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I know that over the past month since the revival of The Matrix we have had a lot of heated and passionate debates but can we all agree that Matrix was the best (and only good) attempt at making a live action anime?
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Oct 9, 2021 22:10
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Noob Saibot posted:I know that over the past month since the revival of The Matrix we have had a lot of heated and passionate debates but can we all agree that Matrix was the best (and only good) attempt at making a live action anime? Speed Racer and Pacific Rim 1 are both good.
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Oct 9, 2021 22:49
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Chronicle, too
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Oct 10, 2021 02:55
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That’s not what happens in the movies. I would have liked to see some Smith-programmed-sentinels attacking other sentinels before Deus killed him.
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Oct 10, 2021 03:03
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A Hugo Weaving face forms out of the Sentinels. A pair of sunglasses descends from the heavens.
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Oct 10, 2021 03:25
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Noob Saibot posted:I know that over the past month since the revival of The Matrix we have had a lot of heated and passionate debates but can we all agree that Matrix was the best (and only good) attempt at making a live action anime? The Matrix is a Good Movie. Anime is a Bad Anything.
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Oct 10, 2021 03:35
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Noob Saibot posted:I know that over the past month since the revival of The Matrix we have had a lot of heated and passionate debates but can we all agree that Matrix was the best (and only good) attempt at making a live action anime? Sodomy Hussein posted:Speed Racer and Pacific Rim 1 are both good. stratdax posted:Chronicle, too
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Oct 10, 2021 03:36
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Ferrinus posted:if we want to analogize Neo's fight in specific to some historical process it would be something like the end of agrarian slavery or direct colonial domination. It's been about the matrix's population from the beginning. The theoretical intervention made by these movies (or repeated, rather, because this has borne out in history again in again years before the Wachowskis came out) is that revolutions don't actually come out of abstract, universal love for everybody. In fact, that's what the machines count on to keep their system going unchanged. It's particularistic, historically contingent, national or otherwise identity-based liberation struggles that actually win victories and get results, and those victories are steps in a much bigger, protracted struggle. That struggle retains momentum if it can deliver material benefits to its participants and necessarily involves triage and maneuver rather than making a direct leap into some sort global and messianic deliverance. It might be helpful to state which specific events in the trilogy illustrate that interpretation, since Neo doesn’t actually do very much in any of them. Like, I understand what you are arguing: that Neo was correct to crash the matrix and focus exclusively on defending Zion, because the Zionites’ defense of Zion is the first step in a broader struggle that is gaining momentum and etc. But where exactly does that occur in the films? You seem to be skipping all the steps between “the Zion insurgency takes up arms” and “all humanity is freer now”. Without the ‘broader struggle gaining momentum’ thing, you’re left with just a pragmatism.
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Oct 10, 2021 04:35
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codo27 posted:The Matrix is a Good Movie. Anime is a Bad Anything. Woah.
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Oct 10, 2021 04:58
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codo27 posted:The Matrix is a Good Movie. Anime is a Bad Anything. When they weren’t shamelessly stealing from Grant Morrison the Wackoskis were known to be anime enthusiasts. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-01-ca-solomon1-story.html?_amp=true
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Oct 10, 2021 05:03
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Noob Saibot posted:I know that over the past month since the revival of The Matrix we have had a lot of heated and passionate debates but can we all agree that Matrix was the best (and only good) attempt at making a live action anime? What about mobile suit ZZ Gundam
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Oct 10, 2021 05:32
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Stairmaster posted:What about mobile suit ZZ Gundam
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Oct 10, 2021 11:27
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It might be helpful to state which specific events in the trilogy illustrate that interpretation, since Neo doesn’t actually do very much in any of them. I'm not even sure I'd say Neo was correct "to crash" the matrix because, well, that didn't happen. It's more that he was correct not to play along with the machines, because the ruling class's complete inability to imagine existence after even a small check to their power does not mean that they really are a load-bearing pillar for all existence and therefore to be obeyed in all particulars. The top-level sequence of events in the Matrix series goes something like this: 1. The accumulated refusal of humanity to remain imprisoned pools in a single entity, making that entity increasingly powerful 2. That entity is supposed to wrap up that power in a bow tie and hand it back over to the ruling class so that revolutionary energy can be grounded and diffused, but instead the entity hangs on to their power and uses it to keep fighting 3. The exercise in that power causes increasing instability which only that power combined with the broader infrastructure undergirding everything can solve 4. The solution produces a new and different status quo because of the balance of class forces that went into it More succinctly, humanity's refusal to play along with the machines forces the machines to cede power to humanity. Neo is the locus of humanity's resistance to the machines. I want to be clear that I don't think that the "real" battle is the one for Zion that involves squids and chainguns. Neo's own refusal wasn't really about Zion (Zion was going to be destroyed regardless of which door he went through, that was non-negotiable) but about Trinity, who was in the matrix at the time. The final defeat of (reconciliation with?) Smith happens in the virtual world, and obviously the virtual world is a practical necessity for the bulk of remaining humanity however you want to slice it. Just because the superstructure rests on a base doesn't mean it doesn't have its own importance. But, unless we have a clear-eyed understanding of that base nothing in the superstructure is ever going to make sense to us, and we'll never be able to meaningfully change either. So, we shouldn't dismiss all the robot hellscape stuff as a mere delusion or distraction. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Oct 10, 2021 |
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Oct 10, 2021 19:08
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Ferrinus posted:The top-level sequence of events in the Matrix series goes something like this: That’s not an accurate summary of events, though. At the very least, it’s glossing over important distinctions. Neo doesn’t “hang on to power and use it to keep fighting [to liberate humans inside the matrix from what he perceives as enslavement]”. Rather, he switches to an entirely different fight, which is the defence of those already ‘freed’. The humans inside the matrix are totally forsaken at that point - and that remains the case up until the very end of Matrix 3, when he decides to just give the machines exactly what they want. In Revolutions, Neo uses an entirely different set of powers based around his interaction with what he perceives as a city of light. This city of light is “The Source”, which is what he was designed to interact with in the first place: “The Source. That’s what you felt when you touched those Sentinels. But you weren’t ready for it. You should be dead, but apparently you weren’t ready for that, either.” The cleansing white light at the end of Matrix 3 is precisely what Neo was programmed to unleash, so the eternal cycle of rebellion and corruption is preserved. It’s why Oracle and Architect are so pleased at the end: change, but not too much change. It bears repeating that Smith is the one who actually threatens the machines. Without him, Neo has no leverage - nothing. And it also bears repeating that the Smiths are literally the collective anger of Earth’s entire population. You think those guys in the rain are doing their jobs? It’s a fuckin’ general strike! So, to summarize: Neo only cares about saving the population of Zion, yet fails repeatedly to do so. He also fails to kill Smith and, in the end, finally just gives up and does exactly what he was told.
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Oct 10, 2021 23:26
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The superpowers Neo uses throughout the third movie are in fact the powers he's had all along. According to the Oracle*, the powers of the One extend beyond the Matrix and reach all the way back to the Source/machine city, which is why Neo can engage in telepathic interaction with machines when he's not jacked in, but still fly around and stop bullets when jacked in. He does return to the Source at the end of the movie, but we know it's not exactly what the machines want because they go to great lengths to resist him and ultimately cede things to him and his people that were never supposed to be on the table, like Zion being allowed to persist rather than start from scratch and jacked-in humans being able to opt out. Smith is what makes the machines immediately desperate enough to agree to this, but A) even Smith is a byproduct of the One's power B) Smith can only actually be stopped via the One's power (otherwise the machines could just pick any of the other already-jacked-in humans who've been overwritten and zap their spinal cords with lightning C) Smith is only a threat because the machines can't do without the matrix, i.e. without people. If the matrix is going to suffer a catastrophic system crash anyway and a cancerous computer virus is spreading through it unchecked, why not just scuttle the Trainman's metro station dimension and shut the entire thing down immediately? Well, they can't, because they need it. Or, even if they don't need it, they can't go back to not having it even for a moment. It's a late-stage Krypton situation. I agree with you that Smith is a revolutionary force in his own right, but we know he isn't collective human anger (that's what Neo's wizardry is) and we also know he isn't carrying out a strike (the Matrix is still running and the machines fully powered and operational even after every last plugged-in human has been taken over). To the machines, Smith is just the violence of the periphery coming back home to the core. More broadly, I think Smith is best understood as objective or structural instability as opposed to Neo's subjective human rebellion; liberalism looks stable but in practice can't help but generate these violent, homogenizing excesses that spiral beyond the ruling class's own control. Of course, you need both objective (political and economic crisis, the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way, etc) and subjective (party discipline, working class institutions, etc) factors to line up if you want a revolution. * While looking this dialogue up I also found the Oracle explicitly dismissing the Architect's predictions of human extinction as blinkered by the Architect's own failings Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 00:15
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The fundamental conceit of a revolution is that you have power. In the Matrix, people don't. A reminder that nothing normal humans did in the first 3 movies was outside the plans of the Machines. Their rage, their revolution, was another intended cog in the Machine design. They were intended to 'liberate' people that the Matrix couldn't contain, and when they reach an arbitrary point they are culled. Their city destroyed, and given the resources to start again. The totality of their resistance is enough to stop the light first assault of the Machines, who immediately send in a second, even larger force. And as we follow Neo and Trinity, we see an even larger force below them. Humans could spend centuries rebuilding and still be at the whim of the Machines. What they've achieved at the end is.....the end of hope. You won't free people from the Machines, you won't take back the Earth. You can stay in your little people zoo and have raves though, we'll ship you the losers that pop out the Machine on the regular. Humanity had it's zenith. It took it's best shot to stop the Machines. It failed. There was a revolution of the oppressed against the forces of capital. It was successful. It just wasn't humans that won.
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Oct 11, 2021 02:06
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People are literally the machines' source of power, so I don't think you thought that one through. You also seem to be describing the backstory of the movies rather than the plot, since what happens in the movies is that the machines' control system, heretofore more or less stable, fails catastrophically.
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Oct 11, 2021 03:38
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Ferrinus posted:we also know he isn't carrying out a strike (the Matrix is still running and the machines fully powered and operational even after every last plugged-in human has been taken over) Marx: Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Oracle: I see the end coming. I see the darkness spreading. I see death. And you are all that stands in his way. Neo: Smith. Smith's goal is obviously not to destroy the matrix itself, because the matrix was already condemned to destruction by Architect and Neo. As several characters fear, Smith is absolutely heading to Machine City to overtake Deus, with the ultimate goal of refashioning the matrix into a new world. ("This is my world!") The whole ending depends on this fact, unable to happen without it. Neo: The program "Smith" has grown beyond your control. Soon he will spread through this city [i.e. The Source] as he spread through the Matrix. You cannot stop him, but I can. Why Neo's sudden concern? Recall that their last interaction was the 'Burly Brawl', where Neo just flew off like "eh, that's weird". Now Neo's curiously alarmed about how 'uncontrollable' Smith is. The explanation is the extremely lengthy scene in Matrix 3, where it takes Neo like half an hour to figure out that Bane is possessed by Smith. After all the dubious poo poo in these movies, Bane-Smith is what finally blows his mind and shocks him into a stupor: Neo: It can’t be. Bane: There’s nowhere I can’t go, there’s nowhere I won’t find you. Neo: It’s impossible. In other words, Neo had previously ignored Smith because he thought Smith was successfully quarantined in the matrix, which was abandonned to crash anyways. Although the Bane plot point is laid out in explicit detail for the audience, the reveal that Zion is threatened, along with Machine City, catches Neo entirely by surprise. And the machines underestimated Smith too. This is where, again, we need firm basis in the text. The 'trainman' and his underground railroad are a unique bit of coding set up by the Merovingian for the purposes of smuggling. It's a whole different language from what the machines use, which is why Neo's powers don't work there. Smith, however, could probably overcome it without much difficulty - and it's not his only avenue. Everyone underestimates Smith as he unites Earth's population, and then everyone teams up to destroy him because he 'cannot be controlled.' Who are the good guys again? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 05:00
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The problem with your phrasing is that the people in Smith's grasp have not ceased to work. They're still jacked in and acting as fusion spark plugs or neural co-processors or whatever. Smith's new world is still going to be hosted on the servers of the matrix, machine city, or both, and that means the actual machine mode of production needs to continue uninterrupted. Remember, someone who goes on strike - or is straight up unemployed - inside the matrix is still "working" in the real world by contributing bits and pieces of their life-force to the machines. Now, it's possible that Smith(or even regular agent)-possessed humans don't contribute power or even act as a net drain on the machines' reserves. In that case, Smith is making GBS threads where he eats, though this may be deliberate such that "the purpose of life is to end" is meant to apply to machines and humans both, ultimately including Smith himself. But it's important not to confuse endogenous economic crises with deliberate revolutionary activity. For example, the brokers of the '20s did not launch a "general strike" when they crashed the stock market and put a quarter of the population out of work. On the other hand, Du Bois called it a "general strike" when only about ten percent of the south's slave population fled into the ranks of the Union army even though many of those people immediately started working for the army, occasionally on the very same plantations they'd previously abandoned. Neo quits the original "burly brawl" because A) he can't actually win it and B) still thinks at this point that finding the Source is going to solve problems that simply throwing superpowers around in the matrix heretofore hasn't. In a way, he's right, since it's only interface with the Source on Neo's terms that defeats Smith at the end of the story. Either way, there's a difference between abandoning the matrix and the people in it and realizing that you can't resolve the problems of the matrix without access to its base infrastructure. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 05:25
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Ferrinus posted:People are literally the machines' source of power, so I don't think you thought that one through. You also seem to be describing the backstory of the movies rather than the plot, since what happens in the movies is that the machines' control system, heretofore more or less stable, fails catastrophically. And yet here we are at Matrix 4, still featuring a Matrix. It failed so catastrophically it immediately went right back to business as usual, except now they don't have to waste resources giving a poo poo about Zion. There was a momentary apocalypse, caused by a program and not a human, and it was resolved. And in resolving it, so was The One resolved. All outliers are put to rest, conflict is over. And it's set so laughably, overwhelmingly in the Machines favor there will never be a chance for humanity to come back from it. People don't matter. People are the past, and their time is over. And nothing of value was lost with their passing. The Machines have all the same foibles, the same emotions and drives. At the end of the day they were far kinder to humans than humans were to them. Stewardship of the Earth has passed to better hands. Humanity is resigned to a care home waiting out their final days, or kept asleep and nutured for as long as the Machines still hold any regard for them. Really the most interesting concept of the new Matrix is why anyone cares about Neo. What's he going to do at this point that even matters? He's looking for Trinity? Good, let him.
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Oct 11, 2021 06:02
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Mulva posted:And yet here we are at Matrix 4, still featuring a Matrix. It failed so catastrophically it immediately went right back to business as usual, except now they don't have to waste resources giving a poo poo about Zion. There was a momentary apocalypse, caused by a program and not a human, and it was resolved. And in resolving it, so was The One resolved. All outliers are put to rest, conflict is over. And it's set so laughably, overwhelmingly in the Machines favor there will never be a chance for humanity to come back from it. That's the complete opposite reading of Revolutions' ending. The Machines have accepted peace between them and humanity, The Architect says that any humans that want out will be let go. If anything, humanity has the chance to grow and prosper again now that they can focus on things beyond barely surviving a war against a superior foe. Its all uncertain for sure, and The Architect even hints that eventually the peace will break down again (And it was slowly happening in The Matrix Online), but it ends on a more hopeful note than what you're presenting here.
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Oct 11, 2021 08:26
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Archer666 posted:If anything, humanity has the chance to grow and prosper again now that they can focus on things beyond barely surviving a war against a superior foe. With what resources? Where? Basically the only livable space is a small area around the core of the planet. The rest of the world is not only dead, but either so far blasted it can never be made livable in anything short of centuries or it's still unlivable *and* covered in Machines and their massive complex. And those robots aren't building themselves out of nothing. There's only so many precious metals and such to go around, and I imagine the Machines aren't going to leave a lot for the hillbillies in the core. Humanity in the Matrix is hosed. And all the progress they make isn't happening in a vacuum. The Machines are just as capable of changing and adapting. Like Zion....ites? are stuck eating something that makes porridge look obscenely rich, they are not getting on top of things anytime soon. But quote:Its all uncertain for sure, and The Architect even hints that eventually the peace will break down again (And it was slowly happening in The Matrix Online), but it ends on a more hopeful note than what you're presenting here. I mean it's still infinitely better than what they had before, which was living a massive lie in a constructed fantasy war only to be brutally slaughtered in the end. A fate that they have no idea has happened multiple times. Their fight wasn't only hopeless, it was loving rote. Their lives were spent dying in a rerun of a conflict they never changed. And, without Smith, never would. Now at least they don't have to die in a pointless struggle. They can live their lives and those that want out of the Matrix get out. It's something. It's just not something they particularly earned through the strength of their abilities, nor will it get them much down the road. Without the chaotic variable that is Smith and Deus' word there's nothing they could have done if the Machines turned around after Neo sacrificed himself and continued to wipe them out. Their continued existence relies on Machines being more noble than people would be. Like I guess there is some theoretical future in a few centuries where the Machines have outgrown the Earth and just blast off to live as pure energy in the cosmos, and the dumb apes can get the world back. Maybe. I guess that could happen. If there hasn't been another war and the Machines just decide to wipe them out this time.
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Oct 11, 2021 09:32
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Ferrinus posted:The problem with your phrasing is that the people in Smith's grasp have not ceased to work. They're still jacked in and acting as fusion spark plugs or neural co-processors or whatever. This is where the pragmatism comes back to bite you. Neo is a figure of the restoration of order, who you characterize as a revolutionary for doing and saying basically nothing - literally spending half a film unconscious - but he’s “gaining momentum,” right? Nobody’s perfect, triage, etc. Meanwhile, the Smiths have only ended capitalism on Earth and are only making headway against God Himself in the realm Beyond. What a slacker! (This, I claim, is ideology.) But it’s also overlooking the imagery in the films, where the Main Smith at the end - the ultimate antagonist - is literally the benevolent Oracle who gave herself up in the effort to further “unbalance the equation”. It’s also missing the part where Neo now perceives the machine city as a beautiful city of golden light, because the robots are not precisely villains, and so-on. Neo: It’s unbelievable, Trin. Lights everywhere. Like the whole thing was built with light. I wish you could see what I see. Louis: If you're afraid of dying, and you're holdin' on, you'll see devils tearin' your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein' you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it.
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Oct 11, 2021 11:36
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Mulva posted:And yet here we are at Matrix 4, still featuring a Matrix. It failed so catastrophically it immediately went right back to business as usual, except now they don't have to waste resources giving a poo poo about Zion. There was a momentary apocalypse, caused by a program and not a human, and it was resolved. And in resolving it, so was The One resolved. All outliers are put to rest, conflict is over. And it's set so laughably, overwhelmingly in the Machines favor there will never be a chance for humanity to come back from it. No, that's just wrong. The matrix is now optional, where before it was mandatory, because humans flexed their power against the machines and the machines flinched. It's actually good that the machines are still alive and running a matrix because machines are people too and the matrix is an important part of keeping both humans and machines alive in the apocalyptic hellworld. No one, human or machine, would want otherwise. The difference is not what rote motions people are going through every day but who is in charge of where the surplus goes. SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is where the pragmatism comes back to bite you. I'm not sure where "pragmatism comes back to bite you" comes into the observation that, as a computer program that needs to be hosted on physical servers, Smith needs electric current and processing power just like the rest of the machines do. There's no indication that he is choking those things off (because if he were, he would be strangling himself just as much as he'd be strangling the god baby, and this conflicts with his desire to have "[his] world"), so it's strictly false that he is denying the machines their surplus by way of a strike. Exploitation proceeds whether or not everybody's themselves or everybody's a Smith. Another clue is that, like I said, the machines have not simply shut down and quarantined themselves off from the matrix as a pre-emptive measure. They should, but they can't! They need that energy flowing! A crisis of uncontrolled overproduction and underconsumption isn't the same as revolutionary activity. The the latter can easily take advantage of the former (and literally does in the plot of the film) but there's just too much that flies in the face of your characterization. For half of Revolutions, Neo (and, therefore, the collective will to resist of humanity) isn't gaining momentum. Rather, he (and it) is recovering from an upset that's revealed his (and its) theory to be incomplete and therefore strategy in need of alteration. We just need to get the ball to the goal and we win, right? No, it turns out to be a complicated and extended process of advances, retreats, etc. This is why calls for a general strike tend to be the swan songs of social movements, an ineffectual final plea to the cosmos when every concrete plan has failed. Okay, guys, it looks bad now, but if we all just jump at the same moment we can knock the earth out of orbit and then they'll have to listen to us! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 18:31
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stratdax posted:Chronicle, too
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Oct 13, 2021 02:11
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Just don't pay to watch it then, like you would for other movies bad people were involved in making
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Oct 13, 2021 23:04
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Blood Boils posted:Just don't pay to watch it then, like you would for other movies bad people were involved in making Or do pay for it because a whole bunch of people who aren't Max Landis get checks when you do.
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Oct 13, 2021 23:09
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I mean it's not his idea or anything, it's just another one of the dozens of films he was brought in as a hired gun scriptwriter. It was Trank's idea, and he did an original spec script with Jeremy Slater, but Slater wasn't available when it needed to move ahead, so there comes Landis. The degree to which you have to give a poo poo about any of that is up to you, but the overwhelming majority of everything that film is was there without him. If you want to watch, you can do so knowing he is a very small part of what it is. And if you don't want to give him even that recognition, that's cool too.
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Oct 14, 2021 02:11
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seems like someone got the script hugo weaving was using and annotated during the production of the first matrix and scanned it and put it online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11ZFulxmguYWa-ZANTuNfA-z187dm7ohj/view looks like weaving wrote 'no' above every single instance of 'smith smiles' or etc, hah Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Oct 14, 2021 |
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Oct 14, 2021 11:12
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There's also an interesting bit that was cut from the movie where Neo finds out he's actually the sixth guy that Morpheus has recruited as "The One", and the other 5 were all killed by Agents.
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Oct 14, 2021 18:04
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Robot Style posted:There's also an interesting bit that was cut from the movie where Neo finds out he's actually the sixth guy that Morpheus has recruited as "The One", and the other 5 were all killed by Agents. That really would have obliterated Morpheus' legitimacy and undermined an already tenuous Neo I wonder what their real names were....penultimate neo? beta neo? web 1.0?
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Oct 14, 2021 19:27
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Oldo
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Oct 14, 2021 19:32
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Ferrinus posted:I'm not sure where "pragmatism comes back to bite you" comes into the observation that, as a computer program that needs to be hosted on physical servers, Smith needs electric current and processing power just like the rest of the machines do. There's no indication that he is choking those things off (because if he were, he would be strangling himself just as much as he'd be strangling the god baby, and this conflicts with his desire to have "[his] world"), so it's strictly false that he is denying the machines their surplus by way of a strike. Well, now we're back to the infinite energy. You are flipping back and forth between talking about the resource - electricity - and the money gained through the alleged sale of the resource.* Through this conflation of money and electricity, you assert that because machines in general are powered by electricity, they are therefore inherently evil. You're advancing a reading of the film where machines of all stripes are purely parasitic. Their existence is exploitation, and the ultimate goal can only be their annihilation. From there, you are arguing that (after seven hours of screentime!) Neo ultimately inspired Architect to make an offhand remark about 'freeing others'. And these 'others' may, potentially, contribute to the eventual goal of total machine annihilation in some way. This was the victory. Or, maybe a massive setback. Maybe both. It's complicated? So, in the end, The Matrix Trilogy is a powerful inspirational fable of, like, being reasonable and not expecting too much. I must repeat that, besides being lame, way too much of your reading is based on stuff that isn't actually in the film at all. Like, the machines' entire money-making operation, and the entire part where 'the others' defeat them. Those aren't in the films. *I'm referring to 'money' instead of 'surplus value' and etc. for simplicity, because I think the more abstract stuff might be throwing you off.
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Oct 14, 2021 20:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, now we're back to the infinite energy. You are flipping back and forth between talking about the resource - electricity - and the money gained through the alleged sale of the resource.* Through this conflation of money and electricity, you assert that because machines in general are powered by electricity, they are therefore inherently evil. You're advancing a reading of the film where machines of all stripes are purely parasitic. Their existence is exploitation, and the ultimate goal can only be their annihilation. Your theoretical problem here is that surplus value isn't the same as money. Feudal lords appropriated the fruits of their serfs' unpaid labor regularly, but it wasn't to sell those fruits on the market and transform them into money, or at least not at first and not primarily. Money is a constituent part of the circuit of capital specifically (value has to constantly metamorphose into money, which becomes fixed and variable capital, which becomes commodities, which become money again) but exploitation (particularly of prisoners and slaves) may or may not metamorphose directly into spendable currency. Certainly, that is not the case with the prisoner-slaves we keep in America to this day. The cost of imprisonment far exceeds the profits of selling inmate-bottled hand sanitizer or what have you. Nevertheless, we do it, because our way of life depends on it to the extent that only revolutionary violence could make us stop. Because you make that mistake, you're able to continuously wander away from and forget the point that the machines (this includes Smith, who is one of them; maybe it's more correct to say "the programs", but whatever) need the matrix. It's not an affectation, it's not an act of charity, it's not a science project, and it's not a zoo. I've made this point several times and as far as I've been able to tell you haven't disagreed, but suddenly you're accusing me of believing in infinite energy for some reason, as though only the total repeal of the laws of thermodynamics could have made the Spartiates unwilling to free their helots. Do the machines need the matrix or not? If they don't then the movies stand as some weird morality play about the fickleness of Cartesian demons. If they do, we can start actually talking about politics. I'm also perplexed, by the by, that you're suddenly casting me as calling for (incremental?) machine genocide or something. Wasn't one of your earliest points that the fact that there is still a matrix people are plugged into, the fact that the Oracle and Architect have a friendly chat at the end, etc. means that the ending was some kind of betrayal or trick? The machines are people, and insofar as they need human help to survive should receive that help. The question is not whether these forces and capacities should exist (they simply do) but what kind of class society controls and deploys them. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 00:08
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Ferrinus posted:The cost of imprisonment far exceeds the profits of selling inmate-bottled hand sanitizer or what have you. Nevertheless, we do it, because our way of life depends on it to the extent that only revolutionary violence could make us stop. This is a mistake. There are no costs - the "costs" are subsidized by money spent into existence by a sovereign state. The profits are gleaned by an entirely separate, private capital entity to the one paying the costs, and the payer has no interest in profit for itself. This is like arguing that a weapons factory can't be profitable because the military budget is really high.
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Oct 16, 2021 00:54
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Ferrinus posted:... surplus value isn't the same as money. Feudal lords appropriated the fruits of their serfs' unpaid labor regularly, but it wasn't to sell those fruits on the market and transform them into money, or at least not at first and not primarily. Money is a constituent part of the circuit of capital specifically (value has to constantly metamorphose into money, which becomes fixed and variable capital, which becomes commodities, which become money again) but exploitation (particularly of prisoners and slaves) may or may not metamorphose directly into spendable currency. Certainly, that is not the case with the prisoner-slaves we keep in America to this day. The cost of imprisonment far exceeds the profits of selling inmate-bottled hand sanitizer or what have you. Nevertheless, we do it, because our way of life depends on it to the extent that only revolutionary violence could make us stop. This is what I suspected. In treating ‘surplus value’ as a pure abstraction, you are missing basic questions of, like, where’s the hand sanitizer in this situation? Who’s buying it? What, in concrete terms, are the machines actually gaining? Without a good answer, your machines are evidently just accumulating trillions and trillions of man-hours for the sake of it - indifferent as to whether this purely abstract value is ever realized in any way. This is where we escape into a backwards logic where the machines are presumed to be feudal lords, and therefore they must be gaining some kind of fruits from some kind of serfs. The whole ostensible ideological critique isn’t based in the material conditions of the societies depicted in the films, but on a secret badness imagined in the heart of the alien god. This is why you are able to shift effortlessly between calling the machines lords, spartans, bosses, and whatever. They’re just nonspecifically bad, representing a generic unfreedom. (Immovable object vs unstoppable force - which should win?) As a contrast, I am asking basic political questions like: what sort of God allows suffering? “The solution cannot be for the God to (re)appear in all his majesty, revealing to Christ the deeper meaning of his suffering (that he was the Innocent sacrificed to redeem humanity).” Smith is correct: there is no meaning, to any of this. His is an elementary critique of ideology. The whole thing was botched.
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Oct 16, 2021 06:48
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DeimosRising posted:This is a mistake. There are no costs - the "costs" are subsidized by money spent into existence by a sovereign state. The profits are gleaned by an entirely separate, private capital entity to the one paying the costs, and the payer has no interest in profit for itself. This is like arguing that a weapons factory can't be profitable because the military budget is really high. There are material costs in terms of raw material, construction, food, security, electronics, bureaucracy, and so on which vastly exceed the costs of soap bottled or t-shirts sewn. Now, it's true that a percentage of the public money that goes into prison gets siphoned out as private profit. But, that percentage is very small. Most prisoners are in state-run facilities and most of the slave labor done in prisons generates products for other branches of the federal government, not for private sale. This makes sense because prison labor is actually incredibly inefficient compared to "free" labor; the security costs are way higher and it's way more common for minor incidents to totally shut down the production line by mandating emergency lockdowns or whatever. Prisons don't generate profit themselves. They just allow profit, society-wide, because they enforce a class dictatorship. SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is what I suspected. In treating ‘surplus value’ as a pure abstraction, you are missing basic questions of, like, where’s the hand sanitizer in this situation? Who’s buying it? What, in concrete terms, are the machines actually gaining? Without a good answer, your machines are evidently just accumulating trillions and trillions of man-hours for the sake of it - indifferent as to whether this purely abstract value is ever realized in any way. First, see above; prisons aren't there to generate hand sanitizer. They're there to enforce class dictatorship. The hand sanitizer allows a small percentage of their material costs to be defrayed. Second, the reason I am constantly bringing up Spartan nobility, Frankish dukes, etc is to point out to you—because you seem to keep wandering off the point—that exploitation does not violate thermodynamics. Obviously, there are salient differences between the exploitation performed by the machines and the exploitation performed by various ruling classes throughout human history. If I had to pick one historical example that I felt lined up the best, I would analogize the machines to the planters pre-Civil War, whose openly coercive exploitation of what was effectively an internal colony generated the base inputs that went on to fuel the rest of an economy superficially unrelated to the slave regime. I think this actually maps pretty well in a couple ways: To start, there's actually some legitimate disagreement as to the extent to which the antebellum south's mode of production was "capitalist" as opposed to "slave-owning" or whatever, but it's indisputable that the exploitation happening on the plantations was important to capitalism happening elsewhere. As well, while the violent destruction of this regime was obviously a good thing, it was carried out at least in part by people who had totally unrelated motives, was only one step on the road to liberation, could easily be followed by a retrograde move as happened in the actual American south, etc. So your point that the ending of Revolutions is questionable or ambiguous in various ways is well-made, but downplays the significance of getting that far. Third, I'm surprised by your first question because I thought we'd been over this a few times. As materialists (as well as just, readers), we know the machines are fulfilling survival needs by imprisoning and exploiting humanity. In my mind, there are two most likely ways this works, which I will list below, but I want to be very clear that the specific benefits the machines reap from imprisoning humans does not matter to the human struggle for liberation. To continue the above analogy, the complex supply chains that sent cotton and sugarcane across the world help us to explain the specific forms slavery takes but do not change the correct response to slavery.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Oct 17, 2021 |
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Oct 17, 2021 04:38
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Ammanas posted:That really would have obliterated Morpheus' legitimacy and undermined an already tenuous Neo Gregory
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Oct 19, 2021 01:19
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Neo (Thomas anderson) was living a simulated life in the matrix (simulated 1999)does that mean he saw The Terminator? Also if you can ‘be’ a kung-fu god in the matrix why does noone hack themselves an auto aim gun that can shoot through walls and infinite health and no clip mode?
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Oct 19, 2021 12:33
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Brazilianpeanutwar posted:Neo (Thomas anderson) was living a simulated life in the matrix (simulated 1999)does that mean he saw The Terminator? Even the stuff they bring in from the Construct has to obey the base rules of the simulation. The can achieved peak human physical performance and even in certain circumstances briefly exceed it, but even if they bring in hundreds of guns, those guns are still observing the rules of the game.
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Oct 19, 2021 13:48
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