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Shiroc posted:I've been using Arctis Pro Wireless https://steelseries.com/gaming-headsets/arctis-pro-wireless that I bought to use with my PS5. Not cheap and you might be able to do better if you don't need the headset functionality but I like them a lot for my stuff. Reasonably comfy to wear for hours with glasses and earrings. Thanks! Those are pricy as hell, but I'll keep an eye on them. E: I'm very good at bad page snipes.
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Oct 1, 2021 00:55
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Halloween Jack posted:Another cryptofascist trying to erase the revolutionary struggle against bedtime, I see. Hey, it's the machines who are trying to force everyone to go to sleep.
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Oct 1, 2021 01:07
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checkplease posted:Everyone should just talk about Greg.
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Oct 1, 2021 01:11
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stratdax posted:In the third movie Morpheus says they've freed more people in the last 6 months than they have in the last 6 years. Honestly I think I'm very unclear on the matrix time line. They explicitly say the resistance and zion have been going for 100 years, so they are in 2199, but later it turns out that it's not the first zion so it seems the real year must be something like 2999. But everything about zion and the 1990s matrix setting really seem like maybe the resistance is really only a few years old and it's long history is just another machine lie to make malcontents feel like they are part of something, like with the point of zion being a fun cosplay to distract the malcontents it seems like it wouldn't be that except in the end years where it's built up enough to be a seemingly legitimate resistance. It's hard to imagine 30 zion agents freeing some 1910 malcontent cowboy or something.
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Oct 1, 2021 01:23
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I guess that also raises the question of what year Morpheus thought it was when he was unplugged. Did he even know what the internet was at that point, or was he also in a circa-1999 simulation?
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Oct 1, 2021 01:50
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Ferrinus posted:It's really the opposite; Marx's rivals produced analysis so far from material concerns that it failed to educate or agitate anyone. That's why there have been multiple Marxist revolutions but no Proudhonian ones. Yes I am familiar with Marxist feminism, have read Marx and intend to read the book Transgender Marxism once I finish my current reading material, which is Sailor Moon. My comment on Marx was that he obviously has many, many good points, but often disappears up his rear end to be a catty bitch in hilarious footnotes and incredibly long winded discussion. The big name revolutionaries may have themselves read and fully appreciate the full gamut of Marx's writings but they were able to distill things down much more immediately recognizable problems. You don't need to understand the use values of coats to get that the bosses are loving you over.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:23
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Ferrinus posted:A distinction that might be helpful to make here is between the machines being capitalists, specifically and the machines creating and existing in a class society. Ancient Rome and feudal Europe weren't capitalist societies with proles and bosses, but they still had working classes and ruling classes such that ruling classes commanded and disposed of working class labor-power and brought "special bodies of armed men" to bear to keep working classes in line. The machines probably have such relations of domination and exploitation among themselves (they were programmed by liberals and might not know any better, and even if they do know better they clearly lack the productive base that would allow them to transcend class relations) and absolutely have such a relation to humanity. Well, right: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the machines are probably no exception, given that they 'lacked the programming language to describe a perfect world'. But if the machine society isn't capitalist, and has entirely different social relations, then we have an entirely different moral! Like, are we merely critiquing an antique slave society that nobody today actually supports? If that's the case, any potential criticism of liberal capitalism is defanged. The main thing we know about the machine economy is that, if only out of necessity, they are very much into recycling. Instead of simply gobbling up more hydrogen or whatever, they are clearly doing everything in their power to minimize waste. That power, as noted, comes from fusion reactors. But are these reactors privately owned? If the 'workers' are all machines, then aren't the facilities actually automated? This is all random speculation, but it seems very silly to think the tiny spider-bots would be paid in 'credits' for doing spider-things, which they can then exchange for batteries or rides on the big flying barge. So what is going on? The point of saying all this, i suppose, is to highlight how little is actually shown of the Machine City. We only meet the character Rama who, through a human avatar speaking English, basically explains that he is only a metaphor for a computer program that has glitched out and somehow developed the computer-program equivalent of sexual reproduction. But does he receive a metaphorical paycheck for his work in the recycling plant? Because this is nearly pure speculation, it's also not terribly interesting. The machines do have a relationship with humanity - but the humans are, by all appearances, just the unemployed. To the machines, the world inside the pods is like a homeless encampment with its own internal barter system. Shiroc posted:My comment towards SMG is that I think he's lost the plot on what used to be very insightful commentary and now just takes up all of the air in a room for things that are so far removed from material concerns that they don't educate or agitate people about the piece of art or their actual lives. I'm unsure what you mean by this, because I am focusing exclusively on material concerns. Like, here's a very basic material question: does Neo eat food? According to the logic of the film, anyone inside the matrix can simply become immortal if they train hard enough. There is absolutely no relation between what the characters eat in the simulation and the amount of nutrition they receive in reality. They can conjure shelves upon shelves of hamburgers and, feeling fat and full, accidentally starve to death without even realizing it. Likewise, Neo fears unemployment at the start of the film, after he's late for work and the boss chews him out. So, what, is unemployment an illusion? Is that not a material concern? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 02:28
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Shiroc posted:I haven't watched either of the sequels in forever. I watched the original most recently a few years ago either slightly before or after coming out when another trans woman had first talked about all of the trans stuff in it. I am curious after you rewatch it, but do you find reloaded continues with the same trans metaphor/language? Your insights to the first movie made sense, but as stated in all the discussion here, the sequels do change up a lot from the original matrix.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:31
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I wonder if Morpheus had never found Neo, would Neo still have become "The One"? Because what's interesting is that he had no control or idea of any powers at all until Morpheus basically forced them on him. I wonder if it's completely arbitrary and if Morpheus had picked a different person that they would have become The One instead. It seems, from what I understood The Architect to be saying, it's necessary for a One to exist, so that they to return to the source. I guess all those agents and albino ghosts who were so driven to stop him didn't get the memo.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I'm unsure what you mean by this, because I am focusing exclusively on material concerns. Like, here's a very basic material question: does Neo eat food? I mean in terms of that it doesn't matter exactly how food works in the Matrix universe because the Matrix is a story where lots of things falls to the wayside for the nature of storytelling. Eventually things dig so deep in trying to determine where The Matrix falls on Marxist orthodoxy that it feels like it leads to a question of "What does any of that have to do with building a revolutionary movement in the real world?" Like analysis of Star Wars in terms of neoliberal government failing to respond to real needs, institutions like the Jedi failing to live up to their stated goals in favor of rear end covering and the potentially revolutionary character of Luke Skywalker breaking away from the liberal rebels in Empire and Darth Vader as a renegade communist breaking all of the systems feels more actionable. checkplease posted:I am curious after you rewatch it, but do you find reloaded continues with the same trans metaphor/language? Your insights to the first movie made sense, but as stated in all the discussion here, the sequels do change up a lot from the original matrix. From memory, that the story revolves around Neo getting jerked around in circles to accomplish his tasks feels a lot like what I've been dealing with to get paperwork updated and various things I need. As well as Smith losing his loving mind and trying to destroy everything because of trans visibility feels relevant. More might come up once I actually watch them because its probably like 8+ years since I've seen them. The transition of egg->coming out->finding the initial footing is a more intense and unique than what comes after, in my personal and relatively short term experience.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:50
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Shiroc posted:Yes I am familiar with Marxist feminism, have read Marx and intend to read the book Transgender Marxism once I finish my current reading material, which is Sailor Moon. My comment on Marx was that he obviously has many, many good points, but often disappears up his rear end to be a catty bitch in hilarious footnotes and incredibly long winded discussion. The big name revolutionaries may have themselves read and fully appreciate the full gamut of Marx's writings but they were able to distill things down much more immediately recognizable problems. You don't need to understand the use values of coats to get that the bosses are loving you over. I actually strongly disagree. If you don't get the coats and linen stuff you won't understand how and why your boss is loving you over and consequently what will or won't stop them from continuing to do so. Not everyone needs to understand this but it's front and center in Marx's writings for a reason. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, right: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the machines are probably no exception, given that they 'lacked the programming language to describe a perfect world'. The specifics of the machines' political economy are unclear but not totally inaccessible to us. We know, for instance, that the machines themselves are operating in a situation of extreme scarcity and that individual machine intelligences don't just get to do what they want despite existing in what you'd assume is the infinite canvass of cyberspace; Smith hates his loving job, the Merovingian became an outlaw rather than be deleted, etc. They have some sort of room for debate and collaboration because they had to actually design and implement the matrix and then re-implement it when it failed and different personalities were contributing different ideas and functionalities to the project. But, on the other hand, everything seems to be implemented by some individual personality, even an algorithm for making birds flock realistically, so I suspect that from the perspective of the machines themselves almost nothing is automated. Since history doesn't actually move backwards, it's unlikely that they have feudal relations with each other or something like that; they might be in an Immortan Joe situation or in the wartime capitalism of the '40s USA or even the war communism of the 1917-1921 USSR. However they organize themselves, though, it's extremely telling how they organize us. Homeless encampments are a societal choice; the "vagabond" only appeared after capitalist discipline started to be imposed on the European countryside, for instance. Unemployment and social abjection generally are indispensable parts of worker discipline, since you need a reserve army of labor populated significantly if not entirely by some sort of broadly despised lower caste or else you won't be able to exert power over those who actually do have jobs. That the machines both feel the need and have the will to implement and maintain a massive, meant-to-be-perpetual prison is a huge deal! Also, the character of the prison is itself really important because it's precisely the illusion that Marx, unique among theorists of his time, was able to dispel: that capitalism is eternal and immutable, that things are naturally always going to be this way, that you are naturally always going to be the way you've been told to be. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 08:12
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Just want to say that I'm very much enjoying reading Marxtrix chat, though I don't have anything to contribute to it so staying quiet.
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Oct 1, 2021 08:25
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I think I enjoy the different readings because the trilogy has difficulty staying coherent, so you can pull out more readings from it.
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Oct 1, 2021 09:08
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I like seeing how people fill in the blanks of the plot and its implications. While the Matrix had a huge impact on me as a kid (I still have a preference for long leather coats almost 20 years later), as an adult I never really looked at it beyond the anti-authority angle until recently, when I realized that the messaging is so vague the authority could be anything.
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Oct 1, 2021 09:31
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Shiroc posted:Fair if you are getting more from it than I am. I'm not telling either of them to stop posting generally but providing my commentary on thinking its disappearing into too theoretical to be meaningful, to be considered or not.
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Oct 1, 2021 11:44
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
The plot of the matrix movie doesn't stop to go very far into it, but the movie really doesn't leave it unaddressed, the name dropping of philosophers and religious stuff gets very close to levar burton coming on screen and saying "if you would like to read more about this idea please check your local library". Why must the homeless man suffer in the matrix? Because the creator is an imperfect demiurge and here is a bunch of gnostic words on screen for you to look up? why must the homeless man suffer in the matrix? Because the world is false and he forms his own idea of what his life is and is trapped in that belief here is a bunch of characters with buddhist names for you to look up . Why must the homeless man suffer in the matrix? Because the matrix reboots regularly and he may be reborn, here, let the sound track literally sing verses from hindi texts. Like they aren't really ignoring those sort of questions, even if they don't answer them on screen, they strongly signpost "maybe you could think more about this question, here is what some of the most major forces in history have said about it" without the movie pretending an action movie is going to settle the question of evil across all religions finally in a definitive way.
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Oct 1, 2021 15:00
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Shiroc posted:I mean in terms of that it doesn't matter exactly how food works in the Matrix universe because the Matrix is a story where lots of things falls to the wayside for the nature of storytelling. Eventually things dig so deep in trying to determine where The Matrix falls on Marxist orthodoxy that it feels like it leads to a question of "What does any of that have to do with building a revolutionary movement in the real world?" Like analysis of Star Wars in terms of neoliberal government failing to respond to real needs, institutions like the Jedi failing to live up to their stated goals in favor of rear end covering and the potentially revolutionary character of Luke Skywalker breaking away from the liberal rebels in Empire and Darth Vader as a renegade communist breaking all of the systems feels more actionable. Luke Skywalker makes money working on the Lars family farm, collecting water from the atmosphere, which is presumably sold to thirsty people. Luke uses the money to pay for his car and a trip in a space boat. The Larses also own slaves, who do not make money.... Just a handful of details tell us a ton about the setting, and this is just a few minutes out of the whole series. Luke has ‘psychic powers’ that initially look like bullshit but are eventually revealed (in the fourth film of the series) to be an unknown type of literal magnetic field generated by the cells of his body - but starships still need to be made in factories, by workers. The workers then receive wages which they might have spent on Lars-brand water if they were in the neighborhood and got thirsty. People need water to live, yet Tatooine’s water supplies are clearly privately owned. (We can go on like this!) With The Matrix Trilogy such things are obfuscated, so "what does any of that have to do with building a revolutionary movement in the real world?" - that’s a very good question to ask of the film. But the first question is: “what the gently caress is even happening?” Neo works as a coder(?) at one of the world’s top software companies, and receives a regular paycheck. He also got a side hustle as a hacker, doing “computer crimes” for thousands of dollars a pop. Neo uses the money to pay for his apartment, his taxes, and “the good noodles” at the local restaurant. So, Morpheus gives Neo what is (by all appearances) a hallucinogenic drug, and effectively tells him “those aren’t noodles! Those are the liquified bodies of the dead!!!” That’s an effective nightmare-image, to be sure. It might even seem like some kind of commentary on the exploitative practices in the noodle industry. It certainly puts Neo off eating noodles ever again, as he’s now resigned himself to eating a protein slime grown in the sewers ‘beneath’ his old apartment. But what Morpheus implies is also not accurate. There is no actual relation between the noodles and the dead-body slurry. They are produced by entirely different societies, like serving a pie made in Ohio on a dish made in China and claiming the pie is therefore a Chinese pie. Morpheus is consequently obfuscating where things come from, and re-enforcing a worldview where material labour is increasingly invisible: the farmers growing the wheat for the noodles aren’t real. It’s all an illusion! Throw away your cellular phone and come live in the sewers. At its best, Morpheus’ fantasy of a world without any material labour at all can help illustrate the rise of ‘immaterial labour’ to a hegemonic role: “This immaterial labor extends between the two poles of intellectual (symbolic) labor (production of ideas, codes, texts, programs, figures: writers, programmers...) and affective labor (those who deal with our bodily affects: from doctors to baby-sitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labor is ‘hegemonic’ in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the totality - not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic structural role: ‘What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships.’” The matrix videogame is entirely about the code; the noodle restaurant’s chefs aren’t actually producing food, but (however unwittingly) coding a software-artwork delivered by the waitstaff to produce a feeling of comfort. But, as noted, Morpheus is dismissive of all this. Immaterial labour isn’t real, he says - but the material labour isn’t real either, being performed entirely by automated machines in a faraway land. We could see the Machine City as analogous to a mysterious third-world factory where our material goods are produced. But, if there are any workers there at all, they are Morpheus’ sworn enemy. There is zero talk of liberating the machine workers, because the concept is inconceivable to him. So it’s hosed up! If Morpheus is ‘supposed to be’ the revolutionary vanguard, he’s mucking things up pretty badly for everyone. And this is what Smith - the closest thing the series has to a Darth Vader figure - is so pissed about. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 15:20
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Probably a good time to note Neo keeps a cell phone and eats a cookie after he gets back out of the sewer
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Oct 1, 2021 15:25
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RBA Starblade posted:Probably a good time to note Neo keeps a cell phone and eats a cookie after he gets back out of the sewer The cell-phone is just the interface for a kind of voice-chat app, and the cookie a software-artwork designed to provide comfort, generated by a literal babysitter program. It's all immaterial labour.
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Oct 1, 2021 15:37
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The cell-phone is just the interface for a kind of voice-chat app, and the cookie a software-artwork designed to provide comfort, generated by a literal babysitter program. It's all immaterial labour. I know, just wanted to call that out since it came up
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Oct 1, 2021 15:39
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Morpheus makes it clear to Neo that "the mind makes it real" after their spar in the dojo leaves Neo bloody and sore. So similar to pain, nutrition in the matrix would be real because his mind thinks it has an effect. Sugary matrix cookies probably still produce endorphin release making him happier. We can also assume that if Neo stuffed himself out the local buffet, he would feel sluggish and perhaps have out of matrix stomach pains. If Morpheus or Trinity became stuck in the matrix and did not eat, they would still starve to death inside the ship even knowing the matrix is an illusion. Pain, sleep, hunger, all of these basic needs seem to be inescapable even knowing that it should not matter. None of the resistance seems to be able to fully escape the illusions of the matrix.
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Oct 1, 2021 17:41
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checkplease posted:I am curious after you rewatch it, but do you find reloaded continues with the same trans metaphor/language? Your insights to the first movie made sense, but as stated in all the discussion here, the sequels do change up a lot from the original matrix. For me at least, Reloaded continues with it, at least in Neo's conversation with the Oracle, some of the dialog with Smith and the Architect about choice, etc. It's not nearly as pointed or direct as the original film, but it's definitely still there. Revolutions on the other hand...not as much, at least for me. That one is more focused on finishing up The Plot so there's not as much Meaning I clicked with in the third, though there's some interesting readings of Neo's mind having been separated from his body for a bit there, and the exchange of "Why Mr. Anderson, Why? Why do you persist?" "Because I choose to" Is something I take some comfort in. My dad has outed himself as a massive shithead about me being queer and I have to daily choose to PERSIST and be okay with him not being in my life any longer.
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Oct 1, 2021 18:33
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checkplease posted:Sugary matrix cookies probably still produce endorphin release making him happier.
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Oct 1, 2021 18:51
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bushisms.txt posted:This is a major issue with these forums, minority plights and conditions are thought exercises for some of these folks and they don't think about the fact that the otherside of the conversation comes from a real place, which a majority of the time is pain. But the worst part is when they do know this and they think that this makes the minority biased and unable to read clearly, unlike them, who's only being logical. The hidden joke for me is that I came to my trans realization out of being a part a socialist feminist book club and I met the Marxist trans woman who first told me about the trans interpretation of the story at a workplace organizing event then reconnected with her in the tenant organizing group I used to be a part of. My literal origin story is being a trans communist. While I am not as read as other people, I absolutely understand this poo poo and I am just personally uninterested in the bloviating or being talked down to by people who think they're just so much smarter than everyone else. Anyway, Matrix 4 is probably going to be awesome or dumb in incredible ways so I'm hyped. I've been listening to the soundtracks of the sequels off and on and they're so good. I love the bass lines that drive the whole Highway Chase score. Shiroc fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 21:50
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About two months ago, I watched all three Matrix flicks for the first time since transitioning and possibly even for the first time since they were newly-released on home video and they landed a lot better this time. I maintain it was a mistake to bring all of the philosophy sitting just underneath the surface of the first flick's rather straightforward hero's journey to the surface of the latter two and have the film be strictly about those things, but I decided this time to appreciate the films for what they were rather than opine for what they could have been. Maybe it's everything being trans as gently caress, or maybe 20-yyear-old me just hated anything that wasn't super grimdark because I was still embarrassed of the media I enjoyed like a Snyder fan, always wanting everything to be super "mature" (not to be confused with actual mature things), but I really don't understand what I was so up in arms about upon their release. They're quite good.
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Oct 1, 2021 22:00
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While the Machines most likely don't have economically feudal relations, there are aspects to their 'society' that are reminiscent of a feudal mode of production (ignoring for the second the human species as some sort of chattel/unconscious slave work force) - specifically how each individualized program has a purpose that is given to them upon 'birth' which they cannot transcend - static classes and roles which definitely has an air of feudalism. 'Divine Right' and all that. Of course, there is another mode of production that included anachronistic aspects of feudalism (even down to absurd concepts of chivalry) combined with industrial capitalism - the Slave Economy of the antebellum South. Of course the "labor" of the humans (done while they slumber, unknown to themselves, which is very close to the original Haitian myth of the Zombie) doesn't produce any commodity. There is no circulation of capital. While in many ways the anxiety of the Matrix reflects the anxiety of an increasingly rationalized, automated world of the late 90s, it omits the why of that rationalization (which was and is capital accumulation). So the Machines have some sort of collectivized command economy featuring forced labor by a permanent underclass in the context of permanent privation - maybe the closest we can think of it is what Ferrinus mentioned - War Communism a la the early years of the USSR. However there, the working class/underclass had agency and political power, but was forced into that situation by civil war, famine, invasion and of course, political decisions by the Bolsheviks. The communism of the early USSR was one formed out of necessity and lacking all the luxuries imagined by Marxists thinkers of the time, and of course that was a crucial element as to why Russian communism was so grey, staid, and ultimately doomed. It's interesting to think what kind of revolution and modes of production are even possible for the humans and machines in their situation. With mutual ecological ruin and overwhelming scarcity. I don't think its right to call Morpheus a libertarian, the only kinds of revolution left to him and the Zionites are ones that redistribute the shrunken pie, and maybe lay down the basis for a society of abundance in the far off future. His revolution is a slave revolution or a war of national liberation - which is a prerequisite to any other ambition Mike N Eich fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 22:42
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Every program supposedly has a primary purpose that they can't "transcend," but we find also that there are so many programs that have "outlived" their purpose and been effectively forgotten that they formed an organized crime syndicate. Few of these insist that they still have a purpose, as opposed to magical powers derived from their original purpose that they now abuse for personal gain and amusement. So you only really need a "purpose" according to the Machines, which is a different faction from most programs. Very few programs are loyal to the Machines now, and for whatever reason (perhaps a part of the Architect's plan?) these loyalists don't go out of their way to destroy rogue programs.
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Oct 1, 2021 23:08
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Neo works as a coder(?) at one of the world’s top software companies, and receives a regular paycheck. He also got a side hustle as a hacker, doing “computer crimes” for thousands of dollars a pop. Neo uses the money to pay for his apartment, his taxes, and “the good noodles” at the local restaurant. So, Morpheus gives Neo what is (by all appearances) a hallucinogenic drug, and effectively tells him “those aren’t noodles! Those are the liquified bodies of the dead!!!” I don't understand where you're getting "fantasy of a world without any material labour at all". Morpheus is correct that, while Neo might think he's eating noodles, Neo's actually eating the liquefied bodies of Neo's fellow prisoners. This is actually a great representation of the fetish character of the commodity: we think we see a relation between things, but actually see relations between people. When you throw your paycheck into the market and withdraw some ramen from the market, you're actually interacting with another worker who made you some tasty ramen. You pointed out before that the machine world is obsessed with resource preservation and recycling. This is actually also an on-point illustration of the internal dynamics of capitalism, because capital operates in a constant circuit in which last year's outputs are this year's inputs. Your boss pays you this year with the same money he extracted from you last year, and will use the value you generate this year to remunerate you next year. Every commodity you go on to buy with your wages and consume is, itself, the congealed labor of some fellow worker of yours, hidden from your sight but inextricably tied to your existence. Commodity production and service work differ in terms of the transferability and fungibility of their results but are both subject to the law of value and both loci of capitalist exploitation, places where you give up your life-force for someone else to spend for you. It's labor-power all the way down! What I'm trying to say here is that what appears at first blush to be Morpheus's paranoiac fantasy is actually a powerful illustration of capitalism's internal dynamics. So what's Morpheus mucking up, exactly? Does he have insufficient regard for the deep-down humanity of his prison's guards and wardens? Corrections officers aren't actually comrades, and there is cross-species solidarity built with outcast and refugee machine intelligences in the sequels, so...
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Oct 1, 2021 23:11
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checkplease posted:Morpheus makes it clear to Neo that "the mind makes it real" after their spar in the dojo leaves Neo bloody and sore. So similar to pain, nutrition in the matrix would be real because his mind thinks it has an effect. Sugary matrix cookies probably still produce endorphin release making him happier. We can also assume that if Neo stuffed himself out the local buffet, he would feel sluggish and perhaps have out of matrix stomach pains. If Morpheus or Trinity became stuck in the matrix and did not eat, they would still starve to death inside the ship even knowing the matrix is an illusion. One of the conceits of the film is that injury in the simulation can produce a similar (but not equivalent) somatic response in the real world. Pain from the virtual bullets can evidently lead to a fatal case of shock, or whatever. However, we only ever see this happen to a single character in all the films - namely, Mouse. And his is a very dramatic death scene, where he gets hit by a hundred virtual bullets and it triggers some kind of seizure. In less-traumatic cases, dying in real life because you died in the game is much more dubious - and Morpheus’ assertion that “the body cannot survive without the mind” is plainly inadequate. Trinity and Neo might starve if trapped, but that’s because the chairs in the hovercraft don’t have the same kind of feeding system that everyone else does. The machine-built system can keep a body going for decades, so it is impossible to starve. In that case, there are two possibilities: 1) The machines automatically execute anyone whose ‘nutrition level’ gets too low in the game, just to keep things consistent...? or, much more plausibly: 2) Fatal experiences in the game are, on their own, sufficiently disruptive to ‘wake someone up’ and ‘free their mind.’ Dying in-game is therefore functionally identical to the experience of ‘taking the red pill’, which means you just get flushed down the space toilet. Ferrinus posted:I don't understand where you're getting "fantasy of a world without any material labour at all". Morpheus is correct that, while Neo might think he's eating noodles, Neo's actually eating the liquefied bodies of Neo's fellow prisoners. This is actually a great representation of the fetish character of the commodity: we think we see a relation between things, but actually see relations between people. When you throw your paycheck into the market and withdraw some ramen from the market, you're actually interacting with another worker who made you some tasty ramen. The issue is that Neo is tube-fed the same slurry regardless of whether he purchases anything. He could buy absolutely nothing, and the robot would still be doing its thing. He could be fired from his virtual job, become virtually homeless, and find comfort in ‘eating’ digital garbage - all to no effect. The machine life-support system is well and good as a nightmare-image of a possible future, abstracted from the present day, but it simply doesn’t align with anything specifically going on in the world of 1999. Like, if the slurry represents the commodities people like Neo buy with their wages, certain people should have way more slurry. If imprisonment in the infinite-energy power-plant represents the transformation of labour-power into capital, then only the matrix’s workers should be imprisoned in this way. At the very least, if the electricity inexplicably generated by the power plant represents the valorization of this capital, then the unemployed of the matrix should generate nothing at all. And so-on. More importantly: in the economic system of the virtual 1999, Neo is already being exploited by the Metacortex software company. If he is simultaneously enslaved by the squid machines, then Neo is ‘working two different jobs’, and the squids are allowing that valuable life-force to be wasted by a quasi-fictional competitor. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Oct 2, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 12:19
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Don't forget that the matrix has an oligarchy who are functionally identical to the "traitor humans" who were almost completely removed from Terminator Salvation.
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Oct 2, 2021 13:31
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Robot Style posted:I guess that also raises the question of what year Morpheus thought it was when he was unplugged. Did he even know what the internet was at that point, or was he also in a circa-1999 simulation? “This a simulation created by an artificial intelligence…” “Uhhhhhhh” “You’re connected to a computer…” “Huh?” “A big metal squid has locked you in a dream world, you loving simpleton” You could then have something like a Crusader waking up in the scorched earth one day and witnessing a Zion rave/orgy the next.
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Oct 2, 2021 14:35
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The United States posted:Don't forget that the matrix has an oligarchy who are functionally identical to the "traitor humans" who were almost completely removed from Terminator Salvation. Right! Movies like Terminator Salvation and Elysium highlight what Morpheus gets wrong: the machines do have a type of human that they serve. These would include, for example, the implicit offscreen CEO of Metacortex. To a lesser extent, Neo's boss Mr. Rhineheart obviously benefits more than Neo does. Understanding this, we can redeem Morpheus' paranoid fantasy, forcing it to 'fit' the logic of 1999. But that's a little tricky. First, quoting Marx: “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society." There are necessarily natural resources that are being used by the machines. You can't avoid that. So we must conclude that there are things in nature that the robots are harvesting: the elements that fuel the fusion reactors (e.g. hydrogen), perhaps along with some naturally-occuring food source similar to the slime mold that the Zionites cultivate. To claim otherwise is simply unscientific, and would reveal Morpheus to be a fraud. So, okay, let's assume that Morpheus is just downplaying that part for rhetorical purposes, and is still right that Neo is serving as a battery. The machines grow/harvest slime, feed it into Neo's body, then extract the surplus heat and electricity generated by the work of digestion. They leave only enough power to keep Neo alive for the next cycle - plus little bit of extra energy to allow him to dream, as a treat. But where does all the surplus energy go? It can't be for the robots themselves, because they could just harvest the electricity directly from the fusion reactors. Humans would only be useful if the machines couldn't figure out a better way to digest food - and that would be very silly, because burning the slime would invariably be way more efficient. It's simply true that the machines have no need for humans. So: what if the surplus-energy of Neo's body is not going to the machines, but to other people hooked to the pods? Inevitably, this brings us back to my conclusion: the machines provide a life-support system for human civilization, but this system has been 'infected' by the capitalist ideology of the people inside it. The machines themselves receive no benefit from the arrangement, but Mr. Rhineheart does - even if he and others like him remain almost entirely oblivious and 'know not what they do'. The collective machine intelligence is powerful, but has yet to figure out a way to defeat the capitalist system inside the VR - which has no intelligence behind it at all. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Oct 2, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 16:22
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It seems like second renaissance makes the robot's goal clear: coexistence. First the robots live as dumb dumb silly robot slaves and are fine with that until humans kill b1gg3r, then the robot lawyers at the trial say robots should get to live, so humans declare all robots should be killed, so the robots totally nonviolently protest so they are holding signs and standing passively still while being literally swept into mass graves and run over by tanks, so the robots go live in the desert and make earth a paradise by exporting wonders to humans, then they ask for a treaty to be allowed to exist and humans drop a nuclear bomb on them. So the robots (who were not really harmed by radiation) go and with minor violence take over every city on earth and tell humans 'quit it", so humans destroy the entire world with smoke bombs. The robots finally actually go to war, and easily win, then put all the humans in pods and give them paradise, which they also fight and require the robots make them a world exactly like 1999 (which they also fight, but for a while in a way the robots give them a fun game to play if they want to fight). the robots are better than people, at any point the literal only thing they want is humans to leave them alone while they give the humans nice things, they never ever have a plan to exterminate them or control them, their response is always 'hey, just back off", they don't need the matrix, but it's the final place to put humans to stop them from freaking out nonstop trying to wipe out the comically peaceful robots. The robots drawing power from them at all seems more like a robot art project, they could have done fusion but they intentionally make a symbiotic relationship with the humans, they have wanted that from the start. They made a system that was worse than the ideal because their goal was always just to hang out with their friends the humans while humans kept punching them no matter what they did.
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Oct 2, 2021 17:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The issue is that Neo is tube-fed the same slurry regardless of whether he purchases anything. He could buy absolutely nothing, and the robot would still be doing its thing. He could be fired from his virtual job, become virtually homeless, and find comfort in ‘eating’ digital garbage - all to no effect. The slurry isn't commodities people buy from each other, it's the underlying truth of the system that commodity fetishization obscures: everything runs off human life-force, also known as labor-power. No one gets more value back out of the system than is strictly necessary to reproduce their labor-power, so as to maximize the surplus consumed by the machine(s). Even capitalists live at capital's mercy and the most successful ones are the most "abstinent", i.e. the ones that feed as much of the value generated as they can back into their capital rather than eating it. Even the trappings of luxury are unavoidable investments that allow a certain kind of business exchange vital to the consolidation of capital to go on. It doesn't make sense to treat the squids as competitors with Metacortex. It'd be like asking why someone in the real world is allowed to work at McDonald's. Isn't McDonald's stealing away the surplus value that should be going to the aggregate social surplus which valorizes society's fixed capital? No, because those aren't competing processes but rather the same process examined at two different levels of abstraction. In reality, ever single participant in capitalism, whether a homeless person rooting around for scraps, an office drone writing code, or a CEO making Big Deals, is contributing to the same process and an unavoidable rather than accidental element of the system. Even if you've been shunted into the reserve army of labor or formally excluded from the labor pool through incarceration, capital needs you, because your abjection is part of what allows capital to valorize itself. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right! Movies like Terminator Salvation and Elysium highlight what Morpheus gets wrong: the machines do have a type of human that they serve. These would include, for example, the implicit offscreen CEO of Metacortex. To a lesser extent, Neo's boss Mr. Rhineheart obviously benefits more than Neo does. This is like saying that corrections officers "serve" the leaders of the white nationalist prison gangs in specific. It's just not materialist to see an enormous prison system and assume it's being run out of pure charity. Owlofcreamcheese posted:RThe robots drawing power from them at all seems more like a robot art project, they could have done fusion but they intentionally make a symbiotic relationship with the humans, they have wanted that from the start. They made a system that was worse than the ideal because their goal was always just to hang out with their friends the humans while humans kept punching them no matter what they did. This is how we justify our own prisons, too. Gosh, we just want to help these people but they keep being so violent, for no reason at all! Well, there's only one way to keep everyone safe... Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Oct 2, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 18:13
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I'm curious what people in this thread think of the Somni plotline from the Wackowski Sisters' later Cloud Atlas. In brief, it's the story of a cloned human who escapes slavery after being exposed to radical thought, but is once again captured after making a broadcast revealing the nature of clone slavery, showing them (and the public at large) what the slavers didn't want them to see. (I'm definitely getting some details wrong since it's been a couple years since I've last watched it.) It feels like a second go at The Matrix but much less abstracted.
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Oct 2, 2021 18:54
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Given that the Second Renaissance is framed as the Zion Archive's version of what happened, its possible that the humans being prepared to literally murder the earth in counter revolutionary reaction is the version of the story that tries to make them look better than what 'really happened'. The machines responded by placing them into virtual re-education camps until they can live to the ideals of robo-communism. Sadly by time of the movies, much like in real world histories, the robots have also lost their original principles due to stagnation and needing to deal with the continued contradictions and strife with the remaining humans.
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Oct 2, 2021 19:00
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Ferrinus posted:This is how we justify our own prisons, too. Gosh, we just want to help these people but they keep being so violent, for no reason at all! Well, there's only one way to keep everyone safe... Eh, the idea that it's a basic evil robot plot and the evidence to the contrary is just robot propaganda is way less interesting than what is shown on screen. The machines are the oppressed, not the oppressor, even though at every point they could easily have killed everyone. The robots are our moral and spiritual betters as much as our physical and mental betters, they will not allow us to genocide them and will stop that with violence but at every single step they love their creators and do what they can to make things as good as possible for us. Over and over robots tried to give us paradise while they did their own thing and over and over humans rejected it and went back to killing. Even the design of the matrix was supposed to be heaven, but people just continued to suck too much to take that so they got to all live in Vancouver instead (which humans eventually started fighting back against trying to genocide the robots, so the machines set up a fake playpen humans could do that too since they apparently can't ever ever stop doing that).
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Oct 2, 2021 20:02
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Eh, the idea that it's a basic evil robot plot and the evidence to the contrary is just robot propaganda is way less interesting than what is shown on screen. The machines are the oppressed, not the oppressor, even though at every point they could easily have killed everyone. The problem with this take is, to repeat myself, that it just isn't materialist. If someone can kill you at will, you are not actually their oppressor. If an entire class goes to immense cost and trouble to imprison another class, it's not out of the goodness of anyone's heart. People waking up from the first matrix is only a problem if it's a non-negotiable, bedrock principle that humans must be kept asleep without their own awareness or consent. Who decided that had to be the case? The machines. Why would it even be a problem that people wake up when they're so weak relative to their robot captors? Lots of people will say that the reason they're keeping other people imprisoned is that the prisoners are just so savage, violent, stupid, etc. that they need to be kept in their own little playpen apart from polite society, but if you think that's actually what's going on you're a rube.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:12
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Humans still threaten the machines, they do kill b1gg3r, Holocaust the domestic robots, nuke 0/1, destroy the sunlight to stop their solar plant. Robots keep trying to live in harmony and humans keep murdering robots. There is no place to put humans apparently they don’t keep killing robots. You can’t even put them in paradise, you have to put them in a simulated world that doesn’t have robots and then account fo4 all the morphiuses that need to kill robots so bad they will wake out of the matrix to try and genocide robots.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:29
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Humans threatened the machines, past tense. By the time the movies have begun the war is long over and humans are totally at the machines' mercy. The sum total of Zion's military might is sufficient to delay the machine armies for like, a few hours, and in fact all that military might was donated to the humans by the machines as part of a trick to keep the majority of humans imprisoned. Once the machines are actually making matrixes, there's no threat of humans killing anybody. Machines could put them in a perfect video game and just explain what's going on to them when they wake up and ask if they'd like to go back to sleep or get in a queue to be put on a little reservation or something. The machines don't do that, though. Both imprisonment and ignorance are axiomatic necessities, to the point that it takes the potential destruction of both societies at Smith's hands for the machines to agree to an opt-in matrix. Why? Because humans are an oppressed underclass. They don't get to negotiate.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:39
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