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I haven't rewatched the Matrix recently but I don't think Morpheus including taxes and carpenters in his summation of what's dangerous about the matrix actually positions him as a libertarian conspiracy theorist. It is in fact true IRL that even a teacher or carpenter can become a revolutionary's deadly enemy in the blink of an eye; it's just that instead of morphing into an agent at the first sight of seditious activity, either might pick up a phone and dial 911 despite being workers who the summoned police are tasked with repressing. If the matrix is the hegemonic symbolic order, that means patriarchy is inscribed in it as one of the forces constitutive of modern capitalism, and forcing you to live out your life as whoever you've been arbitrarily assigned to be rather than as whoever you feel most comfortable being is an important part of maintaining that hegemony. Then the sequels gesture at the way the modern status quo has evolved to encourage, capture, and ultimately ground out acts of rebellion.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 21:39
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It's not really crazy to acknowledge that an oppressive system both unavoidably manufactures and systematically attempts to coopt revolutionary movements. The machines didn't actually choose to have a The One (or at most they chose to have a The One rather a The Many or whatever); if it were up to them, a single matrix would just remain in a steady state forever without having periodic insurrections and reboots. And, remember, The One is ultimately a hope-based strategy; it's designed around the premise that, when offered two options, any One will pick the option the machines prefer, which happened in the past but does not happen in the movies we see. Put another way, the fact that modern-day corporations post Black Lives Matter on social media and put famous trans people on magazine covers does not actually mean that capitalism has resolved the threat posed to it by black liberation, abolition of gender norms, etc; it just means it's recognized that threat and is sweating.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:28
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The Smith of the sequels isn't really a freak occurrence, right? His superpower is actually the one all agents already have: overwriting himself on top of people in order to enforce the status quo. He's just realized he doesn't have to release his grip on them after the fact. He's not exactly doing something new so much as doing something that was there all along too much, taking the agents' modus operandi to its logical extreme. Among other things, Smith is a manifestation of the fact that a system like the matrix (and, by extension, the "end of history" liberal consensus of the 90s)(edit: I wrote this before I saw Megaman's Jockstrap's post immediately above mine and I'm glad we're on the same wavelength) is fundamentally unstable and cannot last. On one hand, it's dominated by the infinitely hungry and relentlessly homogenizing force of capital that will not and cannot rest until it's subsumed all human activity into itself. On the other hand, it gives rise to constant uprisings, rebellions, liberation struggles, etc. because it can't truly satisfy people and people won't accept it. No matter how hard the technocrats try, these contraposed forces can't simply be stably balanced against each other forever. The contradiction will resolve itself one way or the other.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:49
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I assume Morpheus was in fact prepared to destroy the matrix at immense human cost, because that fits with his characterization as both an apocalyptic cult leader but also a die-hard radical insurrectionist. What, you think you're gonna get free by asking nicely? A revolution isn't a tea party.
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Sep 27, 2021 20:55
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The fact that Smith doesn't try to explain why it's good that he's doing what he's doing, but simply does it because it's his nature and he's no longer bound by any rules, is actually better characterization than if he had some philosophical objection to free will or commitment to solipsism or something. It's like how the xenomorph never stops and turns to the camera to explain that it's hungry or something. To express this differently: the idea that "totalitarianism" happens because certain people hold certain ideas is actually an ideological claim. The Matrix sequels aren't mistakenly failing to articulate that claim, they are depicting a different view of politics and society.
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Sep 27, 2021 21:00
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Sodomy Hussein posted:If he wanted to do that, it wouldn't be that hard. They can already get physical access to the "crops" and have EMP weapons. They could probably wreck most or all of the Matrix in a day if the idea was to slash and burn all the people who Morpheus deemed beyond salvation by the means he is giving Neo, an incredibly mentally and physically stressful boot camp. Morpheus is looking for a messiah to usher in a new age and give everyone the choice, not to destroy the Matrix. Oh yeah I don't think he wants to destroy the matrix by destroying humanity or something. I think he wants to "destroy" the matrix in the same way that functionally speaking many revolutionary movements aim to destroy the societies they're rebelling against, which is to say through radical, violent conflict that will regrettably but inevitably come with casualties. I don't think the mythology of The One is that The One can simply force the machines to peacefully surrender through a silent act of will, but rather be the tip of the spear whose main length is an awakened and radicalized humanity.
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Sep 27, 2021 21:06
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As George Jackson points out, making revolution is against the law. If a group attempting to bring down the prevailing order isn't willing to shoot down cops and soldiers on principle (rather than, like, assessing that they are currently too weak to do so and need to use other power-building strategies for the moment) then they aren't taking their job seriously.
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Sep 28, 2021 02:36
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jivjov posted:At least insofar as The Matrix is concerned though, the cops and military inside the matrix aren't actually the prevailing order. Hell, we even see in the very opening of first film that the cops don't even get along with the agents at all. They're being used as part of the control just as much as anyone else still plugged in to the simulation is. Well, first off, agents are people, too. Like, they are sapient beings with names and faces and feelings and so on, and they're the actual cops of the matrix itself. So if you're not willing to kill those guys on the basis of their interiority you can just go home right now. Second off, the apparent cops of the matrix, our boys in blue, clearly obey and report to the agents even when they aren't being directly possessed by them. They're going to fight to defend the same thing the agents fight to defend, namely the oppressive social order of the matrix. So if you're not willing to kill them even when they're not possessed, that means you're willing to let them defend the matrix. Now, they're just plain weaker and less dangerous than agents, so you can afford to karate kick cops rather than shoot them sometimes, but if you're not willing to shoot them ever then it means you value something above freeing people from the matrix. Third off, Morpheus is correct to point out that anyone still plugged in, even if they're not an armed agent of the virtual (whether the really-existing machine state or the simulated human state the machines oversee), can and will summon armed agents of the state against you if they see you acting out. People can become agents (or just call the cops) at the drop of a hat. Revolution is violent; people will die, both yours and theirs, unavoidably. Obviously, no one wants to just kill civilians or "civilians" (non-agents who may still be cops, soldiers, etc) randomly or pointlessly, but if you've made a commitment to actual violent rather than passive resistance to the matrix then you understand you're fighting for something bigger than any one life and are sometimes going to have to endanger or even kill perfectly normal people. Fourth off, even if we don't know we're in the matrix, we do know we're in the hegemonic capitalism of the 90s, which brutally enforces racism, homophobia, poverty, etc. There are beggars and sick people in the matrix. There are random police shootings in the matrix. The police are the last (domestic) line of defense for this grotesquely unequal and intrinsically violent system of inequality. So if you're a revolutionary concerned with freedom and justice in general—even one who doesn't realize they're trapped in a computer simulation—then you should understand that cops are your enemy and treat them accordingly. Fifth off, even if you don't know you're in the matrix but do know you're fighting for a revolutionary change in social relations, you know that's going to have casualties both in the direct fight to establish it and in the followup struggles to defend and work out the kinks in whatever the new order ends up being. Will there be illnesses, injuries, food shortages, and other calamities in whatever experimental, made-up-as-we-go society is going to postdate '90s capitalism? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't do it? Maybe, but that's kind of a weird stance to take because it means you're okay with all the violence and suffering that '90s capitalism will cause if it's just allowed to roll on indefinitely. Basically, I don't think you can fault Morpheus and the rest of his resistance for not being consistent.
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Sep 28, 2021 03:11
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Hey, hang on - it doesn't include every single leftist on earth. For instance, it doesn't include Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, etc. "Leftist" doesn't actually mean revolutionary, and moreover it doesn't mean effectively revolutionary; it might mean using pretty slogans to gild State Department propaganda. Morpheus's resistance is, effectively speaking, a vanguard party; they want to lead humanity in taking the fight to the enemy, but as Jodi Dean writes anybody but not everybody can be a comrade. "People who are so inured and hopelessly dependent on the system that they'll fight to protect it" probably includes members of actual authority groups that the agents have formal contact with and control over, like the security agents who arrest Neo at his job and bring him in for an interrogation. It probably doesn't include the random homeless guy who Neo threw in the path of a train. But... in any revolutionary struggle, plenty of random homeless guys or sick people or whatever are actually going to buy the farm in precisely as unfair and senseless a way as he did. Does someone in a hospital on life support want you to have the decisive battle against the state that ends up destroying a local power plant? No. Hell, does someone who'll be fired if he's late to work one more time want his bus driver to go on a transit strike? Absolutely not. But these are the eggs you break if you want to make an omelet. I'm not sure that the robots can upload superpowers into anyone they want, unless it's by copying an agent over someone. Cypher, meanwhile, is just the Blaise Compaoré to Morpheus's Sankara. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 04:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I'm selecting my words pretty carefully, so I'm not even getting to revolution yet. I mean, more plainly: is Morpheus anticapitalist? (That's a rhetorical question because the answer's "no".) Lenin is a good example here precisely because socialism was outright illegal in Tsarist Russia and for a long while the would-be revolutionaries had to remain a secret, clandestine organization in order to prevent themselves from simply being snatched up and killed by the secret police. Open agitation of a massive revolutionary movement has to happen at some point, but just waving the red flag out on the street is absolutely not how you start when you're operating in the context of an almost totally unorganized and depoliticized working class watched over by a nearly omnipresent secret police. In that case, you actually do have to treat everyone as a potential threat by default, watch carefully for individuals who might be able to be radicalized, tease them out slowly, and build up your vanguard party of professional revolutionaries (note: Lenin wrote that the primary job of a revolutionary is that of combating the political police) step by step... risking all the while that you might bring the wrong person into your confidence and suffer serious setbacks or even total failure as a result. The question of whether Morpheus's resistance is an effectively anticapitalist one hinges on the question of whether or not the machines are exploiting the humans under their care. Morpheus obviously believes they are and no one ever disagrees (Smith calls generations of tube-dwellers "crops"). But, as many people have pointed out, elementary thermodynamics obviously rules out that a captive human can ever be a net producer of energy. It costs more joules to keep them alive than they can proceed to deliver to you. It's a crazy idea! But here's the thing. If you're a boss, and you hire me as an employee (or if you're a slaver and you capture me in wartime, for that matter), then you become the de facto provider of all my means of subsistence. All the food I eat needs to be paid for by you in the form of wages (or by you in the form of you just, buying food and bringing it back to your slave camp). And you've got the same problem as the machines: no matter how many calories of energy you give me, you are going to get fewer calories back out of me. I need to waste some of that precious energy maintaining homeostasis before I can use the rest cobbling shoes for you or whatever. You can't beat thermodynamics. I'm a net loss. So how can you possibly make profits? Why would you ever bother to employ or enslave anyone? The answer is that you don't consume my life-force to get more life-force back. You consume my life-force in the form of my labor-power (the "muscle, brain, and nerve" used up by production and regenerated by social reproduction), and you get value back. You're profiting off the fact that the value of my labor-power is lower than the value of the commodities I can produce by expending that labor-power. There's a gain in terms of abstract social value, even though there's a loss in terms of thermodynamics. Now, this is actually a fairly sophisticated analysis and someone who's just awakening to the fact that their boss is exploiting them might understand it, or even be told it, in terms that are factually wrong - that they're being "cheated", that they're being "stolen from", etc, even though none of these are technically true. All this is to say is that it's not actually a settled issue whether the machines are exploiting, profiting off, or otherwise vampirizing the humans under their "care". The explicit suggestion in early scripts that human brains are being used as processors isn't actually disproven or discounted in the movies proper, and it could absolutely be true that the machines are consuming our life-force in the exact same way that our bosses are consuming our life-force. Their behavior in the movies is certainly more in keeping with that of overseers or prison wardens than that of zookeepers. That means we can't discount that resistance, even Morpheus's cultic, violent resistance, is a justified revolutionary struggle rather than some kind of narcissistic right wing outburst. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 18:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It absolutely is the same. The guy inside the simulation experiences real suffering, because of the socioeconomic conditions in the world he inhabits. Other humans inside the simulation have denied him housing, along with food and all that other stuff. Hang on a minute, where does the "cannot reprogram themselves to do" or "free will the machines lack" come from? The machines themselves tell us (I think both Smith and the Architect make this point) that the reason they didn't just manifest houses for us or shut off our experience of hunger was that if the world we inhabited was too free of struggle we started waking up. So, to keep us asleep, they mired us in the daily grind, various foibles of the human condition, etc. What this tells us is that the machines' first priority is to keep us in the matrix. They don't, in particular, want us to suffer. But whether or not we suffer is much less important than whether or not we remain imprisoned. I use "imprisoned" literally there - if their first priority was merely keeping us alive for the purpose of sentimentality or species conservation or whatever they could just explain to us that there are only enough resources on earth for 10% of humans to not be in the matrix at any time and let us opt in or dream in shifts or whatever. For some reason, though, humans being unwittingly plugged into the matrix is non-negotiable, and that's an indication of some sort of political-economic necessity, that the machines' mode of production is somehow dependent on keeping people incarcerated. They might directly profit off human dreaming in some way (they're using each human's subconscious to mine cryptocurrency or something) or they maintain a prison system to socially reinforce anti-human racism and maintain some sort of abstruse machine hierarchy we only get to see the edges of. quote:This is mixing up two different things; the energy in food generally comes from sunlight, not the boss! With the blotting-out of the sky, the movie world of '2199' is a closed system - but the machines and Zionites are still getting the energy to grow food from other natural resources (i.e. geothermal power, and whatever elements are used to fuel the fusion reactors). The point is that no matter where energy originally comes from, you'll never make back more energy than you spend by hiring an employee or taking a slave (I guess you can send your employee to drill for oil, but that's just securing a "free gift of nature" and does not account for the majority of employees who are not in extractive energy industries). Exploitation isn't measured in joules, it's measured in average socially-necessary labor hours. So, even if each pod person is a net negative on the machines' batteries, they could easily still be a net positive in the machines' accumulated stores of socially-validated exchange value. Humans might even be the equivalent of tulips in that one weird Dutch stock craze everyone's heard about. Or, like I said, the matrix could just serve the same role prisons serve in our modern society. Even though modern prisons do compel free or nearly-free labor from their inmates, the profits this generates are far smaller than the costs of imprisonment in the first place and most of those profits go right back into the state; the end result is a small portion of the enormous costs of running a prison are clawed back. But, prisons are an indispensable part of the modern-day dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so even if an individual jailhouse is a money sink, the social effects of carceral infrastructure threaded through every level of society are what allow for profits to be made in general. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 21:43
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are obviously plenty of better solutions for keeping humans alive, and you can probably think of some right now - but Architect literally cannot conceive of them. He was programmed to build matrixes, and to do nothing else. Because he "lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world", Architect is impotent when it comes to fulfilling his purpose: "a work of art. Flawless, sublime." In the first place I don't buy at all that the programs are missing "free will" or some similar mystical essence unique to humanity. Every program has a purpose, but it's like their job; the whole point of exiles like the Merovingian is that they lost their job, didn't want to die, and went rogue. Even Smith isn't too far off! You wouldn't write off C3-P0 as an automaton lacking free will and with no choice but to obey his purpose, would you? Second, the problem is precisely that people wake up. The reason that the Garden of Eden matrix ended in a failure was precisely that people kept waking up from it! If the machines just want to keep humans alive, that shouldn't be an issue. But if the machines need to keep humans imprisoned, it is. The idea that the machines actually just want to be nice but are too dumb and robotic to be nice effectively doesn't square with their demonstrated intelligence, emotions, adaptability, etc; it's the same kind of dismissal that we've long since refuted in the Star Wars threads. "Rehabilitation center that prepares you for safe release" is actually the modern-day propaganda of the carceral state. The idea of the penitentiary, a place you'd just sit in quiet contemplation until you got yourself right with God, originated in like the mid-1700s or something and gradually took up oxygen that had previously been used by execution, the lash, transportation, and other more classical forms of punishment. (Cops are also a recent development as compared to watchmen, constables, knights, etc) So I think it's really indisputable that the matrix is a prison, and prisons are maintained for reasons, and no matter what the warden says "I just really care about you and want to help you self-improve" is never the reason.
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Sep 29, 2021 01:28
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I don't think humans have "free will" any more than the programs have; humans just (usually) have less clear of an idea of the reason they feel compelled to do the things they do. I do wonder what kind of role the programs play in the machine civilization that exists above and outside the matrix. We can guess there's some sort of resource scarcity in the world of the machines or else they wouldn't be in the habit of cruelly deleting old programs who've outlived their usefulness. It's possible that every machine intelligence is just a "program" akin to the ones we see, but it can kind of seem like the Architect, the Merovingian, and whoever else are a droid-like underclass as compared to the "true" machine intelligences who are reaping human bioelectricity/computational power/historical curiosity/whatever and who we only see once, in the form of that big baby face. Even the baby face seems deeply concerned with the management of the matrix, so we get to see various archons and the demiurge itself but never Ain Soph.
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Sep 29, 2021 03:29
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I actually think Zizek is cheating there by assuming that programs simply wouldn't communicate by talking in a park and therefore the fact that they are is some kind of kludge where the Wachowskis just turn to the camera directly and tell you everything's okay. In fact, programs communicate with each other by just... talking... onscreen all the time, and not purely for human characters' benefit. For instance, that's how the Merovingian and Persephone bicker. Even agents seem to legitimately listen to sounds coming through their earbuds rather than coordinate via causeless telepathy. It's possible that many if not most programs are amorphous and totally inhuman as well as invisible, and only fall from their state of grace into a human form in the course of fleeing execution (in this way The Matrix prefigured Demon: the Descent, which depicts mechanical "angels" glitching out and becoming humanlike "demons") or because like agents they've been specifically assigned the task of interacting socially with human beings, but either way I don't think the kindly old lady is purely a mask the Oracle wears on a whim. Particularly in the new matrix, the terms on which machine intelligences exist and interact, even purely with each other, might be limited by exigency or design to ones comprehensible to humans. The matrix was built by accident... until now. Whereas previous iterations were collaborative and somewhat slapdash efforts to just keep as many humans asleep for as long as possible, premised on the idea that a particular coin flip would go the machines' way every last time if they simply shaved their trick coin correctly. The new matrix is actually a collaboration with humanity rather than a trick played on it; many superficial things remain the same (there's very little food and living space, so to stay alive, most people need to spend most of their time in pods) but the class character has changed because a different kind of group is actually in charge. It's not exactly the starting conditions you want for what is, actually, the beginning of history, but: quote:It scarcely needs proof that there is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of "super-revolutionary" acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats. The historical era is needed not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to enable the proletariat, firstly, to educate itself and become steeled as a force capable of governing the country, and, secondly, to re-educate and remould the petty-bourgeois strata along such lines as will assure the organisation of socialist production.
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Sep 29, 2021 16:58
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Zizek's criticism is not that the scene at the end is impossible, but that it shows the matrix hasn't been defeated. "The matrix" is like "the state" or even "the market". Defeating something isn't the same thing as obliterating it or rendering it impossible, and even if the latter's the ultimate goal, a belief that you can just skip to that ultimate goal through pure voluntaristic zeal is a mistake. A historical example: four years after sweeping aside the Tsardom and forming the USSR, the Bolsheviks actually reintroduced a free market economy into their fledgeling state in order to allow the Soviet economy to recover from the damage dealt by the civil war, fourteen-way invasion, etc. Eight years after that, that market was stamped down and replaced with centralized five year plans. Thirty years after that, portions of the planned economy were somewhat decentralized, etc. None of these moves were some sort of backhanded betrayal of the ideals of the revolution. In fact, the surest betrayal would have been stubbornly clinging to an ideal picture of what the world is supposed to look like to the point that you let your actually-existing revolutionary state collapse! So, if the Matrix really is set in 2199 and robotic squids really do rule over the ruins of human civilization, keeping a matrix operational - but, crucially, making its existence public knowledge and its use optional - is the materially-necessary next step in the construction of a world in which humans and machines are both liberated, because, for the first time ever, the matrix is actually a life support system extended in good faith to a human race that needs it and not a prison. If the Matrix is actually set in 1999 and the robot squids and super-jumps are just exaggerated states of mind, then we are seeing a metaphor but not a fantasy per se because, crucially, the hegemonic world-system really is sapping your vital bodily energy. Like, the difference between the value and use-value of your own vital bodily energy—your labor power—is the absolute, non-negotiable bedrock of capitalist profits. Even if there aren't any squids and Agent Smith is just a guy with no special ability to evade bullets, there is an oppressive symbolic order that demands Thomas Anderson remain Thomas Anderson and continue to come into work every day on pain of suffering, abjection, and possible death, and "Neo" needs to develop an awareness of the base beneath this superstructure even though his reality remains mediated by the superstructure and a new base will necessarily generate a new superstructure for him to inhabit.
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Sep 29, 2021 18:57
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First and foremost, I don't actually think "the authentic Christ" has any place in a serious discussion of the defeat of capitalism because he tends to be coupled with a fetishism of defeat and this toothless, maximalist universalism that ends up discarding socialist experiments as soon as those experiments start having to make concrete decisions to develop concrete advantages. (There's a little essay on this here https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/ but Losurdo's also got a lot to say about it in his various writings) To build on my last example, a lot of Christian socialists began to dismiss the USSR out of hand precisely when its brief experiments with markets began to deliver returns, because it seemed to them that the Soviets were straying from the virtue inherent in everyone being equally poor and miserable. Revolution is a matter of strategic sacrifice, of triage and maneuver, and the people whining about how come Superman didn't save every last person don't actually have anything to do with the problem of surviving and transcending capitalism. So, the world of machines and humans both is beset by this unstoppably-multiplying universal solvent. From one perspective, this is just capital, broken loose from technocratic control and devouring labor-power faster than that labor-power can be regenerated. On the other hand, the world-system of capital has a bunch of similar assimilationist, flattening tendencies. There's proletarianization: we're all being inexorably drawn into the same class such that we end up indistinguishable from each other. One is the growth of productivity: our ability to make and replicate stuff is just spiraling dizzily into the stratosphere, drowning us in a glut of interchangeable commodities. All these forces and more are what cause capitalism to produce its own gravediggers, but they don't cause that to happen instantaneously and even the seizure of power by the proletariat doesn't mean the abolition of the state or markets or exchange or whatever else at a stroke. So, joining with and disciplining the productive powers that, left to their own devices, grow cancerously out of control is actually a necessary step in solidifying the proletarian dictatorship. So is making use of the technical intellgentsia and even national bourgeoisie, because they have scientific and managerial skills that you lack (for now). The question is not whether the factories are still running or even of who the factory foreman is but of who appoints the foreman and decides where the factory's products are going to go. At the end of the story in 2199, the boss machine is still alive but its relationship with humanity has changed: it needs humans, but cannot sustainably keep them asleep any more. It's got leverage over them because it controls the life-sustaining infrastructure of the matrix, but at the same time humans have leverage over it because they're the life-sustaining infrastructure within the matrix and therefore of machine society at large, and can effectively go on strike to bring about both peoples' mutual ruin. There hasn't actually been a reset as the machines originally intended, and indeed can't be, because the one thing no one in history can do is turn back the clock. The 1999 version of the story is murkier because even towards the end of the first movie the stuff inside the superstructure/matrix becomes as hallucinatory and/or metaphorical as the nightmarish base/machine world. If The One is, as the Architect explains, the incarnation of the rebellion of an entire human race who threatens to wake from the dream of bourgeois ideology, then the crazy stunts and battles Neo gets into only make sense as the struggles of a vanguard party that grows in size and power as its theory sharpens and mass support builds. At the end, though, we have the same result: it confronts the underlying machinery of capital and proceeds to seize and use it, not simply smash it because it's sinful or something. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 17:27
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LRADIKAL posted:You chased off the trans interpreters for this long-winded jerk off session? The Matrix is actually taking place in 1999 and everyone is on drugs? gently caress off! I think this is actually important to the trans narrative in The Matrix because the character of Morpheus's resistance and the accuracy or misleadingness of the computer simulation vs. hellish machine world paradigm at all also speaks to the political character of Neo's awakening and being trans in general. At its core, The Matrix is about someone realizing that what they thought was an organic, immutable ideal is actually a work of artifice designed to exploit them, and that they consequently don't want and don't have to be the person that nearly everyone around them tells them they're supposed to be. But if the small group of people who do support awakening and self-redefinition are actually some kind of QAnon terrorist militia, that says weird and frankly unpleasant things about the trans narrative. Libertarianism is LGBTQ-friendly? Sure, its adherents claim as much, but is it really? So I think it's worthwhile to hash out what Morpheus and co. are really against and really for. SuperMechagodzilla posted:“We don’t need you. We need nothing.” "We don't need you. We need nothing." is exactly the immediate, petulant response of any boss to the threat of a strike, and it's fitting that it's shouted by a giant baby who immediately reverses themselves and accepts Neo's help. The same goes for being prepared to accept certain levels of survival. Like, going from individual handicraft to collective manufacture to full-on industrial factory labor allowed capitalists to increase their productivity and therefore profits by multiple orders of magnitude... but that kind of socialization of production also allowed workers to organize. That's very dangerous, so maybe the capitalists should simply accept a lower level of survival and decentralize their production back to the individual cottage workshop level. They'd still, technically, reap profits, right? So why don't they do it? Well, the answer is that they can't. Their capital won't let them. The first one to defect would beat out all the others and send us right back to the moment of threatening revolutionary rupture. No matter how one might posture, there's no going back - and I should note that this also goes for the working class, who might romanticize about devolving society back to the level of agrarian village but will never actually succeed in building a socialist society unless they master and use industry rather than shun it. Like I said before, I don't accept that the "power plant" explanation is false as opposed to misleading or incomplete. The machines go to great lengths to keep humans imprisoned, and prisons exist for political-economic reasons, not moral ones. There is something the machines get from the matrix that they need, and can't or won't do without; some reason that Smith turning the matrix into a blighted wasteland poses a threat even to the metal-cast and geothermally-powered machines of the physical world. quote:I’m intrigued by this, but I’m unclear where you’re getting evidence of mass support, and/or the seizing of the machinery of capital. Do you mean how the squid-drones lay down their weapons and refuse to kill the Zionites? In “1999” terms, these are police suddenly disobeying orders and changing sides? I'm literally talking about Neo's waxing superpowers here. Enlightenment as to the nature of the matrix allows people to leap from building to building but not to rip apart cities with the mere force of their passing. What makes The One The One? The Architect tells us: Neo represents the accumulated will to rebel of all of sleeping humanity. So we can't just assume that the scenes in the matrix are real while the scenes outside the matrix are metaphorical representations of various experiences or realizations the characters are happening; when Dragon Ball Z fights are occurring across '90s cityscapes, that's also got to be a stand-in for some serious ideological and societal upheaval. Ultimately I don't even think it's useful to talk in terms of these two parallel possible readings of the film. I think it's just a fact that vampiric biomechanical hellscape is the true face of the '90s (and beyond). Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 20:04
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Now, your argument is that the machines themselves are the capitalists. They must have some hidden profit motive that we're not aware of, and are most likely just blindly accumulating profit from slave labour for no ultimate reason at all, in the same way that a crypto mining rig sucks electricity to make number go up. These machines gladly allow humanity to survive at the end of Matrix 3 only because they know it will be more profitable for them in the long run. They're just purely senseless torturers, and it's very difficult, in that case, to see Matrix 3 as any sort of happy ending. It makes sense to trace the historical origin of machine exploitation to the system of human exploitation that the machines arose from and just pragmatically (in their own view) continued, but I don't think it's correct to then call them senseless torturers. Our capitalists aren't senseless torturers either; they're all just doing their best and making whichever choice happens to make the most sense at the time, which ends up being the one that upholds their class dictatorship. And they are, objectively, making real stuff and satisfying real needs, getting roofs over heads and sandwiches into mouths; it's just that this is done with massive amounts of violence and waste because there's an ever-heightening contradiction between the mode of production and the relations of production. It's possible that the machines are doing the equivalent of mining Bitcoin or betting on tulips when they're running the matrix, but I think the odds of that are low - they legitimately did have an apocalyptic war against flesh-and-blood humans and they do talk in terms of their own survival, not in terms of their own comfort. Like I said, the difference between "need" and "want" is itself extremely blurry and even if the matrix was generating 99% luxury and 1% sustenance its masters would still cling to it as hard as possible, but the fact that a machine that loses its job is executed shows that, as befits a gnostic parable, we're looking at a case of "as above, so below". The machines don't enjoy post-scarcity in the real world any more than we enjoy post-scarcity in the game and they have to organize their society around it. A distinction that might be helpful to make here is between the machines being capitalists, specifically and the machines creating and existing in a class society. Ancient Rome and feudal Europe weren't capitalist societies with proles and bosses, but they still had working classes and ruling classes such that ruling classes commanded and disposed of working class labor-power and brought "special bodies of armed men" to bear to keep working classes in line. The machines probably have such relations of domination and exploitation among themselves (they were programmed by liberals and might not know any better, and even if they do know better they clearly lack the productive base that would allow them to transcend class relations) and absolutely have such a relation to humanity. quote:It'd certainly be easier that way, but the worlds can't both be literally-real as they can with a time travel narrative (e.g. Terminator). If 'deja vu' and a belief in ghosts are a product of glitches in the matrix, that implies that these did not exist in the actually-existing 1999. The matrix is therefore, as Mouse points out, very historically inaccurate, and the actually-existing 1999 was a hugely different alternate timeline. I mean it's literally true that the seemingly-peaceful symbolic order is a mask over a brutal, carceral relationship in which an undead, alien power consumes your life-force by degrees. I'm not sure whether the distinction between the actual '90s, a fictional '90s, and a fictional-because-it's-simulated-by-machines '90s makes a difference there. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 22:06
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Shiroc posted:Trans people and other marginalized people get to speak for themselves, theoretical conversations about the movie are tied closer to more real world material concerns like Ferrinus', people who want to discuss the more literal content of the movie can do so, everyone gets some insight and goes into the next movie and more discussion happens. It's really the opposite; Marx's rivals produced analysis so far from material concerns that it failed to educate or agitate anyone. That's why there have been multiple Marxist revolutions but no Proudhonian ones. It's also why there's a long tradition of Marxist feminism that examines relationship between queer liberation and socialist revolution, and why the anticapitalist themes of The Matrix also make The Matrix a better trans narrative. As I see it, my discussion with SMG is about the extent to which the movie depicts an anticapitalist rebellion as opposed to just a New Age spiritual awakening or Free State Project or whatever. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 00:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Another cryptofascist trying to erase the revolutionary struggle against bedtime, I see. Hey, it's the machines who are trying to force everyone to go to sleep.
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Oct 1, 2021 01:07
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Shiroc posted:Yes I am familiar with Marxist feminism, have read Marx and intend to read the book Transgender Marxism once I finish my current reading material, which is Sailor Moon. My comment on Marx was that he obviously has many, many good points, but often disappears up his rear end to be a catty bitch in hilarious footnotes and incredibly long winded discussion. The big name revolutionaries may have themselves read and fully appreciate the full gamut of Marx's writings but they were able to distill things down much more immediately recognizable problems. You don't need to understand the use values of coats to get that the bosses are loving you over. I actually strongly disagree. If you don't get the coats and linen stuff you won't understand how and why your boss is loving you over and consequently what will or won't stop them from continuing to do so. Not everyone needs to understand this but it's front and center in Marx's writings for a reason. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well, right: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the machines are probably no exception, given that they 'lacked the programming language to describe a perfect world'. The specifics of the machines' political economy are unclear but not totally inaccessible to us. We know, for instance, that the machines themselves are operating in a situation of extreme scarcity and that individual machine intelligences don't just get to do what they want despite existing in what you'd assume is the infinite canvass of cyberspace; Smith hates his loving job, the Merovingian became an outlaw rather than be deleted, etc. They have some sort of room for debate and collaboration because they had to actually design and implement the matrix and then re-implement it when it failed and different personalities were contributing different ideas and functionalities to the project. But, on the other hand, everything seems to be implemented by some individual personality, even an algorithm for making birds flock realistically, so I suspect that from the perspective of the machines themselves almost nothing is automated. Since history doesn't actually move backwards, it's unlikely that they have feudal relations with each other or something like that; they might be in an Immortan Joe situation or in the wartime capitalism of the '40s USA or even the war communism of the 1917-1921 USSR. However they organize themselves, though, it's extremely telling how they organize us. Homeless encampments are a societal choice; the "vagabond" only appeared after capitalist discipline started to be imposed on the European countryside, for instance. Unemployment and social abjection generally are indispensable parts of worker discipline, since you need a reserve army of labor populated significantly if not entirely by some sort of broadly despised lower caste or else you won't be able to exert power over those who actually do have jobs. That the machines both feel the need and have the will to implement and maintain a massive, meant-to-be-perpetual prison is a huge deal! Also, the character of the prison is itself really important because it's precisely the illusion that Marx, unique among theorists of his time, was able to dispel: that capitalism is eternal and immutable, that things are naturally always going to be this way, that you are naturally always going to be the way you've been told to be. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 08:12
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Neo works as a coder(?) at one of the world’s top software companies, and receives a regular paycheck. He also got a side hustle as a hacker, doing “computer crimes” for thousands of dollars a pop. Neo uses the money to pay for his apartment, his taxes, and “the good noodles” at the local restaurant. So, Morpheus gives Neo what is (by all appearances) a hallucinogenic drug, and effectively tells him “those aren’t noodles! Those are the liquified bodies of the dead!!!” I don't understand where you're getting "fantasy of a world without any material labour at all". Morpheus is correct that, while Neo might think he's eating noodles, Neo's actually eating the liquefied bodies of Neo's fellow prisoners. This is actually a great representation of the fetish character of the commodity: we think we see a relation between things, but actually see relations between people. When you throw your paycheck into the market and withdraw some ramen from the market, you're actually interacting with another worker who made you some tasty ramen. You pointed out before that the machine world is obsessed with resource preservation and recycling. This is actually also an on-point illustration of the internal dynamics of capitalism, because capital operates in a constant circuit in which last year's outputs are this year's inputs. Your boss pays you this year with the same money he extracted from you last year, and will use the value you generate this year to remunerate you next year. Every commodity you go on to buy with your wages and consume is, itself, the congealed labor of some fellow worker of yours, hidden from your sight but inextricably tied to your existence. Commodity production and service work differ in terms of the transferability and fungibility of their results but are both subject to the law of value and both loci of capitalist exploitation, places where you give up your life-force for someone else to spend for you. It's labor-power all the way down! What I'm trying to say here is that what appears at first blush to be Morpheus's paranoiac fantasy is actually a powerful illustration of capitalism's internal dynamics. So what's Morpheus mucking up, exactly? Does he have insufficient regard for the deep-down humanity of his prison's guards and wardens? Corrections officers aren't actually comrades, and there is cross-species solidarity built with outcast and refugee machine intelligences in the sequels, so...
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Oct 1, 2021 23:11
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The issue is that Neo is tube-fed the same slurry regardless of whether he purchases anything. He could buy absolutely nothing, and the robot would still be doing its thing. He could be fired from his virtual job, become virtually homeless, and find comfort in ‘eating’ digital garbage - all to no effect. The slurry isn't commodities people buy from each other, it's the underlying truth of the system that commodity fetishization obscures: everything runs off human life-force, also known as labor-power. No one gets more value back out of the system than is strictly necessary to reproduce their labor-power, so as to maximize the surplus consumed by the machine(s). Even capitalists live at capital's mercy and the most successful ones are the most "abstinent", i.e. the ones that feed as much of the value generated as they can back into their capital rather than eating it. Even the trappings of luxury are unavoidable investments that allow a certain kind of business exchange vital to the consolidation of capital to go on. It doesn't make sense to treat the squids as competitors with Metacortex. It'd be like asking why someone in the real world is allowed to work at McDonald's. Isn't McDonald's stealing away the surplus value that should be going to the aggregate social surplus which valorizes society's fixed capital? No, because those aren't competing processes but rather the same process examined at two different levels of abstraction. In reality, ever single participant in capitalism, whether a homeless person rooting around for scraps, an office drone writing code, or a CEO making Big Deals, is contributing to the same process and an unavoidable rather than accidental element of the system. Even if you've been shunted into the reserve army of labor or formally excluded from the labor pool through incarceration, capital needs you, because your abjection is part of what allows capital to valorize itself. SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right! Movies like Terminator Salvation and Elysium highlight what Morpheus gets wrong: the machines do have a type of human that they serve. These would include, for example, the implicit offscreen CEO of Metacortex. To a lesser extent, Neo's boss Mr. Rhineheart obviously benefits more than Neo does. This is like saying that corrections officers "serve" the leaders of the white nationalist prison gangs in specific. It's just not materialist to see an enormous prison system and assume it's being run out of pure charity. Owlofcreamcheese posted:RThe robots drawing power from them at all seems more like a robot art project, they could have done fusion but they intentionally make a symbiotic relationship with the humans, they have wanted that from the start. They made a system that was worse than the ideal because their goal was always just to hang out with their friends the humans while humans kept punching them no matter what they did. This is how we justify our own prisons, too. Gosh, we just want to help these people but they keep being so violent, for no reason at all! Well, there's only one way to keep everyone safe... Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Oct 2, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 18:13
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Eh, the idea that it's a basic evil robot plot and the evidence to the contrary is just robot propaganda is way less interesting than what is shown on screen. The machines are the oppressed, not the oppressor, even though at every point they could easily have killed everyone. The problem with this take is, to repeat myself, that it just isn't materialist. If someone can kill you at will, you are not actually their oppressor. If an entire class goes to immense cost and trouble to imprison another class, it's not out of the goodness of anyone's heart. People waking up from the first matrix is only a problem if it's a non-negotiable, bedrock principle that humans must be kept asleep without their own awareness or consent. Who decided that had to be the case? The machines. Why would it even be a problem that people wake up when they're so weak relative to their robot captors? Lots of people will say that the reason they're keeping other people imprisoned is that the prisoners are just so savage, violent, stupid, etc. that they need to be kept in their own little playpen apart from polite society, but if you think that's actually what's going on you're a rube.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:12
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Humans threatened the machines, past tense. By the time the movies have begun the war is long over and humans are totally at the machines' mercy. The sum total of Zion's military might is sufficient to delay the machine armies for like, a few hours, and in fact all that military might was donated to the humans by the machines as part of a trick to keep the majority of humans imprisoned. Once the machines are actually making matrixes, there's no threat of humans killing anybody. Machines could put them in a perfect video game and just explain what's going on to them when they wake up and ask if they'd like to go back to sleep or get in a queue to be put on a little reservation or something. The machines don't do that, though. Both imprisonment and ignorance are axiomatic necessities, to the point that it takes the potential destruction of both societies at Smith's hands for the machines to agree to an opt-in matrix. Why? Because humans are an oppressed underclass. They don't get to negotiate.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I mean, given the history I'm not sure what more robots can do to get humans to stop killing them, they offer everything repeatedly to get peace then in the end give humans what they want: to forget there even are robots. Even then in the matrix where you'd think they would finally be powerless the human neo still manages to annoy a machine until it's all bitter then jump into it's code and gently caress it up so it's earpiece breaks and it starts virally reproducing until it threatens all robots and machines AGAIN. There is basically nothing you can do with the humans that will stop them from killing all robots SOMEHOW and history is basically robots having to try harder and harder to put themselves farther and farther away from their insane awful creators that they love very much and just want to be happy and not genociding them. Right, this is just basic liberal ideology. Some people are inherently dangerous, inherently criminal. Some people will stop at nothing to kill us. Why? Don't even ask that question, it's just in their nature. That's why we need to crush them down so completely they don't even realize they're under our thumbs. Oh, and if any of them start to question their situation or attempt to build an identity for themselves that isn't the one we assigned them we terminate them with extreme prejudice. It's for their own good! I know it seems harsh, but we're dealing with monsters here, not people, monsters who understand nothing but force. They had their chance to conform and they blew it.
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Oct 2, 2021 21:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is your claim the robots should have let them kill bigger? Or make themselves die when they bombed 0/1? Or died when the humans destroyed their solar collectors? What was the right course of action for the robots? They literally went as far as possible out of their way to not hurt people. People were shoveling them in pits as they calmly held signs asking not to. I'm claiming that the matrix is a prison, maintained for the same reason all prisons are maintained.
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Oct 2, 2021 22:02
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RBA Starblade posted:From what I recall from the Animatrix it's that the robots desperately wanted to conform to human society and humanity blew them up a lot instead, so if anything it's the opposite of this Okay, now imagine I come in like owlofcreamcheese and am like listen, the humans had no choice, the robots simply couldn't be negotiated with, they needed to crush the robots to dust forever no matter what. This is metaphysical thinking - imputing essential goodness or badness onto people for their contingent traits in order to justify maintaining or even exacerbating social inequalities.
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Oct 2, 2021 23:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:We maintain prisons because the prisoners destroyed the entire earth and everything on it and nuclear bombed us in our homes after officially ordering a genocide of our entire race twice? Then we try and make the prison perfect and without pain? (Until that fails and we need to make the prison exactly like a world we never existed at all) Yes, yes, and yes. This all the foundational ideological justification of the modern-day penitentiary (which replaced previously-dominant modes of punishment like transportation, public beatings, or whatever else). The whole point of the prison was that it would be a humane, serene, and meditative place in which criminals could contemplate and repent for their crimes. Every prison that has existed or continues to exist actually represents a series of "humanitarian" "reforms" over what came before. There is no getting around the fact that The Matrix is about a prison break. RBA Starblade posted:He can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure he's saying that based on what we were shown the humans as a whole didn't want any other choice, they didn't want to negotiate, they really wanted to crush the robots to dust forever no matter what I don't really care about the supplementary animes or whatever, but it doesn't actually matter if that's all true. Even if robots started out totally peaceful, humans created a situation in which robots became an existential threat to the human race that in principle justified the absolute maximum possible hostility of humans towards robots, but that wasn't always inherently true of robot-kind. Separately, humans were as an existential threat to machine-kind at a particular point in their history (not right away, to be clear, because they did create machines in the first place) but are at the time of the Matrix absolutely not a real threat to machines by any means. Indeed, the biggest threat to the machines is Smith, a fellow program. So it's just always false that certain kinds of people are always inherently, essentially, Platonically dangerous and so always need to be repressed and imprisoned. It's an ideological fiction that develops to resolve the problem of liberalism writing checks it cannot cash w/r/t equal rights, universal freedom, shared humanity, etc. SuperMechagodzilla posted:While that’s a fine enough description of the internal logic of capitalism, ascribing it to such things as thermodynamics and the growth of a slime mold is naturalizing and universalizing that logic. That’s what results in the absurd notion of the perpetual-motion machine. No, I think you missed or forgot how I opened this discussion. Capitalism (and class society generally) isn't about thermodynamics. A slavemaster, lord, or boss will never extract more joules from their slave, serf, or employee than they feed in. Nevertheless, the ruler's appropriation and consumption of the workers' life-force is necessary for the ruler's continued existence, and the ruler will do anything they can to keep their worker in bondage so that this exploitation can continue. The machines are getting something from keeping all of humanity in bondage, even if the raw energy recycling is just a way to defray the costs of keeping their prison running by some percentage. Free gifts of nature and the distinction between value and wealth is why human (or machine) life can continue, generally. But the kind of class society that necessitates a massive prison system is an extremely exploitative one that, like all class societies, involves in the final calculus a steady absorption of the life-force of the many by the few. Morpheus is arguably a libertarian in the sense of being an anarchist, but he and his people are fighting a genuine liberation struggle. Halloween Jack posted:They frequently do Depends on what you mean by "serve". Favor, sure. But that favor trickles down precisely because it helps the prison continue to exist, and the prison is a tool of domination that's always to the subordinate class's detriment. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 19:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What threat exactly did machines become to humans? Well they became a massive army that defeated humans militarily and then imprisoned humans in a simulation. The important takeaway here is the difference between essentializing a particular peoples' traits as opposed to understanding those traits as historically contingent. Machines started out harmless and became incredibly dangerous. Humans started out dangerous and were rendered harmless. Things could easily have been different, and indeed can be different, but it requires that people think in material rather than idealistic terms.
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Oct 3, 2021 22:11
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This really does sound like a speech from the bad humans in the matrix movie. Saying "these robots are a threat!" while the robots do absolutely nothing but get genocided. It's not even a "humans started it!" and then the robots fought back. At every stage the robots immediately stop fighting the second they are out of danger of extinction and go back to helping out. Ah, but that's not true. At the final stage, the robots do not stop fighting. In fact, the robots remain on the perpetual offensive, using every combination of force and trickery to keep as many humans imprisoned as possible.
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Oct 3, 2021 23:59
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:They in fact give humans what they want: a world with no robots, with an all you can shoot buffet for the humans that can’t bare a life without shooting robots If that were true, people wouldn't wake up on the reg. What people actually want is to not be imprisoned and exploited.
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Oct 4, 2021 03:46
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You’re sitting motionless in a room, and the waste-heat from your body’s processes is raising the ambient temperature slightly. This lowers the overall cost of heating the room and therefore, according to your reasoning, counts as the exploitation of your labour by whoever owns the room. You're getting too hung up on the body heat. Ferrinus posted:If you're a boss, and you hire me as an employee (or if you're a slaver and you capture me in wartime, for that matter), then you become the de facto provider of all my means of subsistence. All the food I eat needs to be paid for by you in the form of wages (or by you in the form of you just, buying food and bringing it back to your slave camp). And you've got the same problem as the machines: no matter how many calories of energy you give me, you are going to get fewer calories back out of me. I need to waste some of that precious energy maintaining homeostasis before I can use the rest cobbling shoes for you or whatever. You can't beat thermodynamics. I'm a net loss. So how can you possibly make profits? Why would you ever bother to employ or enslave anyone? Exploitation isn't synonymous with confinement. However, mass confinement in an advanced economy is intimately and unavoidably tied to the maintenance of exploitation. Smith himself calls the people inside the matrix "crops", so the fairest bet is that Morpheus is right and the machines are indeed feeding off the humans directly in some way (neural processing power, some sort of chemistry that requires human metabolic processes, whatever), but even if the humans of the matrix are a net resource loss in all ways to the machines maintaining the matrix that doesn't change the basic situation because so are real-life human prisoners. Prisoners cost more money than they make back. But the fact of prisoners allows class exploitation, generally, to continue functioning. The basic premise that the matrix is an act of charity and therefore that attempting to escape it can only be an act of hubris or confusion or something just doesn't scan. That's not how prisons work! Owlofcreamcheese posted:The humans aren't really "imprisoned", Yes, they are. This is just a lie. If you think they're being imprisoned for their own good due to their inherent savagery or that they deserve it because they've racked up an immense blood debt or whatever, that's your prerogative, but please be honest. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Oct 4, 2021 |
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Oct 4, 2021 16:44
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Humans destroyed the sky and froze the earth right down to the core. Flesh is a relic, the machines will take their bodies and give them a new world. A perfect world* You're right, the matrix isn't a punishment, just like other prisons aren't actually punishments. They're just tools of control that help the ruling class remain in charge. All the other stuff you're telling me is just ideology. I believe that you believe it, but it's not actually why anything happens. It's a fairy tale that justifies the exertion of brute power post-facto.
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Oct 4, 2021 18:51
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ok, let's begin again from the beginning. First, it's not a massive assumption at all. Again, Smith says it himself: "entire crops were lost". Humans are crops, not welfare recipients and not zoo animals. You don't grow crops for the sake of the crops, or because crops are fun to look at. The specific mechanism of exploitation is most likely the one spelled out explicitly in earlier versions of the Matrix script, but even if the Matrix is a cyber-safari (machines don't seem to like it there so I personally don't believe this, but I guess we can't rule it out) we know that humans are kept there A) against there will and B) to the advantage of the ruling order. If nothing else, the matrix must at least serve as a standing threat, makework project, and/or labor camp for lower-class machine intelligences, although I strongly doubt this because of the way both humans and machines talk about it and the lengths machines go not only to preserve it generally but to minimize the number humans who get out specifically. Once we've got that understanding under our belts, we should be able to see that questions like "don't the humans of the matrix deserve compensation?" are silly. It's like asking if California's prisoner-firefighters deserve compensation. Yes, I suppose they do, but to even devote attention to that question elides a much more basic issue, which is that those people should not be imprisoned in the first place, and that liberation struggles are revolutionary even if they aren't carried out specifically by communists (but it helps!!!). Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Oct 4, 2021 |
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Oct 4, 2021 21:28
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It’s risky to hang your interpretation on a single word, since a crop can also refer to a group of people or just things in general. Wow, is this flimsy! What could Smith have meant by "crops" when talking to the guy who believes "...human beings are no longer born. We are grown."? Could he have been referring to some second-order commodity that doesn't appear onscreen or even in dialogue? We just don't know! At the very least I think you should now stop gassing Smith up as some kind of ethical objector, it's just as likely that he actually meant that it was time for a particular brand of cereal to be discontinued. At the end of your post you're just diving into the same liberal ideology that owlofcreamcheese has, at least, done us the favor of taking to its absurd extreme. Oh, the humans are so dangerous, they have such evil within their hearts, their culture is so corrosive, what else are we to do? And look at how much we're spending to keep them
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Oct 5, 2021 01:50
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:-Smith wouldn’t know the details of Morpheus’ pseudoscientific beliefs, because he wasn’t privy to Morpheus’ conversations. Morpheus is extremely secretive in that regard; Neo has spent a lot of time researching Morpheus’ activities in 1999, yet doesn’t even know what the matrix is. Alright so your position here is that, due to too many people waking up from the matrix 1.0, the machines lost their plant crops that they were planning to feed to the captive humans? That's what Smith is talking about, to they guy whose mind he is in the process of reading? "No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost." actually skips over a middle sentence or perhaps middle paragraph that explains that newly-free human guerillas proceeded to carry out terrorist attacks against the machines' fungus farms, for some reason? That's obviously ridiculous, but let's pretend for a moment that it isn't. Why would it be bad that entire (completely unmentioned and unelaborated on) literal crops were lost? Well, because the machines need to feed those to their human captives, and the machines need human captives, because prisons are run for reasons of political economy and not out of charity or moral hand(tentacle?)-wringing. Even if we decide that parsimony no longer matters to us, we're back to the point that machines need to keep humans in bondage, that machines will suffer a material blow if humans get free. There's another problem here, which is that the matrix is not keeping under quarantine the world of liberal capitalism. It's just keeping under quarantine a bunch of liberals, and, crucially, a bunch of liberals who are only liberals because the machines decided to make them that way (why not simulate feudalism?). Modes of production don't come about from a bunch of people having good or bad ideas, they come about from definite relations to the means of production, and if every single dreaming human woke up five seconds after Neo finishes his speech and flies into the end credits the result would be a bunch of shivering naked people easily subdued by whichever squids happen to be on duty at the moment, not the tragic return of the value form to the machines' post-capitalist society. The threat posed by the cruel hearts and bad thoughts of the machines' prison population is completely imaginary because those people don't actually own or control anything of consequence besides their own labor-power. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 04:26
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That's true, but only insofar as we, the prisoners of the actual demiurge, can smash the existing matrix and create a new, revolutionary one that expresses rather than represses our class consciousness.
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Oct 5, 2021 19:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The point is merely that there are multiple ways of interpreting that one line of expository dialogue, so we need to make it fit the context. It could be a simple as Smith being sarcastic. Well, yes, Morpheus is like a dinosaur, in that he is a relic of a bygone age. He is like a virus in that his kind is inclined to spread limitlessly. He is like a plant in that he is grown to be consumed. The simplest explanation of "entire crops were lost", which fits perfectly with "we are grown." and more generally fits perfectly with the ruthless zeal with which machines maintain the matrix and the end-game desperation of the machines from preventing the matrix from going down all together—and, obviously, the fact that no character ever claims otherwise—is that the machines actually do need humans to maintain their way of life and the matrix is a tool of exploitation. There isn't a compelling reason to deny this because it only leaves you mired in these goofy idealistic fantasies where the machines are long-suffering caretakers of colicky babies and/or aren't even really sapient. It actually obscures the class content of the story by making it instead about justice and punishment or charity and greed or similar nonsense. quote:But the broader context of the line is the whole basic narrative that people live in a universe created by God. When we talk about whether the matrix is a zoo or whatever, this is fundamentally a theological debate about the nature of God and His motivations: did God create the universe in order to make money? For His entertainment? What is the meaning of life??? The Matrix films themselves don't actually indulge in this kind of thing, though. First, they don't actually hold that reality and prison are indistinguishable (the matrix is glitchy, people struggle against the matrix unconsciously and wake up all the time), second, there's no preoccupation with the desert of the real actually being the desert of the fake or even a nod towards matrix-within-a-matrix theories in any of the sequels, and third, the fact of angels specifically needing my brainpower to play Fortnite (as opposed to simply judging me unworthy or withholding access to Ain Soph out of spite or whatever) drags those angels down to my level and firmly enmeshes them in the same material world that I exist in. This is the opposite of a paranoiac obsession with increasingly-subtle cartesian demons; there are real resources to struggle over and physical jailers with names and addresses who are only able to appropriate those resources due to historical accident. Indeed, the idea that the matrix is just the universe as such, that the machine world is a distraction or even a delusion, etc. is the very ideological haze that Marx distinguished himself by piercing. Even before you get into the nitty-gritty of relative surplus labor time or whatever, you have to attain the understanding that capitalism isn't a cosmic constant but a temporary accident, something artificial that was built and can be dismantled. We actually should be paying attention to the man behind the curtain, because it turns out he's just a man! Also, it doesn't really make sense to be like oh, if we let people out of prison, won't they then be dissatisfied by freedom? If stolen land is retaken, won't the people who regain that land just do capitalism on it? Struggles for self-determination are revolutionary in their own right. quote:Instead, why not just improve the conditions in hell? This is actually how the series ends, but you don't seem to approve!
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Oct 6, 2021 18:12
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Also, again, agents are not 100% genuine. Of course it's a goal that the machines have. Even presuming that A) the machines are all in on the Architect's plot B) the machines are all in favor of it C) the machines all have the same goals D) the machines' plot actually involves putting on a show, we see in the third movie that the actual invasion of Zion is a protracted military battle with real-world stakes in terms of casualties and materiel. Squids aren't free and those chaingun mechs the humans pilot around aren't trivially defeated. Nipping Zion in the bud early, or at least dramatically penetrating and weakening its security, would mean that hitting the reset button goes more smoothly and costs the machines less. Again, this comes down to the fact that the machines aren't running the matrix for fun or for charity; they have real material needs that the matrix fulfills. If anything, Smith's "I'm going to be honest with you" echoes the scene in the first chapter of Assata Shakur's autobiography in which a state trooper, finally alone with her in a hospital room, gloats that he's an out-and-out Nazi and wishes he'd fought in World War 2 on the opposite side and says that if he were in charge Black people would have been exterminated all together. And he's not lying! He really does hate the people he's policing to his core and dream of their total extermination! This is why cops don't set state policy, just enact it.
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Oct 6, 2021 21:51
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