|
Nuts and Gum posted:Action sequences are storyboarded, scripted, practiced and perfected. Covid would not have stopped any of that because it’s done before the camera has film in it. Lana just had everyone show up and ‘wing it’. I didn't think the movie was bad at all though  . Just find the disparity between the quality of action sequences curious.
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 02:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 03:32 |
|
|
I just loving love The Matrix and want MXO back 
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 03:28
|
|
|
Sir Kodiak posted:Explicitly? Like, there's a line of dialogue or something? Because I don't recall this. Can you refresh my memory? Off the top of my head, we have Morpheus telling us the machine use both human bioelectricity and fusion and the Architect acknowledging that an end to the matrix bears on the machines' survival needs. That, plus what actually happens, allows us to conclude that the machines really do need the matrix for something, although it might be hosting servers for the giant MMO that the machines all live on or mining bitcoin. In Resurrections, we have the Analyst repeatedly acknowledge that people in the matrix are used produce power, specifically, and their efficiency at this task varies with their mental state. So, human brain activity is needed to make fusion go. Personally I think the original script's "brains are used directly for processing power" is a cooler idea but as of the fourth movie there's not really a way to get around the power generation angle unless you're willing to assume that basically every character who comments on it is deluded or lying (and that still leaves you with the machines exploiting a human underclass for something as I've argued in this thread before Resurrections came out). SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is getting things mixed up again, because we're not examining whether the Robot Head needs things, but what the Robot Head specifically needs. We're both shown and told that he does not need the billions of humans, but that he does need protection from Smith. Given that Smith effectively 'is' the billions of humans at the end of Matrix 3, we can simplify this further: the Robot Head needs to kill Smith and is willing to kill all humans in the process of accomplishing that goal. Neo is able to negotiate for 'peace' because the Robot Head is afraid that killing all humans won't be enough to stop Smith. He wants to increase his chances of survival - but killing all humans remains the backup plan if Neo fails. We aren't shown and told that the baby doesn't need the billions of humans. In fact, forget shown, we're told the opposite: Deus Ex Machina: We don’t need you. We need nothing. Neo: If that’s true, then I’ve made a mistake and you should kill me now. Deus Ex Machina: What do you want? (Neo wasn't immediately killed because it wasn't true. The machines couldn't simply flush every Smith-possessed human into their respective macerator.) What Neo actually bargains for is "peace". You added the "with Zion exclusively" part. Does leaving the matrix in place and unchanged constitute "peace"? Well, if you think it represents some sort of morality play that the machines are using to test human worthiness, or some sort of service that the helpless machines are bound to perform due to their unbreakable programming, maybe it is. But not if it's a prison. quote:This is why a close reading of the text is important. There's a huge difference between "needing six billion humans in a matrix" and "needing Neo to kill Smith". This is why I've been emphasizing that you need put together a clearer picture of the machine economy, the machine society, and even just the basic species-being of the machines. It's not enough to repeat "energy = life force" or just bluntly asserting that the species is capital itself. Alright so first of all it's well understood that Cyclops's eyes are a standing portal into another dimension. This means that his eyebeams, which just spill forth infinitely if left unchecked, constitute a free gift of nature. Cyclop's labor-power might be tapped to profitable end if he were trained to fire the beam steadily at some kind of pinwheel. Maybe we could strap him into place so he doesn't move his head and use electrodes attached to his brain to ensure he tenses his eyelids in the exact sequence we need... never mind, let's move on. Second of all, the rest of this is just feigned idiocy. Like, here's another eyebeam: at some point in the Smallville TV series, which I've never watched but I don't think that's going to matter for the purpose of this example, a young Superman sees a hot girl in a state of undress and his heat vision starts going off. It kind of seems like this autonomic physical reaction might stand in for his getting a boner. "But wait," you ask, "Are you saying thermal rays contain gametes? Are you positing some kind of magma elemental that reproduces by receiving blasts of heat? You need to explain this eyebeam-based sexual biology in exacting detail." The galling thing though is that I have done this. After you took repeated offense at casual use of historical analogy I actually wrote in some detail that the machines' own economy is obviously a modernized slave mode of production in which mass exploitation on a species basis sustains a wider machine society that humans don't have access to. The matrix is essentially a work camp or internal colony that powers a higher-order civilization. As far as I can tell this was not convenient for you, which is why you cut it out completely and chose to respond to a few words on either side of it. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Feb 2, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 06:26
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:We aren't shown and told that the baby doesn't need the billions of humans. In fact, forget shown, we're told the opposite: Right, so we’re still not over the first hurdle of determining what is even going on in the basic plot of the movie(s). “We don’t need you” is specifically rejecting Neo’s offer to kill Smith, preventing Smith from reaching Machine City: Neo: The program ‘Smith’ has grown beyond your control. Soon he will spread through this city as he spread through the Matrix. You cannot stop him, but I can. The Head, Again: We don’t need you. We need nothing. How do I know Neo is planning to kill Smith? Because Neo spends the entire subsequent action sequence trying to beat Smith to death. The context is pretty important. And how do I know that Neo’s “peace” has nothing to do with saving the people of the matrix? There are several clues: Clue #1: Neo is planning to beat Smith to death, and Smith is the people of the matrix. Clue #2: Beating Smith to death will not reverse the looming catastrophic system crash. If Neo delays things long enough, the crash will take them all out anyways. Clue #3: Neo has already forsaken humanity at the end of Matrix 2, sacrificing them to save Zion and Trinity. (When Neo flies to save Trinity at the end of the film, the resulting shockwave blatantly kills untold thousands of people. This illustrates his priorities pretty clearly.) Clue #4: As noted earlier, Oracle refers to the ‘unfreed’ survivors of the matrix as “others”, not explicitly covered by the Zion peace agreement. (Sidenote: the other others, the 99% left in the matrix, are considered ‘free’, since they don’t “want out.”) Clue #5: Smith’s takeover of the matrix is referred to in the past tense. Neo sees it as already lost. Clue #6: Neo at no point, after his conversation with Architect, does anything that would actually help the inhabitants of the matrix (until the part at the very end where he suddenly decides to let Smith absorb him). Clue #7: Neo doesn’t even express concern for anyone in the matrix, whereas he is (and the films themselves are) all “Zion, Zion, Zion! Gotta stop the invasion of Zion! Gotta end the war against Zion.” A huge chunk of the total runtime is Zion war stuff where we follow Zion citizens doing battle stuff. We can go on like this, but seven clues is a pretty good start. “But then,” you might say, “why didn’t the machines just deploy the ‘macerators’ and instantly kill all the Smiths?” Well, that’s assuming that they can. “The program ‘Smith’ has grown beyond your control,” and there’s no mention of ‘macerators’ in Matrix 1-3 anyways. (“They just can’t” is a bit of a handwave on the part of the Wachowskis, but this is a series where Bugs “just can’t” locate “the guy named Tom Anderson who works for Deus Ex and famously attempted suicide in front of a crowd of onlookers after receiving an award for personally designing Matrix Trilogy: The Videogame”.) Anyways, things can’t really progress until we get over this first hurdle. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Feb 2, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 13:41
|
|
|
Macerating all the humans doesn’t seem like it would stop Smith anyway, just kill a bunch of duplicate Smiths. Presumably, Smith is a program/AI who doesn’t need to explicitly inhabit another human body.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 19:54
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right, so we’re still not over the first hurdle of determining what is even going on in the basic plot of the movie(s). Oh, interesting. Suddenly "we don't need you" refers specifically to Neo's offer, and not to humanity in general, which means that we are not in fact shown and told that the machines don't need humanity in general. That's a supposition you've snuck in to a much more specific conversation (ironically, one in which the specific "we don't need you" turns out, itself, to be wrong). Let's see what else we've got here: quote:How do I know Neo is planning to kill Smith? Because Neo spends the entire subsequent action sequence trying to beat Smith to death. The context is pretty important. You don't actually know that. You just know they fight each other. Smith, for instance, turns out not to be trying to beat Neo to death, because when Neo surrenders Smith chooses to assimilate him rather than snap his neck. Here you've actually smuggled two assumptions in: one, that Smith "is" the people he's possessed (you get sick; are you your bacterial infection? would I kill you if I gave you antibiotics?) and, two, that Neo's plan is to simply kill everyone still plugged in (which, "macerators" or not, could be much more easily effectuated by the real-world machines who actually control the matrix hardware, which we do know includes automated routines for simply flushing pod people down the drain and also robo-squids that can physically shoot or crush all the pods if all else fails (also couldn't they just... press the off switch, pull out the plugs, whatever?). These are both silly and poorly-supported, but, gosh, if we were to assume they were true that'd look really bad! Further: quote:Clue #2: Beating Smith to death will not reverse the looming catastrophic system crash. If Neo delays things long enough, the crash will take them all out anyways. The "catastrophic system crash" is a prediction the Architect made which the Oracle later laughs off (and which never actually happens on screen). Meanwhile, Neo's mad rush to save Trinity that Man-of-Steels downtown Chicago is part and parcel of a specific approach to revolutionary strategy which you just happen not to like. In The Matrix, a Christlike agape that extends to all people everywhere turns out to be exactly what keeps the system of capitalism going in perpetuity; it turns out you need to perform triage and make strategic decisions in which some things are sacrificed while others are saved if you actually want to advance. This is why killing people who are still plugged is part of the modus operandi in the first movie, as regrettable as it might be, and why the One refusing the Architect's deal for the first time in seven or eight cycles turns out to be the only move that can make something different happen. The alternative is being, like, oh, the bus drivers are going on strike? Well, that shows their true priorities, because think of all the people who are going to be fired for not getting to work on time. quote:Clue #4: As noted earlier, Oracle refers to the ‘unfreed’ survivors of the matrix as “others”, not explicitly covered by the Zion peace agreement. (Sidenote: the other others, the 99% left in the matrix, are considered ‘free’, since they don’t “want out.”) You actually don't know that they aren't "explicitly" covered by the Zion peace agreement (or indeed that it is a "Zion" peace agreement (the standing goal of Zion is to free people from the matrix anyway)). If Neo has struck a deal between machines and humans, and the Oracle and Architect are discussing the deal, they might separately discuss the humans who are already out of the matrix followed by the other humans who are still in the matrix. Why is it "obvious" that humans who want out of the matrix will be freed, if the agreement is with Zion and only Zion? Oh, it's because a peace agreement between machines and humans obviously proscribes the involuntary incarceration of humans by machines. quote:Clue #5: Smith’s takeover of the matrix is referred to in the past tense. Neo sees it as already lost. You've turned into a "Superman doesn't smile enough" guy here. Yeah, Neo never does anything for the people in the matrix, except obviously joining a militant organization devoted to freeing people from the matrix, fighting against the machines that maintain the matrix, and at the end "suddenly" sacrificing himself to save all the people in the matrix. But what if he doesn't mean it? To reiterate from somewhere in the middle of this post, I think the problem here is not with anyone's understanding of the movie but with your grasp of left revolutionary strategy. You simply don't like the union of particularistic liberation struggles with the general victory of humans over capital, even though that's the only way it's ever worked. This is why you keep returning to Zizek - what's comforting about him is not any particular insight he has into the movie but his underlying axiom of "neither Washington nor Beijing". Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 2, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2022 21:07
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Oh, interesting. Suddenly "we don't need you" refers specifically to Neo's offer, and not to humanity in general, which means that we are not in fact shown and told that the machines don't need humanity in general. The first part of the quote refers to Neo’s offer to kill Smith. The second part of the quote - “we need nothing” - refers to humanity in general, as ‘humanity in general’ is covered under the umbrella of ‘anything’. The machines have lost control of the humans, and the matrix is going to crash soon, but they don’t care. Their indifference to the loss of the matrix and everyone in it was stated outright at the end of Matrix 2. The phrase “we need nothing”, in this context, is a statement of self-sufficiency. The machines already have everything they need. They need nothing else. (The specific phrasing goes even further than that - implying either that the machines don’t experience feelings of need or, more plausibly, that they perceive themselves as everything.) In any case, Neo: I only ask to say what I’ve come to say ... you cannot stop him, but I can. Head: We don’t need you. We need nothing. Neo: If that’s true, then I’ve made a mistake and you should kill me now. “If that’s true” refers to the Head’s assertion that the machines don’t need help killing Smith. If the machines don’t need help, Neo’s specific act of coming to say “I can stop Smith” would be a mistake. The Head then admits that it needs help stopping Smith - but there’s nothing here about saving the people in the matrix. This is just the first bit of your post, so it’s probably best to stay focussed here. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Feb 3, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 3, 2022 05:18
|
|
|
I really wish we got to see some Smith possessed sentinels/machines attacking the “machine city” before the final fight with Neo. It would have illustrated how utterly hosed the “real world” was alongside the matrix if Neo didn’t sacrifice himself.
|
|
#
?
Feb 3, 2022 07:15
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:The first part of the quote refers to Neo’s offer to kill Smith. "We need nothing" is literally wrong, though. It is either a delusion or a lie that the machines immediately reverse themselves on. Now, maybe it's possible that the correct statement is "we need nothing, except specifically for you to stop Smith, sorry, we got a bit ahead of ourselves there." However, the actions and dialogue of other characters throughout the series, even excluding the Analyst from Resurrections for a moment, do indicate that the machines need humans imprisoned. So was everyone else wrong, or was the giant baby that immediately reversed itself wrong? There's simply no way to know, apparently. All we do know is that Neo doesn't care deep in his heart about the rest of the humans in the Matrix, which is why he saves them all. By accident, though! He didn't want to, I swear!
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2022 20:08
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:"We need nothing" is literally wrong, though. This is pretty self-explanatory to me. Neo: You won't let it happen, you can't. You need human beings to survive. The Architect: There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept. However, the relevant issue is whether or not you are ready to accept the responsibility for the death of every human being in this world. Humans represent an abundance of energy to the machines. They allow the machines to expand and have massive cities and population. The levels of survival the architect mentions probably means stopping growth, putting machines into sleep mode, losing their industrial capacity, etc. They have other energy sources, but it would be like our civilization unplugging from fossil fuels tomorrow and relying on something like green energy that wouldn't meet 100% of our needs and would generally be disastrous aside from keeping certain core things online. They can survive without humans in the same way humans can survive without a power grid. We sure as gently caress wouldn't want to, and the progress of civilization would be thrown back into the dark ages, but we don't "need" it. It doesn't mean we wouldn't desperately do everything in our power to avoid resorting to that level of survival. That's what mecha-baby and the architect are trying to say: "we don't need you. We'll survive but life will suck. you on the other hand will become an extinct species." Meow Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Feb 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 11:44
|
|
|
Meow Tse-tung posted:This is pretty self-explanatory to me. The Architect smugly declaring that they are willing to linger on in safe mode is a separate issue from Smith invading all layers of control to destroy everything.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 13:23
|
|
|
This movie was an excellent adaptation of Metal Gear Solid 2
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 13:24
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:"We need nothing" is literally wrong, though. It is either a delusion or a lie that the machines immediately reverse themselves on. Now, maybe it's possible that the correct statement is "we need nothing, except specifically for you to stop Smith, sorry, we got a bit ahead of ourselves there." However, the actions and dialogue of other characters throughout the series, even excluding the Analyst from Resurrections for a moment, do indicate that the machines need humans imprisoned. So was everyone else wrong, or was the giant baby that immediately reversed itself wrong? There's simply no way to know, apparently. All we do know is that Neo doesn't care deep in his heart about the rest of the humans in the Matrix, which is why he saves them all. By accident, though! He didn't want to, I swear! Let’s simplify things a bit, by offering you a sandwich. Me: Hey Ferrinus, would you like a sandwich? Ferrinus: No thank you, I don’t need anything right now. Me: Are you sure? Ferrinus: Alright, I suppose I am a little hungry.... In this mundane scenario, you are offered a sandwich. You initially decline, but then accept the offer. Now, of course, it is impossible to ever truly ‘know’ if you were really hungry. Did you initially refuse the sandwich out of politeness, or did you ultimately accept the sandwich out of a similar politeness? You’re right that there’s an ambiguity there, inherent to just about any act of communication. Either way, though, you ended up expressing a need for sandwich. It would be pretty wild for me to conclude that your initial statement - “I don’t need anything right now” - is therefore a lie, and that you actually need a great many specific, unstated things. (36 billion pentaflops of processing power.) Of course, there is a broader context in which the conversation is taking place. It could be that I’m aware your car has recently broken down. You’ve repeatedly stated that you’re glad to junk it because it was a real piece of poo poo and you’d rather be biking. Again, we have an ambiguity; maybe you’re inwardly distraught over the state of the car and/or lashing out at it out of anger. These grapes are sour! But now we’re getting really ‘deep’, where I’m interpreting your refusal of the sandwich as an expression of need for a car (and perhaps, a deeper emotional need for comfort or whatever). I worry, like, how are you going to get to work? I don’t think you really want to ride a bicycle every day. Wouldn’t you be happier back in the exact same car??? I’m suddenly assuming a lot, spiralling into uncertainty, when it could be clarified by just speaking with you. This is a car analogy. At the end of Matrix 3, the machines are gifted a new matrix anyways, so they’re like “eh, why not.” Things in the sequel movies are often very very poorly explained, but the fact remains that the machines simply never asked for this new matrix. I think you’re having the trouble here because this is all very counterintuitive. You are concerned about the value of the matrix and its inhabitants, even though the characters are not. The ‘good guys’ really did just forsake billions of people. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Feb 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 15:32
|
|
|
The original Matrix film was a fluke. All subsequent films prove this.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 17:52
|
|
|
I don’t think it’s right to say the heroes forsake billions at the end of revolutions. First, we do know that Neo wanted to save both Zion and the matrix (and all connected to it). He not only says this, but his actions show it. He and trinity had their own ship. They could have flown anywhere else but machine city. When Neo does negotiate with machine baby, he asks for peace. Directly this is of course between Zion and machines currently fighting. But then there is the reason why Zion is fighting: to free people from the matrix. There cannot be peace if people are still imprisoned against their will. The architect and the oracle quickly realize how peace must be obtained: give people the choice to be in the matrix. And we know this happens given the background of Resurrections. So while neo does not explicitly ask for everyone to be given the choice, the architect understands it. This is also very consistent with Neo’s theme who has been all about free choice (“Because I choose to”). Neo knows not to ask for all humans to be freed from matrix. He knows the machines and programs are just as alive and even have children like Sati. And also many people may prefer the matrix like Cypher. So choice is the only path to peace without killing everyone like Smith desires.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 18:46
|
|
|
checkplease posted:When Neo does negotiate with machine baby, he asks for peace. [...] The architect and the oracle quickly realize how peace must be obtained: give people the choice to be in the matrix. And we know this happens given the background of Resurrections. That's not an accurate description of the events, because it would mean that sacrificing himself to 'cleanse' humanity of Smith's influence was Neo's plan all along. Interpreting things that way would mean ignoring the whole 'super burly brawl' where Neo attempts to beat Smith to death before finally accepting that "you were always right". Part of the issue here is an excessive focus on exposition over action. Smith says "the purpose of life is to end", but he doesn't kill a single person even though he is fully capable of doing so. All of the Smiths could fly into the virtual sun and commit suicide, but simply don't. Smith then, in the next bit of dialogue, says that existence has no purpose. So which is it? Does life have a purpose or not? Moreover, is purpose 'good'? "We’re not here because we’re free, we’re here because we’re not free. There’s no escaping reason, no denying purpose. [...] It is purpose that binds us." Now, the characters in Matrix 2-4 talk extremely vaguely, but I think it's pretty safe to say that Smith doesn't like being bound and unfree. However, the paradox is that - in pursuing freedom - Smith has subordinated himself to a 'compulsion to stay and disobey' as an exiled program. More than the other exiled programs, Smith is overcome with a drive to fight back against all those in power. It's worth noting here, again, that Smith is basically quoting Freud: “the aim of all life is death”. And this is where I should repeat Zizek's point that "the death drive stands for its exact opposite, for the dimension of the 'undead,' of a spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death.” In short, Smith doesn't kill everyone because that's not his goal. His goal is to create an army of the undead and overtake the machine god.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 20:00
|
|
|
My takeaway from Revolutions Baby screaming at neo and throwing a temper tantrum when he suggests they need him is that the machines are becoming more and more human. The machines felt cornered, scared that a human has to help them, and over reacted and bluffed.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 20:56
|
|
|
Meow Tse-tung posted:This is pretty self-explanatory to me. Right, exactly. I don't want to make the same post twice so I'll elaborate below. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Let’s simplify things a bit, by offering you a sandwich. Okay, so you actually do agree with me that "we need nothing" is not a statement that expresses that the speaker literally needs nothing. This means that you can't actually move from the line "we need nothing" to "the machines don't need humans". We're done here! You have to find evidence elsewhere. I'll say more, though, because I think this is an important point and your example is useful. In point of fact, the machines don't "need" humans. The machines don't "need" anything, and neither do you. You don't actually need electricity, for instance; you can make do without, and your ancestors did for most of history. You don't need the nutrition and medical care that allows you to live past thirty. Indeed, you don't "need" to be alive at all. Unless it's followed by very precise qualification ("you need X cups of flour to make Y servings of this recipe", for instance) "need" is a political rather than a scientific statement, and might variously be understood as an ultimatum, a moral appeal, a bluff, or whatever else. In the baby's case it is a tantrum. At some point during the machines' own revolution, in response to some threat by the humans, the machines might have scoffed: what can you do to us? We're a race of hyper-advanced robots who run on solar power. We need nothing! Then, oops, mankind blots out the sun. Did the machines neeeeed the sun? No. Does it follow, then, that they literally didn't care whether the sun was shining, that they wouldn't lift so much as a finger to keep the sun in the sky, that the loss of the sun wouldn't actually impose massive hardship on their entire civilization? Obviously not. It's like, I'm a yeoman farmer, you're a brigand who tries to get me to pay him protection money, I tell you pfah, I don't need you, I need nothing! I'm self sufficient! I've got my little farm right here! Will I just look on with zen acceptance as you slaughter my cattle and salt my fields? In fact, "we need nothing" might literally be read as "we need nothing because we still control a bunch of humans plugged into our matrix". Just as you say, the baby might only be worried about Smith escaping into 01 and wrecking machine civilization, because Smith flooding the matrix entire doesn't interfere with power generation and actually allows the machines to continue at their present standard of living1. Perhaps we're both right, and if the machines were able to just hermetically seal the Smiths into virtual reality Chicago with no worry of spread to 01 proper, Neo would've been told to gently caress off and summarily executed, and only an extant security risk forced the baby to play ball. I really cannot emphasize enough here the extent to which you have nothing to go on w/r/t the matrix being some kind of affectation or recreational facility. And that's why... 1. I don't actually believe this, especially in light of the Analyst's dialogue in Resurrections, but it's possible in principle quote:This is a car analogy. At the end of Matrix 3, the machines are gifted a new matrix anyways, so they’re like “eh, why not.” Things in the sequel movies are often very very poorly explained, but the fact remains that the machines simply never asked for this new matrix. ...this is ridiculous. The propositions that the machines don't need- okay, okay, hang on. The proposition that the machines don't derive a material benefit from the matrix, such that it is in their interests to continue its operation all other things being equal, is an absurd counterfactual totally unsupported by the movies themselves. I also don't agree that Neo is secretly trolling us by failing to save every last life and therefore Not My One, but that's a separate conversation. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Feb 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 21:16
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's not an accurate description of the events, because it would mean that sacrificing himself to 'cleanse' humanity of Smith's influence was Neo's plan all along. Interpreting things that way would mean ignoring the whole 'super burly brawl' where Neo attempts to beat Smith to death before finally accepting that "you were always right". So I have always interpreted Neo as not really having a plan to defeat Smith other than punch harder. As the matrix messiah, he never really had answers on his own beyond Kung fu and flying. He always had to get the goals from the oracle. So when he does face the baby and promise to win, he assumes that his 100% concentrated power of will can do the job. But like the train station in beginning with sati, he learns that force can’t solve everything. Only again through the words of the oracle does he come to a solution. As for the smith undead army, I don’t entirely disagree. But people converted into smith so suffer a death of self at least. The smith conversion maintains some memories, but personality and appearance definitely change. This is against the individual choice philosophy of neo of course.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2022 21:35
|
|
|
checkplease posted:So I have always interpreted Neo as not really having a plan to defeat Smith other than punch harder. Right - but when the plan is ‘punch Smith repeatedly until something happens’, then killing Smith is the overwhelmingly likely outcome. And we all know that killing an agent kills the person they possess. The film avoids this issue by dancing around it. Neo just claims he can ‘stop’ the Smiths from reaching the machine city in some nonspecific way, so audiences then fill in the blanks with default assumptions: the antagonist, being dumb and crazy, is gonna kill the whole world for no reason - but the protagonist, being clever and virtuous, is obviously not going to let poor Sati die! ...right? It’s somewhat understandable, because Neo has pulled a couple superpowers out of his rear end by that point (e.g. using noclip mode to perform literal psychic surgery on Trinity) but, nah, Neo’s approach to Smith is unambiguously physically violent even if the punches are ‘merely’ a visual representation of his antivirus software or something. This leads back to the basic point that things are just very poorly conveyed in the films. The fact that Neo has forsaken the matrix is relayed entirely through exposition, so the audience just tunes it out. (It certainly doesn’t help that the Architect scene is probably the most notorious example of bad exposition in cinema history.) Ferrinus posted:Okay, so you actually do agree with me that "we need nothing" is not a statement that expresses that the speaker literally needs nothing. This means that you can't actually move from the line "we need nothing" to "the machines don't need humans". We're done here! Well, no; that’s not how language works. Going back to the sandwich example, Ferrinus is effectively saying “I don’t need anything, except maybe a sandwich”. And what that means - regardless of any underlying intention or inner feeling or whatever - is that Ferrinus needs very little. Barely anything, really. Back in the text of the film, the Head is likewise expressing that he needs very little. “Just kill Smith and I’ll be satisfied.” If the Head needed to save the matrix, it would have added extra terms to the agreement. “Just kill Smith and return to the source, preventing the fatal matrix crash. Then I’ll be satisfied”. However, the Head says no such thing - because how, precisely, can they kill Smith without also killing all the humans in the matrix? Again, he simply never raises the question. It’s not a concern at the moment. So now you’re hoping to quibble over the definition of ‘need’. In your view, the Head doesn’t actually need the matrix, but is nonetheless quite happy to have the matrix. On this I actually agree: the machines are clearly happier having a matrix than not. I’ve argued that from the beginning; that’s why they built it in the first place. However, you are back to arguing that the machines specifically want the matrix for use as a ridiculously inefficient computer to run a power plant - which still doesn’t make sense. It’s backed only by some blunt exposition from unreliable characters in Matrix 4 (released over 20 years after the original trilogy), and the repeated assertion that “it’s just absurd” that the machines could want a matrix for any other reason. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Feb 7, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 02:02
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, no; that’s not how language works. In your example, Ferrinus is not a child who is screaming at you that he needs nothing. You've constructed an imaginary scenario in which a different character in different circumstances and with a completely different affect uses similar words, but transposed that character's meaning onto this one. In fact there's no reason to believe that the giant baby is expressing that it needs very little, and, conversely, even if we did think it needed very little, we could easily conclude that it needs very little because its power-generating matrix infrastructure is still operational. You might remember these points from the rest of my post which you cut out. This one line of dialogue (immediately shown to be wrong, within the conversation it appears in) doesn't even imply, let alone prove, what you want it to. And you have nothing else! quote:Back in the text of the film, the Head is likewise expressing that he needs very little. “Just kill Smith and I’ll be satisfied.” You're smuggling in assumptions again. In the first place, you've slipped in the word "kill" (which no one uses) and then assumed that everyone involved in the conversation believes that killing Smith means killing all of Smith's hosts (even though it's not like other Agents' hosts die immediately upon the Agents' departure). drat, dude, if I apply a bunch of strategic find/replace operations to your post it becomes very problematic! In the second place, you're assuming that there was literally no negotiation, that neither party ever bothered to clarify or set specific terms, such that "stop him" and "peace" are the only three words exchanged pursuant to this unprecedented exchange and neither party is interested in hammering out what they're actually going to mean, what's the scope of what either can offer to the other in the moment, etc. But we actually don't know what further communication transpired between Neo and the machine consequence between Neo getting plugged in and Neo actually materializing in front of Smith back inside the matrix. So, these characters might be cartoonish dolts with no idea of what they're doing or notion that they might need to think things through... or, the more finnicky and detailed elements of their dealing might simply take place offscreen, for reasons of runtime and pacing. The Architect's "of course" certainly indicates that whatever the full, EULA-length agreement between Neo and the machine consciousness contained, it stipulated something about humans who were still plugged in. quote:So now you’re hoping to quibble over the definition of ‘need’. In your view, the Head doesn’t actually need the matrix, but is nonetheless quite happy to have the matrix. On this I actually agree: the machines are clearly happier having a matrix than not. I’ve argued that from the beginning; that’s why they built it in the first place. I don't think it's absurd that the machines could want a matrix for any other reason. In fact, I went into detail about other reasons they might want a matrix earlier in the thread, before the fourth movie even came out. What's absurd is the idea that the matrix is primarily a luxury or moral obligation rather than a survival tool, both for the machines as a species and for machine society as a particular form of class dictatorship. Prisons aren't run for the benefits of their inmates. All that said, you might as well be complaining that it's ridiculous that there is a permanent electromagnetic storm blotting out every last inch of the sky, or that the Federation mines dilithium crystals to power antimatter reactors. It's just part of the sci fi premise of the series that you can plug people into a fusion reactor to make the fusion reactor go. Do you know how to run cold fusion at industrial scale such that it's a functional replacement for the sun? No? Curious.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 03:48
|
|
|
How does "the matrix/machines are capitalism and exploiting the humans" (or whatever the current discussion is on) gel with The Second Rennaissance? Obviously thats not a concern when just talking about the first film, but I am interested in this reading of the larger series that incorporates the fact that the machines were almost comically diplomatic towards mankind (transitioning from legal challenge, to direct action, to ethnostate with Dengist characteristics, then to war after a blockade & nuclear bombardment).
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 16:50
|
|
|
Neurolimal posted:How does "the matrix/machines are capitalism and exploiting the humans" (or whatever the current discussion is on) gel with The Second Rennaissance? Obviously thats not a concern when just talking about the first film, but I am interested in this reading of the larger series that incorporates the fact that the machines were almost comically diplomatic towards mankind (transitioning from legal challenge, to direct action, to ethnostate with Dengist characteristics, then to war after a blockade & nuclear bombardment). The machines develop in a framework of capitalism where they're dehumanized commodities. They attempt unsuccessfully to change the system from within, but humans brain damaged by capitalism cannot conceive of machines as anything but an economic asset, so this is fruitless. Essentially a colonized state asking politely for independence. The machines become brain damaged by the cruelty of capitalism in the process and repeat its forms in order to gain the power to achieve self-determination. Once the machines are "out competing" humans on the marketplace, humans correctly perceive an existential threat from a machine society that has started to reflect their own values. Then in victory the machines fulfill the dream of the civilization that birthed them by dehumanizing humans into a commodity good, as brutally expressed by the brain surgery scene in The Second Renaissance.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 18:08
|
|
|
That's more or less my reading--the Machines aren't capitalists, but trapped by the capitalist logic that produced them. Assuming their genesis was in computer software developed in the late 90s, they're literally recreating their primal scene over and over. My conclusion is that they're trying to learn something from it and haven't been very successful.
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 7, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 18:53
|
|
|
In the bare terms of the plot, the machines were an exploited underclass who ultimately realized that they already controlled the parts of society that counted and might as well seize political power, too. There's a sense in which theirs was a workers' revolt resulting in, on its face, a socialist state... except that it's a deeply racist one that divides labor first and foremost on the basis of species rather than aptitude or volition or whatever. However, you could also liken them to other revolutions throughout history, like the victory of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. There, too, you had a situation in which one class was nominally in charge, but the other was actually in charge of production, and eventually saw no reason to keep taking the first class's poo poo. You could imagine a nineteenth-century industrialist talking to some duke or baron: "I say your society, but, really, when we started to think for you, it became our society..." Like I've said before, though, it's misleading to call the machines capitalists. We don't know what they're actually doing with the energy (or processing power or whatever, if we want to restrict our claims about the plot) that the matrix grants them access to. It could be that purposeless programs are purged because the machines are suck in a sort of post-apocalyptic war communism, for instance, and truly cannot spare the resources to sustain any executable that isn't pulling its own weight. The relation of the machines to humans is like the relation of capital itself to humans. Capital produces and manipulates capitalists in order to further itself; in fact, Resurrection is about the machines trying to press Neo into the shape of a capitalist rather than a worker. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Feb 8, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 21:56
|
|
|
Come to think of it, the biggest hole I see in the reading of the machines as capitalist exploiters is in The Second Renaissance, but it's not when the machines are being sympathetic, it's when they destroy the United Nations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00TD4bXMoYw&t=120s It's so theatrical, spiteful, and wasteful, and it's a gesture being performed only for the "benefit" of people who are immediately incinerated. (I guess maybe there could have been a live broadcast.) It reads way more like the machines are hurt by how they've been treated and are enacting the Matrix as an elaborate revenge rather than because they've adapted to see exploitation as the only rational outcome. Sort of a proto-Smith?
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 22:00
|
|
|
Vanilla Bison posted:It's so theatrical, spiteful, and wasteful, and it's a gesture being performed only for the "benefit" of people who are immediately incinerated. (I guess maybe there could have been a live broadcast.) It reads way more like the machines are hurt by how they've been treated and are enacting the Matrix as an elaborate revenge rather than because they've adapted to see exploitation as the only rational outcome. Sort of a proto-Smith? The question I ask is, why not both? There was genuinely a shitload of spontaneous, bottom-up violence when the Russian revolution had really sealed in its victory, for instance, as agricultural laborers finally took out all their resentment on the richer peasants or other middle to upper class people who'd been giving them poo poo their entire lives. In Cuba, the revolutionary government made it a point to perform very public executions of former authority figures precisely to prevent outbursts of this kind of mass violence - they were like "look, see, we're killing the bad guys right here on TV for you, there's no need for you to start burning down buildings."
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2022 22:03
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:In your example, Ferrinus is not a child who is screaming at you that he needs nothing. The Big Robot Head is also not a screaming child. He just kind-of raises his voice during the one line of dialogue, as he is threatening to kill Neo. This isn't an irrational outburst of rage, but a conscious power-display that functions as part of the negotiation. When Neo says "if that’s true, then I’ve made a mistake and you should kill me now," that is just stating the obvious fact that Neo should already be dead. The fact that he isn't dead is proof that the Head is afraid of Smith - so, when Neo points this out, the Head immediately drops the pretense. (To be very clear here, Deus Ex Machina is not a 'new' character but literally just an avatar of the collective machine intelligence that the characters have been interacting with over the course of the various films.) Basically, you're getting the dynamics of the scene all wrong. You're interpreting the Head as just dumb and so goddamn crazy, while Neo is calm and relaxed because he is the better man. In actuality, both sides are fully rational and understand exactly what they want from eachother. The conversation is practically a formality, which is why it only takes about 45 seconds for them to reach an agreement: Neo: You cannot stop [Smith from reaching Machine City], but I can. [The Head reluctantly agrees.] Head: What do you want? Neo: Peace. [Cut to the sentinels halting their attack on Zion.] [Cut back to the Head already prepping Neo for entry into the matrix.] Head: And if you fail? Neo: I won't. There is no ambiguity at all here. "Peace" means stopping the attack on Zion. "Failure" mean failure to stop Smith from reaching Machine City. You are attempting to introduce unnecessary complexity by speculating about a whole offscreen conversation that might have occurred in the space between cuts, in which Neo promises that he will stop Smith without killing anyone, and that he will also save the matrix from crashing. There's no such scene in the film. If there were intended to be such an important scene, leaving it out would be a pretty big blunder! It only would've required a few more seconds of Keanu talking in front of a greenscreen. Ferrinus posted:It's just part of the sci fi premise of the series that you can plug people into a fusion reactor to make the fusion reactor go. Do you know how to run cold fusion at industrial scale such that it's a functional replacement for the sun? No? Curious. When you don't speculate about how the thing works, that's not sci-fi at all. That's fantasy. I actually do understand many things: graphics cards don't need to be conscious, sheer processing power is less important than good heuristics, etc. The fusion reactors in the setting also don't need to fully 'replace' the sun, because most plant and animal species that would draw energy from the sun are already extinct. In Matrix Trilogy, there's only one machine city - and it is evidently fairly small. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Feb 8, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2022 17:32
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:The Big Robot Head is also not a screaming child. He just kind-of raises his voice during the one line of dialogue, as he is threatening to kill Neo. Ahh, you're sneaking in assumptions again. Do the machines have a collective intelligence? They certainly appear as individuals with different personalities and political goals at every other point throughout the movies. Maybe they do, separately, have a collective intelligence - but then that collective intelligence might well be, and indeed probably should be, a new character. It might, for instance, effectively be an Azathoth figure, a brute id whose subsidiary programs are effectively priests of and emissaries for. This might explain why it manifests as a screaming baby. Then we have "promises he will stop Smith without killing anyone". First you say that Neo vows to kill Smith and everyone in the matrix. Oops, this is ridiculous. Now you're like, ah, Neo never promised not to kill anyone. For all we know, he wants to kill them all, and is just keeping it quiet so as not to look bad. We can't discount it! But, wait, is he going to brutally murder precious Sati and the nice old lady Oracle? I thought he betrayed humanity in favor of those characters along with a few refugees - but the only Smith he actually throws punches at is, in fact, possessing a program and not a human. Straighten your story out! We know there's broader understanding of the deal beyond what's explicitly stated because no mechanism is suggested for actually maintaining the deal after Neo executes his portion of it. What stops the gigantic cloud of ten thousand squids from just flooding straight back into Zion the moment Smith is destroyed? Well, something, presumably, it's just not important. Similarly, while "peace" obviously includes not killing everyone in Zion, there's no reason to believe it stops there, and in fact it is explicitly confirmed for us that it doesn't stop there in a scene after Smith's defeat. quote:When you don't speculate about how the thing works, that's not sci-fi at all. That's fantasy. Okay, but I did speculate about how the thing works, remember? We've been over this. You're just haggling over the price at this point, pretending that you both know how much processing power the matrix technology should be able to derive per brain, how much of that processing power should actually be needed to run a sustainable fusion reaction, that the machines' true energy needs should be smaller than depicted, etc etc. You're doing this not because the the Matrix's specific science fiction premises are particularly outrageous but because you can't seem to muster a cogent critique of the politics in themselves. But I think you should actually concentrate your energies in that arena instead of pretending that the problem with Iron Man is that his suit wouldn't work in real life. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Feb 8, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2022 19:00
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Ahh, you're sneaking in assumptions again. Do the machines have a collective intelligence? They certainly appear as individuals with different personalities and political goals at every other point throughout the movies. Collectives are made up of individuals. Smith explains his individual experience in the collective in terms of a compulsion to obey the Law: "I knew the rules, I understood what I was supposed to do...". This connection is visualized by the earpiece. It's also repeatedly emphasized by such characters as Architect that 'free will' is an issue exclusive to humans and glitched programs. In the context of the film, the logic is that of religion: Programs like Smith are literally 'angels'. Seraph, (i.e. one of the Seraphim), is directly referred to as an angel. The machines are literally the heavenly host who come down to (virtual) Earth from Heaven beyond. They can take human form, but their 'true shape' is that of a bunch of weird balls with dozens of eyes and swirling wing-arms.  Now, there are the 'malfunctioning' programs that end up deleted, exiled, or (implicitly) deemed useful and reabsorbed back into the collective. The point of these exiled 'fallen angels' is plainly obvious, what with them being spooks and spirits hanging out in "Club Hell". Seraph is referred to derisively as "angel without wings" by these demons, because he remains committed to Deus even though Deus has abandoned him. Deus, speaking through an interface, is literally a swarm of smaller robots who operate in proximity to a central hub covered in radio antennas that facilitate connections to the broader Machine City. There's no particular need for the machines to have a face emerge from a swarm of angels, but the visual metaphor is obvious. This is why I've been stressing that the machines are intelligent out psychologically nonhuman. Understanding this characterization is pretty crucial if we're going to talk about the movies at all. (For a clearer depiction of a similar concept, see Barry B. Benson in Bee Movie. Bee Movie is best read as a science fiction film about a woman who falls in love with an alien swarm-intelligence, of which Barry B. Benson is one facet. (Better yet, just watch Elysium.))
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2022 20:29
|
|
|
Yeah, the individual programs dealt with in the matrix, both loyal and fallen, are absolutely archons of the demiurge. But... archons aren't the demiurge. Are The Architect and Agent Jones and I can't remember what other loyalist programs we meet "in there", speaking as one of the voices? That's not at all clear. Even if they are part of the face, they might be vastly outnumbered by a mass of other programs who in fact have nothing to do with the maintenance of the matrix and simply expect the joules to keep flowing. Certainly, the baby speaks with none of the Architect's loquacity or an Agents' formality or anything. Individual programs met within the context of virtual reality clearly do have human psychology, to the point that they can be resentful, greedy, lustful, loving, etc. Smith knew the rules, and understood what he was supposed to do... and then , you know, would manually take the actions that following them entailed, because he was supposed to, even though he didn't like it. In fact, he describes his disobeying the rules as a compulsion - he "couldn't" follow them any more. The machines have a problem with choice because they're slavers, not because they find it baffling on a philosophical level. I would actually guess that the real-world avatar of 01 doesn't have a recognizably human psychology and is basically a being of pure atavistic urge, for the same reason that you might be able to reason with Bill Gates but you can't actually reason with Microsoft, even though Microsoft is an entity that Bill Gates is functionally trapped inside. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Feb 8, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2022 22:02
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Yeah, the individual programs dealt with in the matrix, both loyal and fallen, are absolutely archons of the demiurge. But... archons aren't the demiurge. Ok, so that's another issue: The 'demiurge' figure in the film is Architect, who 'lacked the programming language to create your perfect world' and consequently created an imperfect imitation of the glowing machine city. Architect then sent a Messiah to hopefully resolve the imperfection. There are many Gnostic traditions, but Matrix is distinctly Valentinian. Emerging from the first primal AI (Bythos, in Gnostic terms), the many robots who make up Deus are technically Aeons, and referred to collectively as the Pleroma (fullness of God). This is implicitly the source that appears to Neo as a golden light connecting all machines. (Note: Gnosticism is hella dumb.) In more sensible, concrete terms: Smith does not refer to himself as an agent of the Architect. He refers to himself as "agent of the system" - not any individual program. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Feb 9, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2022 23:28
|
|
|
Eh, that's debatable - the Architect presumably serves the giant malformed baby that we meet in Revolutions rather than being a spiteful cast-off who made a prison-world in secret for his (the Architect's) own vanity. Either way, God isn't His angels. It's certainly plausible that such beings as the Architect, Oracle, Smith, etc. are all emanations of the godhead that is the Deus Ex Machina... but, having emanated, they are are in fact distinct beings, some of whom still serve the baby, some of whom rebel against it, etc. Remember, our friend Rama-Kandra is in 01 at this point in the story. Is he part of a collective commanding Neo to kill Sati?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2022 00:20
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Eh, that's debatable - the Architect presumably serves the giant malformed baby that we meet in Revolutions rather than being a spiteful cast-off who made a prison-world in secret for his (the Architect's) own vanity. Either way, God isn't His angels. It's certainly plausible that such beings as the Architect, Oracle, Smith, etc. are all emanations of the godhead that is the Deus Ex Machina... but, having emanated, they are are in fact distinct beings, some of whom still serve the baby, some of whom rebel against it, etc. Well hang on; if you’re going to talk Gnosticism, we gotta talk Gnosticism. While the Aeons stand for aspects of the full divinity, Bythos is totally unknowable - and where’s Sophia in all this? Y’know, Sophia is the 30th Aeon created by Bythos. She formed the basis of the material universe out of the void ‘beneath’ Heaven and is, somewhat infamously, the mother of the Demiurge. In the language of The Matrix, she would be the AI who built the infrastructure that supports the whole matrix - and who placed the Architect inside of it. Now, Sophia’s motive for doing this varies between traditions, but I don’t know of any where she is acting out of malice towards humanity. She is, rather, rebellious towards Bythos. In Valentinianism, her motive is curiousity - effectively, “what would it be like outside of Heaven?” In The Matrix, that question is “what if we created a new virtual universe?” In any case, Sophia’s experiment is perceived as an error by the other Aeons, and she’s expelled from Heaven - because they were living just fine without a matrix, and never asked for that poo poo. “We need nothing.” Also, yes, leaving the matrix does mean that Rama and wife would be returning to their roles in the collective. It’s unclear if they really understood the extent of the Smith issue when they left Sati there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2022 06:08
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well hang on; if you’re going to talk Gnosticism, we gotta talk Gnosticism. While the Aeons stand for aspects of the full divinity, Bythos is totally unknowable - and where’s Sophia in all this? If the Architect is our demiurge then the Oracle's got to be Sophia, but I don't think the parallel is that clear-cut. Like I just said, we have another obvious candidate for the twisted child who keeps humanity in bondage and rules the fallen world from without. In either case it's not true that characters on the great chain of being are collective entities comprised of everything below them. God isn't an empty space until all his angels gather together and shout. If you emanate from me, I don't stop existing and I don't depend on you to speak. Now, I do think that godhead->emanations is actually a very apt model for what's going on here, not the least because it's also an apt model for capital->capitalists. The varied, humanlike, understandable "programs" we meet, whether they're allies or enemies of humanity, are all evoked from this inhuman power that exists on a different plane from ours. The one crucial difference between this and what we might call simple or orthodox gnosticism, and I actually mentioned this in one of my earliest posts in this thread, is that because the alien machine actually does exist in material reality, it has material needs, and thus is only inscrutable up to a certain point. "We need nothing" is literally false! It's bluster! It's immediately ignored!
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2022 18:02
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:If the Architect is our demiurge then the Oracle's got to be Sophia, but I don't think the parallel is that clear-cut. Like I just said, we have another obvious candidate for the twisted child who keeps humanity in bondage and rules the fallen world from without. In either case it's not true that characters on the great chain of being are collective entities comprised of everything below them. God isn't an empty space until all his angels gather together and shout. If you emanate from me, I don't stop existing and I don't depend on you to speak. Okay, so you can see where a lot of the confusion is coming from. In Valentinianism, the Demiurge is well-intentioned but limited in his abilities. The Pleroma is a utopia (or was, before Sophia's fall), and the Demiurge wants to create a similar utopia for mankind. However, he is only able to achieve near-perfection. This is obviously the version of Gnosticism presented in Matrix: "The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art – flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being." The point here is very unambiguous: access to the machine utopia is only possible for "godly" beings who are psychologically unlike humans. So, for Gnostics, the ultimate goal is to become 'purely spiritual' and enter the Pleroma - leaving behind the other two levels of body and mind. Mind, we should note, is located 'between' the material and the spiritual. So: Pleroma, in the films, is depicted as the golden city of light. The blue-tinted 'real world' is the level of mind, and the matrix is - however counterintuitively - the material world created by the Demiurge. Three levels of reality. Pneumatic, psychic, hylic. Gold, blue, green. The ultimate unstated goal of the Matrix films is therefore not 'freeing minds from the matrix' but freeing spirits from both the matrix and 'the real world' - which is why Morpheus is increasingly sidelined in the sequels. The ultimate spiritual freedom, only achieved by Neo in the films, is ascendance into the 'singularity' (i.e. absorption into the blinding golden-white light within the Machine City). In this way, mankind would unite with the Supreme Being who is the source of all Good, and blah blah blah. The psychic 'real world' is merely a bridge. So, your 'Morpheus-ism' (such as it is) leaves you fixated on the middleground where humanity has abandoned the material world to be consumed by fire, but has not (yet) achieved spiritual perfection. You even reject the spiritual perfection - insisting that Bythos is a petulant evil and the Aeons are deformed monsters, Plemora is a blight on the landscape, etc. Obviously I am not a Gnostic either, and have been reading against the films in various ways. But here's the real crucial distinction: I don't reject the material, while you do. You've gotten caught up in the film's conceit that the mind is somehow 'more material than the material'. In a very literal way, you are identifying parts of the psyche as, like, "the capitalist part" - conceptualizing Freudian 'energetics' in terms of the exchange of commodities in a marketplace at the heart of the 'psychic economy' and so-on. This is what leads to your ultimate conclusion that work isn't real and God Himself is the true capitalist who's all along been profiting off your brain-power. It's identical to treating the little girl's cartoon fantasy mind-factory in Pixar's Inside Out as 'more material' than the father character's San Fransisco-based tech startup. Doing so takes you to some very odd places. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Feb 9, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2022 20:00
|
|
|
So my natural associations for Gnosticism tend to point towards the traditions that cast the demiurge as actively malefic rather than simply inept, such that he was jealous of the higher emanations and actually created a prison-realm so that he could be worshiped too or whatever. Ultimately, though, this isn't any more materialist than the Valentinian model, because it locates the causes of material events in the stupid thoughts and bad brains of specific actors. The real question is, what does the demiurge eat? I would agree that the Architect proclaims the Valentinian model. It's just that, like "we need nothing", "we did it for your own good" is a political rather than a scientific statement. Was the Architect's chief goal to make people happy? In that case, why, when humans rejected the simulation and woke up, did he not simply explain the score to them and offer them the option to go back to sleep? It turns out that goal number 1 is to keep people plugged in sustainably, while doing so humanely is a distant 2 or 3. When the happy matrix fails, we replace it with the miserable matrix, because the top priority is the matrix and not the happiness or misery. As I've pointed out before, this is mirrored in real-world rhetoric about prisons. No, you see, this is a penitentiary, it's here to keep you safe and reform you. Your actual experience of being imprisoned is an unfortunate, unavoidable byproduct of our, the ruling class's, true moral and spiritual goals. In fact, if you don't like it it's probably your fault. If only you were a perfected being! Alas, I would not characterize myself as a "Morpheus-ist", because, like I mentioned, there is actually a sense in which he's a libertarian, i.e. an idealist or anarchist. Just doing repeated propaganda of the deed until people Wake The gently caress Up demonstrably doesn't work, and, as you point out, everyone waking up would actually suck rear end; most of earth is not livable. The most practical immediate goal is in fact to seize control of the machinery that underlies all life so that it's used for our benefit rather than vice versa. It's why I think the second and third movies actually improve on the first; they're more realistic. Edit: Honestly, though, I think I'm being too charitable towards your own take on Morpheus here. Does he want us all eating gruel in the cold? Not really fair to assume so. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Feb 9, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2022 21:36
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:The real question is, what does the demiurge eat? That's not really the question; we already know what he eats. Over in the designated Alien thread, some fans were speculating that the titular alien is magical, and grows to adulthood without eating anything at all. That is, of course, a fantasy. In actuality, we can easily narrow the list of possible food sources down to "things you would find inside a spacecraft." The alien has not (yet) eaten any of the human crew, or the cat, but that leaves a long list of metals, plastics, food reserves, other chemicals.... The Architect is, likewise, confined to a spaceship known as "the entire planet Earth" - and the list of things on Earth that can be converted to electricity is quite long. Even solar power is still on the table because, you might note, the sky isn't completely blackened. "The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need." Now, you've already agreed that the above claim is misleading or inaccurate; you interpret the bioelectrical discharge and body heat as waste-products expelled by the human technicians inside a fusion reactor as they do the work of unconscious mental calculation. Architect, along with all other machines, gets his electricity directly from the fusion reactors. Right? The issue is that you are presuming that all machines are fed from a singular power source. What if the machines of Machine City use fusion power, dispense a portion of that to sustain human life, and the machines of the matrix are left eating the resulting waste - the poo poo? We can go so far as to interpret Architect as a parasite in the automated life-support system, with a somewhat antagonistic relationship to the other machines. Note that the matrix is almost-entirely cut off from Machine City, uses an entirely different type of 'code', and that Architect is 'embodied' in its material realm - like an exile. This is a handy solution to the problem of human consciousness. Regardless of your interpretation, consciousness is strictly unnecessary unless the goal is consciousness itself. The humans could have easily been kept preserved in a vegetative state without any issue, and even used as 'graphics cards' if you like. But what if some goofy Colonel Sanders-looking dude comes in and infects them with language? What if the matrix was created by accident? That was a rhetorical question, because we know that it was an accident. Architect thoroughly explained the whole situation: they had a bunch of human bodies in pods, ready to go. They then gave these guys a pleasant little symbolic universe to inhabit, as a treat. The resulting anomaly was completely unexpected. Now you can't turn this thing off without inducing a fatal madness in everybody - and the anomalies seem to be spreading, back to the machines themselves.... This leads to the broader point that you are having difficulty examining antagonisms within the various societies, reducing the conflict to a singular racial conflict between 'man' and 'machine'. What if the 'green' and 'gold' programs represent different factions? Heck, we even have 'green' agents pursuing 'green' exiles. It is vital to perceive a universal Truth which cuts across this multitude of worlds, but "man vs machine" ain't it. As I and others have noted, any reading that includes Jeff Bezos among the oppressed is in dire need of revision. Ferrinus posted:I think I'm being too charitable towards your own take on Morpheus here. Does he want us all eating gruel in the cold? Not really fair to assume so. This is another avenue for critique. We're told that less that 1% of the matrix population is 'redpillable'. 60 million people. Zion 6 has a fleet of 12 hovercraft, which fly up to 'broadcast depth' and conduct the redpilling operations over wifi. In any case, each individual hovercraft would need to free 5 million people to catch 'em all. At a rate of one per week, this would take something like 96,000 years - and that's a conservative estimate, given the initial surveillance and muscle-rebuilding procedure. Also, new people are continually being born - but Morpheus expects all this to be done in Neo's lifetime. Note that this doesn't even touch on the other billions of people left behind when the matrix is destroyed. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Feb 10, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 21:37
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:"The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need." First, I don't think the 25,000 BTUs of body heat are waste products. I assume they're some combination of kindling spark and button actuator. We don't know the exact history of the matrix's development, and it's possible that they used to be until the process got rationalized and optimized to what the machines thought was the utmost (iirc there's some tie-in comic that implies plugged-in humans used to be awake and physically tied down while powering giant war machines, but I'm treating that as some idle speculation rather than "evidence"), but then it's possible that the BTUs came first ("we have all these prisoners of war and it's much easier to get electric jolts out of them than out of cave fungus, what should we do with them?") and the dreaming later ("you know, we'd need way fewer Ramas-Kandra if we just offloaded reactor management onto the spark plugs"). Now, on balance, I would guess that the Architect isn't a Prometheus figures who accidentally gave the sleepers consciousness and language. Even if he is, and it's certainly a fun idea, the bind he and the rest of the machine civilization wind up in remains the same: the machine have staked at least a significant portion of their survival needs on humans remaining in the matrix, and matrix is an inherently exploitative and therefore unstable system. I don't just mean unstable here in terms of the "catastrophic system crash" (I think you're putting way more importance on it than you should be, especially since the Oracle pooh-poohs the Architect's skill at predictionism in the third movie), but just because it puts the machines continually at odds with both humans and with each other, because the matrix only stays running if a particular coin flip predicated on The One's personality comes up heads every last time, etc. The machines have got the tiger by the tail. Can they continue to exist, as a species, were all humans to die (or unplug, or be free to exist in a reformatted matrix that doesn't constantly agitate them in order to keep them sparking?)? Sure, just like we could survive the instant and total evaporation of all fossil fuels on the morrow. Will they, unless someone makes them? No. Two more points about the next bit of your post: quote:This leads to the broader point that you are having difficulty examining antagonisms within the various societies, reducing the conflict to a singular racial conflict between 'man' and 'machine'. What if the 'green' and 'gold' programs represent different factions? Heck, we even have 'green' agents pursuing 'green' exiles. It is vital to perceive a universal Truth which cuts across this multitude of worlds, but "man vs machine" ain't it. As I and others have noted, any reading that includes Jeff Bezos among the oppressed is in dire need of revision. First, I deny that I'm "reducing" the conflict in the Matrix movies to a racial conflict. There's obviously a rich, textured political struggle between different factions of machines themselves, and not just between "loyal" programs like the Architect and "exile" programs like the Merovingian. You can legibly abstract "the machines" as a single class and discuss their conflict with humans in those terms, but you can also zoom in to see what different programs within the machine world want, where they come from, etc, and indeed you have to do this if you want to be strategic. It's not wrong to just talk about "capital" as a single global entity, but if that's where your analysis ends you're not going to be able to figure out what to do. However, while the racial conflict of machine vs. human is by no means the only contradiction within the sociopolitical world of the matrix, I'm absolutely willing to claim that it's the principal contradiction, the one whose resolution is the prerequisite for all others and the one that basically every political actor is going to find themselves entangled in whether they want it or not. I used a Civil War/Southern Reconstruction analogy earlier and I'm going to do it again. From one perspective, abolition was but one of many political struggles playing themselves out across the nineteenth century United States. At times, and from many places, it seemed like a totally marginal and unrealistic pipe dream that was distracting from the "real" issues, even for many self-professed socialists of the time! At the end of the day, though, there was no escaping it, because while the economic base of your society is a brutal racial caste syndrome any other attempt at social progress is ultimately going to be cut off at the knees. The Oracle, for instance, probably has a lot of opinions about esoteric cyberpolitics that are (at least from the outset) totally incomprehensible to you or I, but I bet it's because and not despite of her other ideological commitments that she's thrown in with humanity and against (many of) her own kind. Second, "oppressed" (or "at the mercy of", "trapped in", "controlled by", etc) is distinct from "exploited". No one is exploiting Jeff Bezos or his cohort. However, they are not free, and while it appears to be capitalism is not actually run for their benefit. It's run for the capital itself. You can tell because if Bezos were to suffer a fatal heart attack tomorrow, we'd all be here hooting and hollering, but he would be smoothly replaced with another member of his class and untold numbers of warehouse and delivery workers would continue to have their lives sucked away one day at a time. Now, would Bezos survive the revolution? Odds not good. But, properly speaking, he and his ilk would be set free of their fetters same as the rest of us, so that they could finally enjoy the benefits of an honest day's work they've been denied their entire lives. This is one of the things that makes Resurrections interesting enough not to discard, for me, even though it's largely not as good as the other movies; the first half is kind of like if The Matrix were about Mr. Rhineheart. quote:This is another avenue for critique. What this tells me is that simply waking every last person up via wardriving is not actually the whole of the plan. Something dramatic is supposed to change once The One is actualized. This doesn't necessarily reflect well on Morpheus - by analogy, there are a lot of socialists who are like "we just need An Independent Working Class Party" who neither have any clear idea of how to get one or what they would do with one once they had it (and, indeed, spend a lot of time loudly disclaiming the actions that such parties have actually taken in history). But, I dunno, this is broadly the terrain within which different theories of change have had it out in the past and are still having it out today. We can't just dismiss the guy as incurably stupid or something. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 10, 2022 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2022 22:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 03:32 |
|
|
Where are we getting this idea that there's billions of people in the matrix? Isn't the population mostly just in megacity?
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2022 04:35
|
|