“What do you mean real? Give me a definition of the real, ”Morpheus asks a bewildered Neo in one of the topical scenes of The Wachowski sisters' iconic film The Matrix , which is now over 20 years old . Neo, who has not yet become the Chosen One to lead the rebellion against the machines, is confused by the question. After swallowing the red pill that allows him to see beyond the digital simulation in which humanity lives unaware (while it is actually imprisoned in factory farms from which the machines draw energy), he has to deal with the new reality that is being brought to him. para in front. Indeed: with "the desert of reality", as Morpheus himself says .
This same term appears on the first page of Simulacra e impostura , an essay by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard , published for the first time in France in 1981. The book is explicitly mentioned in the Matrix : the same Neo, before meeting Morpheus, uses it as a hiding place in to hide the illegal software it sells on the black market. If, on the other hand, he had read it, he would have perhaps caught the quote about the "desert of reality" and also become aware of the Matrix that surrounds it a little in advance.
From a book to The Matrix: Resurrections
In some ways, Simulacri e impostura is a real red pill: the explicit point of reference from which the Wachowski sisters started for the theoretical construction of the quadrilogy ( Resurrections is in Italian cinemas from 1 January 2022). Indeed, it is in this essay that Baudrillard argues that the consumer society of the late twentieth century is a society in which simulations or imitations of reality have become more real than reality itself. A condition which Baudrillard gives the famous definition of "hyperreal" .
Consumer culture has now reached a stage where our lives are filled with simulations, objects and practices that seem to represent something else, but have actually replaced the reality they seem to refer to. Ours is a society in which there is no longer a need to walk or run as a means of travel, but in which running has become a recreational and healthy activity to be carried out with special technical equipment: the simulation of something that we actually did before. . Similarly, through labels such as "bio", "km 0" and more, we only simulate the experience of what was previously our normal nourishment.
In this way, the world of simulations increasingly takes on a life of its own, while reality is eroded to the point of becoming "a desert of the real". From this point of view, the entire first Matrix trilogy can be interpreted (and in fact it has been interpreted) as a critique of the consumer society, which distracts us from the reality in which we live and from the exploitation to which we are subjected. A criticism that could also be defined as Marxist : not only because Karl Marx is one of Baudrillard's main references, but because the exploitation of the working class, for the German thinker, is made possible by the fact that he does not realize he is being exploited. It too lives, forcing the comparison, in a Matrix generated by the ideologies and religions that Marx hated so much.
From Karl Marx to the metaverse
Marx's class struggle is replaced, in the post-industrial era and according to Baudrillard, by the problem of simulation: it is also for this reason that Baudrillard is brought up not only when analyzing the Matrix , but also every time one refers to the social impact of technologies such as virtual reality. What would Baudrillard, who passed away in 2007, have thought of the metaverse ? Of that digital and immersive world, to be experienced in virtual reality and in which the giants of Silicon Valley (starting with Facebook) aim to transfer a growing part of our daily life , from work to fun, from sport to socializing?
A digital world that, if that weren't enough, is being designed just as our planet is rocked by the climate crisis and grappling with a pandemic. It could be provocatively argued that the metaverse is being built to lock us up in a reassuring virtual environment that replicates the world as we knew it, hiding from our view the less and less hospitable reality in which we truly live.
From this point of view, the literary references of the metaverse would no longer be the only novels Snow Crash (where the term "metaverse" appears for the first time) or Ready Player One (in which the metaverse takes complete form), but also the Matrix itself , which significantly raises the level of dystopia by imagining a society in which people immersed in the simulation are not even aware that they are.
Baudrillard's attack on the Matrix
In light of the relationship between Baudrillard's analyzes and the Matrix narrative, the Wachowskis had contacted the French philosopher to provide advice for the two sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions . Baudrillard flatly refused, explaining how his philosophy was badly misunderstood by the film. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, he said this: “There have already been other films that have dealt with this growing indistinction between real and virtual, such as the Truman Show , Minority Report or even Mulholland Drive , David Lynch's masterpiece. Here (in The Matrix , editor's note) the device is more crude and does not really arouse disturbance . Either the characters are in the Matrix, that is, in the digitization of things, or they are radically outside, that is, in Zion, the city of those who resist. Indeed it would be interesting to show what happens at the junction of the two worlds ”.
Not content with having diminished the revolutionary significance of the Matrix, Baudrillard continued: "What is embarrassing in this film is above all that the new problem posed by simulation is here confused with the very classic one of illusion, which was already in Plato. The real misunderstanding is here ". Summing up, Baudrillard stated that the Wachowski sisters' true philosophical debt was with Plato's famous cave myth , in which humans who have seen only shadows cast against the walls think that this is reality, and only after freeing themselves from their chains who force them into the cave get to know the real world.
Instead, according to researcher Randy Laist , “Baudrillard's fundamental intuition in Simulacra and imposture is that the Platonic duality between reality and representation has imploded in the real world, resulting in a hyperreal condition in which the criteria of truth and falsity do not apply. more". The reading of the Matrix would therefore be not very refined, in some ways antiquated and above all not up to the standard of films like The Truman Show or Mulholland Drive (we could also add They Live by John Carpenter), which had better investigated this fusion between reality and representation. . In the Matrix , in a nutshell, a dichotomous reading would be proposed again, which in our society has already been overcome.
There is, however, another aspect that Baudrillard did not tolerate about the Matrix . In some of his works, the philosopher has analyzed the way in which, in our society, protest and rebellion have been increasingly absorbed and exploited by what he called "the symbolic system of capitalism". And the same actually seems to happen with the film Matrix , an exemplary product of that same world that it criticizes: " Matrix is absolutely within this mechanism – said the philosopher in the interview with the Nouvel Observateur – Everything that belongs to order of the dream, of utopia, of fantasy, here it is given to us to see and it is realized. We are in full transparency. The Matrix is a bit like the film about the Matrix that could have made the Matrix itself ”.
