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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, in that way, we both know the socioeconomics of Victorian-Era Britain: ppl worked in factories or something? It seems insightful rather than stupid that the functions and purpose of work are obscured from the perspective of the laborers to the point of incomprehensibility. Any individual role in the Matrix is equivalent to someone on an assembly line soldering a resistor onto a circuit. They don't know how their tools are made or the chemistry by which they operate, they don't know why the resistor goes in that spot or what the circuit does, but their awareness does not change that someone is extracting value/power from their completion of the task. The Matrix posits a sophisticated sci-fi endgame of exploitation such that by merely existing, some kind of value is extracted from you. Which seems fairly prescient for the current state of the Internet in particular, where information about where my eyeballs travel is harvested, packaged and sold for the benefit of obscure machine intelligences. Looking at those websites did not feel like labor to me, the Matrix was invisible, but I was harvested nevertheless.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:15
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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.
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Feb 7, 2022 18:08
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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?
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Feb 7, 2022 22:00
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