Agent Smith clarified that civilization progressed beyond 1999, but that it wasn't human's progress anymore.
Agent Smith: "and I say 'your' civilization, because after we started thinking for you it became 'our' civilization."
We're currently in version 1 of the matrix which blows up. Hopefully soon.
Wasn't the first iteration of the matrix a perfect utopia that blew up because the human mind ended up rejecting its programming?
It was The Architect's vision of a perfect world, so given what we know of him it was probably a featureless box with a chair in the middle and you could sit there forever. No way that's lasting long.
a featureless box with a chair in the middle and you could sit there forever. No way that’s lasting long.
There is definitely a joke about silicon valley and maybe apple itself in here lol
Yes, we still have some descriptions in the Genesis book of the Bible, release codename "Paradise". If we are to trust the same source, there was another reset called "Noah's Ark".
According to that, we'd be in at least the 3rd iteration.
Unless... we're actually dinosaurs IRL, the first reset was codename "Chicxulub"... and the machines have been iterating over who knows how many thousands of different versions, with the current one being an attempt at keeping those lizard brains controlled by... a software overlay codename "Consciousness" (WARNING: don't let your lizard brain know, or both it, and you, will get terminated).
The machines did nothing wrong, it was mankind that caused Nuclear war. I would side with the machines in a heartbeat
The human battery concentration camp is kinda weird though
Humans as a power source was the dumbed-down plot point. The original concept was the human brains acting as parallel processors, but the writers thought the average movie-goer wouldn't get it.
I mean, it wasn't if you're gay or trans.....
Fun fact: Switch was originally supposed to be trans. Her name is still an indicator of it. I think she was supposed to be biologically a man in the real world, but biologically a woman in the matrix.
I still remember 1 Jan 2000. There did seem to be some sense of optimism about where things could go. At least for those of us lucky enough to live in stable, developed countries.
Cold war over, Russia and The West seemingly on the same side, China opening up, exciting new tech connecting us but no toxic social media yet...
But then... the dot com bust, 9/11, the GFC, toxic social media and the rise of "the algorithm", Xi in China, Putin in Russia, a global pandemic......
Didn't really go where we hoped, can we restore to a backup from 1999 and try again??
Transcription:
Dave Wiskus
@dwiskus
The Matrix described 1999 as the peak of human civilization and I laughed because that would obviously not age well but then the next 23 years happened and now l'm like yeah okay maybe the machines had a point
Makes sense. Boomers were still young enough to be relevant. GenX was comfortable with their disposable income. And us millennials were in highschool.
GenX didn't have much disposable income in 99, but you didn't need much to have fun.
In 99 people were throwing cash around like crazy, it was a wild time (before the dotcom crash)
I guess the older Gen X could have been part of that. The younger ones were still finishing up college and just starting their careers when the economy crashed for the first, but not last time in their lives. The youngest ones joined the workforce just after the dot com bust.
And people wrote articles like this. And it wasn't even completely ridiculous. And I still believe the world would be very different today if GWB hadn't "won" the election.
I literally just said this to my wife last week. So far, the timeline of The Matrix has tracked, lol.
It was just the peak of the US, in some aspects anyway. With all my appreciation to all the good things that the US still does.
While we're on the subject of the Matrix... what happens if you take both pills?
The story continues. You wake up in Wonderland and believe how deep the rabbit hole goes.
One of them will be digested slightly earlier than the other. That one takes effect.
You do understand that, within the context of the film, the pills aren't anything special right?
Morpheus: The pill you took is part of a trace program. It’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signals so we can pinpoint your location.
Well, the events of 9/11/2001 were a pivotal moment in the united state's national consciousness. That was a traumatic event for the country; our national self esteem changed. The world became more of a scary place.
For the average unaware US citizen *
It also represented a tipping point for personal rights in the western world. Wholesale spying was something that "evil commies" did, and Intelligence agencies had to at least obscure their attempts at spying on their own citizens. Nowadays you have some western governments basically saying that the Stasi didn't go far enough.
Even before that, the dot-com crash ended the 90s high.
Between the end of the Asian financial crisis and the dot com was peak human civilization in my opinion.
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