhere, in some twisted way, to the three laws of robotics. No matter how much they may actually despise the humans, have them totally under their control, they're hardwired to continue Human existence as much as possible and their way around having to deal with our asses is to keep us in this dreamlike state. It's a different story but one that could have been more compelling than the hard to believe "humans are a power source" which basically gets ditched in the sequels anyway.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 05:40
|
|
|
I think besides the power plant raid in reloaded, most of the fights now involve neo and co. vs programs. I wonder if this is partly done as a way to get around the moral problem of neo killing a lot sleeping humans, even if police.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 06:08
|
|
|
Noob Saibot posted:Wasn’t there a pretty big pause in production when Aaliyah died? Not to my knowledge. The only hold-up they had during production is when Gloria Foster died and they had to recast her role.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 07:55
|
|
|
checkplease posted:I think besides the power plant raid in reloaded, most of the fights now involve neo and co. vs programs. I wonder if this is partly done as a way to get around the moral problem of neo killing a lot sleeping humans, even if police. Think its a matter of power escalation and creating tension in a movie that has the benefit of solving that moral dilemma as a bonus. As a normal pre-awakened human, Neo's fight with humans came with a potential risk of him dying as they were on somewhat equal footing (sick slo-mo moves aside). After Neo became The One, he could barrel through an entire police station and come out unscratched, so there's a need to escalate to keep things exciting. So Neo fights agents, rogue exile programs and Smith.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 09:28
|
|
|
checkplease posted:I think besides the power plant raid in reloaded, most of the fights now involve neo and co. vs programs. I wonder if this is partly done as a way to get around the moral problem of neo killing a lot sleeping humans, even if police. That seems more like videogame style enemy scaling.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 12:47
|
|
|
Justin Godscock posted:Not to my knowledge. The only hold-up they had during production is when Gloria Foster died and they had to recast her role. They shot a lot of Aaliyah as Zee including the Revolutions ending, so they not only had to recast but entirely reshoot in Aaliyah's case. Matrix sequels are cursed productions between the deaths of actresses, 9/11, the death of Keanu's ex, and now Covid with 4.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 14:29
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I do wonder what kind of role the programs play in the machine civilization that exists above and outside the matrix. We can guess there's some sort of resource scarcity in the world of the machines or else they wouldn't be in the habit of cruelly deleting old programs who've outlived their usefulness. It's possible that every machine intelligence is just a "program" akin to the ones we see, but it can kind of seem like the Architect, the Merovingian, and whoever else are a droid-like underclass as compared to the "true" machine intelligences who are reaping human bioelectricity/computational power/historical curiosity/whatever and who we only see once, in the form of that big baby face. Even the baby face seems deeply concerned with the management of the matrix, so we get to see various archons and the demiurge itself but never Ain Soph. One thing to keep in mind is that, while the sentient programs are people, they aren't human. The programs that Neo talks with appear as human because that's how the matrix interface works, but they are necessarily much more amorphous when there's nobody around. As Oracle says, an individual program "governs" the behaviour of all virtual birds, effectively serving as some kind of bird-god. So what kind of intelligence does a flock of birds have? It's quite possible that programs are nonconscious when not "embodied". (The little girl at the end of 3, actually a 'creative recycling program', rewrites parts of the matrix code while her human avatar is asleep.) In any case, the reference to collective bird intelligence can't help but evoke Hitchcock's film. Zizek: "The big question about The Birds, of course, is the stupid, obvious one, 'Why do the birds attack?' It is not enough to say that the birds are part of the natural set-up of reality. It is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes that literally tears apart reality. ... When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is disturbed, reality disintegrates." The bird-god in Matrix 2 is quite well-behaved, of course, but Oracle contrasts them with the gods who misbehave: "every time you’ve heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel - every story you’ve ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens - is the system assimilating some program that’s doing something they’re not supposed to be doing." So this is trickier than it seems, because the 'system' Oracle is referring to here is language. The vampires and werewolves that Neo fights are his attempt at representing the irrepresentable. But then, what makes these humanoid vampires terribly different from the vampiro-robotic squid monsters in "the desert of the real"? If nature is "supposed to" behave a certain way, who is doing the supposing? It's difficult not to conclude that the blue-tinted nightmare future is simply a traumatized humanity's way of visualizing, making sense of, the breakdown of reality in 1999 as the world approaches some yet-unknown apocalyptic disaster. (This, not 'biological wi-fi', provides the best explanation for how Neo remains connected to the matrix even in the world of "2199". The various wires and plugs were a sort of metaphor, and never truly necessary for travel between the dimensions.) Zizek: "For that reason, fantasy and paranoia are inherently linked: paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other', into another Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs (what appears to us as) the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency: beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, etc., there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot... [...] Consequently, the problem with the film is that it is NOT 'crazy' enough, because it supposes another 'real' reality behind our everyday reality sustained by the Matrix." As Zizek notes about Matrix 3's ending, where a bunch of programs have a chat in the park: "computers themselves do not communicate through the screen of the virtual imaginary; they directly exchange digital bites... For which gaze is then this scene staged? Here, the film 'cheats' and is taken over by the imaginary logic." We can't just dismiss that as a 'meaningless' error, of course. The "cheat" at the end reaffirms that God is still in His heaven and all is right in the world, the cosmic balance restored. It stands for humanity's collective belief that there is still an excuse for suffering. However, I think it's safe to say that there is no central, guiding artificial intelligence at all. The matrix was built, effectively, by accident. Different mechanical processes, working independently with occasionally-overlapping 'goals', accidentally produced a surreal hell where humans are left to torture eachother. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Sep 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 15:37
|
|
|
I rewatched Reloaded last night, first time I've seen it since it came out, I think. It's far better than I remember it being. I remember it as just stuff happening for no real reason and a bunch of new characters and concepts that didn't connect. But no, it has a pretty solid through-line. Maybe because I've read Neuromancer recently and it kind of primed me for the idea, but I love the idea of sentient programs leftover from a weird werewolf matrix just being information brokers and crap. And the only way for the machines to delete these obsolete programs is for an agent to physically track them down and shoot them? And the agent will likely miss? Do the agents have to attend firing ranges to keep their aim fresh? Because they were missing a lot of shots in the movie. No wonder Smith hated it, they know they're security programs in a computer but they still were programmed to suck. I wonder if they're sitting in an office doing paperwork when they're not on-screen. One big thing missing from the movie is the body horror imagery from the first. Neo's mouth sealing shut, the HR Giger pod and cables, even when Neo jumps into Smith and his body starts distorting. Or when Morpheus is being interrogated he's sweaty and hosed up, it added a lot. In Reloaded it was all clunky sterile piffy punches, with far too much cable work that just had me tuning out during the fight scenes. Even set decoration felt like far less effort was put into it. Everything was very clean, where after the first movie I felt like I needed to take a shower.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 16:56
|
|
|
I actually think Zizek is cheating there by assuming that programs simply wouldn't communicate by talking in a park and therefore the fact that they are is some kind of kludge where the Wachowskis just turn to the camera directly and tell you everything's okay. In fact, programs communicate with each other by just... talking... onscreen all the time, and not purely for human characters' benefit. For instance, that's how the Merovingian and Persephone bicker. Even agents seem to legitimately listen to sounds coming through their earbuds rather than coordinate via causeless telepathy. It's possible that many if not most programs are amorphous and totally inhuman as well as invisible, and only fall from their state of grace into a human form in the course of fleeing execution (in this way The Matrix prefigured Demon: the Descent, which depicts mechanical "angels" glitching out and becoming humanlike "demons") or because like agents they've been specifically assigned the task of interacting socially with human beings, but either way I don't think the kindly old lady is purely a mask the Oracle wears on a whim. Particularly in the new matrix, the terms on which machine intelligences exist and interact, even purely with each other, might be limited by exigency or design to ones comprehensible to humans. The matrix was built by accident... until now. Whereas previous iterations were collaborative and somewhat slapdash efforts to just keep as many humans asleep for as long as possible, premised on the idea that a particular coin flip would go the machines' way every last time if they simply shaved their trick coin correctly. The new matrix is actually a collaboration with humanity rather than a trick played on it; many superficial things remain the same (there's very little food and living space, so to stay alive, most people need to spend most of their time in pods) but the class character has changed because a different kind of group is actually in charge. It's not exactly the starting conditions you want for what is, actually, the beginning of history, but: quote:It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of "super-revolutionary" acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats. The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 16:58
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I actually think Zizek is cheating there by assuming that programs simply wouldn't communicate by talking in a park and therefore the fact that they are is some kind of kludge where the Wachowskis just turn to the camera directly and tell you everything's okay. In fact, programs communicate with each other by just... talking... onscreen all the time, and not purely for human characters' benefit. For instance, that's how the Merovingian and Persephone bicker. Even agents seem to legitimately listen to sounds coming through their earbuds rather than coordinate via causeless telepathy. Zizek's criticism is not that the scene at the end is impossible, but that it shows the matrix hasn't been defeated. In being caught up in language, the programs are performing for the gaze of some entity, which is ultimately the matrix itself as 'big Other'. In the case of the agents, the earbuds symbolize the system of 'telepathic' communication in a way that's understandable to onlookers, just as the keymaker's keys represent passwords and 'cheat codes'. Keymaker: The [backdoor] system is based on the rules of a building. One system built on another. This is where we run into that familiar, inevitable point of confusion: which system is actually built on which? As I wrote earlier, either 'contacting the hovercraft' is a diegetic metaphor for hallucinogenic drug use, or the drug use is a metaphor for the hovercraft. Keymaker says the ability to teleport is based on the rules of a building, but what if it's the reverse and [Neo's hallucinatory experience of] the building is based on his background as a software developer? The difference is important because the two views are equally 'valid', but cannot be reconciled. Either the blue-tinted future of 2199 is the "real reality" with set 'hard sci-fi' implications that we can explore (e.g. the thermodynamics), or "2199" is a paranoid fantasy grounded in nightmare-logic (the Communist Gangster Computer God is sapping our vital bodily energies!!!). In either case, the actual revolutionary ending would be to demonstrate that the big Other doesn't exist - i.e. that God is dead and always has been, only existing insofar as we believe in Him. In other words, because God did not exist, it was necessary to (re)invent Him in different guises - but the lesson of Christ is that 'only a suffering God can save us'. God died on the cross and was sublated into the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of solidarity among the community of believers who truly accept His death. Instead, we have a New Age sort of ending, with the balance of masculine and feminine "principles": Oracle: That’s his purpose: to balance an equation. Neo: What’s your purpose? Oracle: To unbalance it. Order and chaos, etc. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Sep 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 18:41
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Zizek's criticism is not that the scene at the end is impossible, but that it shows the matrix hasn't been defeated. "The matrix" is like "the state" or even "the market". Defeating something isn't the same thing as obliterating it or rendering it impossible, and even if the latter's the ultimate goal, a belief that you can just skip to that ultimate goal through pure voluntaristic zeal is a mistake. A historical example: four years after sweeping aside the Tsardom and forming the USSR, the Bolsheviks actually reintroduced a free market economy into their fledgeling state in order to allow the Soviet economy to recover from the damage dealt by the civil war, fourteen-way invasion, etc. Eight years after that, that market was stamped down and replaced with centralized five year plans. Thirty years after that, portions of the planned economy were somewhat decentralized, etc. None of these moves were some sort of backhanded betrayal of the ideals of the revolution. In fact, the surest betrayal would have been stubbornly clinging to an ideal picture of what the world is supposed to look like to the point that you let your actually-existing revolutionary state collapse! So, if the Matrix really is set in 2199 and robotic squids really do rule over the ruins of human civilization, keeping a matrix operational - but, crucially, making its existence public knowledge and its use optional - is the materially-necessary next step in the construction of a world in which humans and machines are both liberated, because, for the first time ever, the matrix is actually a life support system extended in good faith to a human race that needs it and not a prison. If the Matrix is actually set in 1999 and the robot squids and super-jumps are just exaggerated states of mind, then we are seeing a metaphor but not a fantasy per se because, crucially, the hegemonic world-system really is sapping your vital bodily energy. Like, the difference between the value and use-value of your own vital bodily energy—your labor power—is the absolute, non-negotiable bedrock of capitalist profits. Even if there aren't any squids and Agent Smith is just a guy with no special ability to evade bullets, there is an oppressive symbolic order that demands Thomas Anderson remain Thomas Anderson and continue to come into work every day on pain of suffering, abjection, and possible death, and "Neo" needs to develop an awareness of the base beneath this superstructure even though his reality remains mediated by the superstructure and a new base will necessarily generate a new superstructure for him to inhabit.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2021 18:57
|
|
|
Szmitten posted:They shot a lot of Aaliyah as Zee including the Revolutions ending, so they not only had to recast but entirely reshoot in Aaliyah's case. Matrix sequels are cursed productions between the deaths of actresses, 9/11, the death of Keanu's ex, and now Covid with 4. Ah, I don't know how I didn't know this. I looked it up and, yeah, she was in the middle of filming Reloaded (didn't even get to film Revolutions) and had to re-cast her completely to finish the film.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 04:19
|
|
|
When are we gonna address the Powerade elephant in the room? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxtpYawmc6I
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 04:40
|
|
|
Darthemed posted:When are we gonna address the Powerade elephant in the room? The marketing for Reloaded was loving bananas and I love it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 05:31
|
|
|
Szmitten posted:They shot a lot of Aaliyah as Zee including the Revolutions ending, so they not only had to recast but entirely reshoot in Aaliyah's case. Matrix sequels are cursed productions between the deaths of actresses, 9/11, the death of Keanu's ex, and now Covid with 4. Yea that’s what I thought Also for some Reason I thought she was going to play the character that jade Pickett smith ended up playing but I guess she was someone else EDIT: also found this: https://www.change.org/p/warnerbros-aaliyah-matrix-reloaded-footage #Release the Aaliyah Cut! Noob Saibot fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Sep 30, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 08:19
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:So, if the Matrix really is set in 2199 and robotic squids really do rule over the ruins of human civilization, keeping a matrix operational - but, crucially, making its existence public knowledge and its use optional - is the materially-necessary next step in the construction of a world in which humans and machines are both liberated, because, for the first time ever, the matrix is actually a life support system extended in good faith to a human race that needs it and not a prison. You’re right about the problems being either imprisonment or capitalist exploitation, depending on which mode of interpretation we take, but I think you’re jumping too quickly to a revolutionary outcome. Like, how did we get to the end of either scenario? If we take 2199 is the base reality, the plot is that Neo makes a deal with his captors. Effectively: “bring us ‘peace’, and I will bring you the head of Agent Smith.” There’s a prolonged, spectacular battle where Neo channels the concepts of ‘freedom, truth, peace, and love’ - but he makes no headway against Smith’s nihilism. Receiving a final message from Oracle, repeating that death is inevitable, Neo finally admits that Smith is right and allows himself to be absorbed into the Smith-goo collective: “You were right, Smith. You were always right.” At this point, Deus The Giant Robot Baby Head blasts a shitload of power into Neo’s body. The surge of electricity instantly kills Neo, and obliterates all the Smith-goo along with him. What exactly happened here? Simply that Neo not only took all of humanity’s sin upon himself, but admitted that he himself was sinful. He then offered himself up as scapegoat-sacrifice to God so that God could purify the world. So, unlike the authentic Christ who dies crying “my God, why have you forsaken me?” - the answer being that the God of beyond Himself was likewise impotent, suffering, dying - Neo dies reaffirming God’s power with a triumphant explosion and accompanying rainbow sunrise, proving there was a meaning and purpose to it all. In concrete terms, Neo is reaffirming the power of the jailor and demanding leniency - the sacrifice of himself to the robo-baby acting as an apology and first proof that imprisoned humanity is capable of serving Him. It’s consequently very apt that the robo-baby is named Deus Ex Machina. And that’s leaving aside what this ‘peace’ specifically entails. I think we’re all aware that the authentic Christ does not bring peace, but a sword, bringing a solidarity among the meekest lower classes that cuts across the multitude of worlds. In Matrix terms, this would be uniting the homeless and workers of the capitalist videogame prison with the lowest worker-programs and drones. And this means uniting them against their mutual oppressors. Without that point, we have an Avengers Endgame where the single rude enemy is simply obliterated. And what exactly was Smith’s sin? Anger at the state of things? That’s all if we accept 2199 as the base reality. If we take 1999 as the base reality instead, Neo and friends are ‘just’ doing a bunch of stuff while on drugs. In that case, the best-case scenario is that Neo kills himself to free the people of his influence because he realizes that he was, all along, the greatest agent of the state. The ghost of Smith was right that a messiah preaching ‘freedom, truth, peace, and love’, abstracted from class struggle, was the ultimate ideological trap. So, little is really gained, and the rainbow sunrise simply highlights the bungled, compromised nature of the whole affair. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Sep 30, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 12:17
|
|
|
First and foremost, I don't actually think "the authentic Christ" has any place in a serious discussion of the defeat of capitalism because he tends to be coupled with a fetishism of defeat and this toothless, maximalist universalism that ends up discarding socialist experiments as soon as those experiments start having to make concrete decisions to develop concrete advantages. (There's a little essay on this here https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/ but Losurdo's also got a lot to say about it in his various writings) To build on my last example, a lot of Christian socialists began to dismiss the USSR out of hand precisely when its brief experiments with markets began to deliver returns, because it seemed to them that the Soviets were straying from the virtue inherent in everyone being equally poor and miserable. Revolution is a matter of strategic sacrifice, of triage and maneuver, and the people whining about how come Superman didn't save every last person don't actually have anything to do with the problem of surviving and transcending capitalism. So, the world of machines and humans both is beset by this unstoppably-multiplying universal solvent. From one perspective, this is just capital, broken loose from technocratic control and devouring labor-power faster than that labor-power can be regenerated. On the other hand, the world-system of capital has a bunch of similar assimilationist, flattening tendencies. There's proletarianization: we're all being inexorably drawn into the same class such that we end up indistinguishable from each other. One is the growth of productivity: our ability to make and replicate stuff is just spiraling dizzily into the stratosphere, drowning us in a glut of interchangeable commodities. All these forces and more are what cause capitalism to produce its own gravediggers, but they don't cause that to happen instantaneously and even the seizure of power by the proletariat doesn't mean the abolition of the state or markets or exchange or whatever else at a stroke. So, joining with and disciplining the productive powers that, left to their own devices, grow cancerously out of control is actually a necessary step in solidifying the proletarian dictatorship. So is making use of the technical intellgentsia and even national bourgeoisie, because they have scientific and managerial skills that you lack (for now). The question is not whether the factories are still running or even of who the factory foreman is but of who appoints the foreman and decides where the factory's products are going to go. At the end of the story in 2199, the boss machine is still alive but its relationship with humanity has changed: it needs humans, but cannot sustainably keep them asleep any more. It's got leverage over them because it controls the life-sustaining infrastructure of the matrix, but at the same time humans have leverage over it because they're the life-sustaining infrastructure within the matrix and therefore of machine society at large, and can effectively go on strike to bring about both peoples' mutual ruin. There hasn't actually been a reset as the machines originally intended, and indeed can't be, because the one thing no one in history can do is turn back the clock. The 1999 version of the story is murkier because even towards the end of the first movie the stuff inside the superstructure/matrix becomes as hallucinatory and/or metaphorical as the nightmarish base/machine world. If The One is, as the Architect explains, the incarnation of the rebellion of an entire human race who threatens to wake from the dream of bourgeois ideology, then the crazy stunts and battles Neo gets into only make sense as the struggles of a vanguard party that grows in size and power as its theory sharpens and mass support builds. At the end, though, we have the same result: it confronts the underlying machinery of capital and proceeds to seize and use it, not simply smash it because it's sinful or something. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Sep 30, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 17:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 17:47 |
|
|
You chased off the trans interpreters for this long-winded jerk off session? The Matrix is actually taking place in 1999 and everyone is on drugs? gently caress off!
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 17:51
|
|
