There are few things more dangerous than fools convinced they have been exposed to a Revelation — gift them the belief that they now see things no one else can see and calamity will ensue. In this respect, the film The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999) has a lot to answer for.
I can’t think of any other cultural artefact that in its over-simplification and recycling of ready-made ideas1 has proved more revelatory to fools and therefore so poisonous2. All those fools who instead of realising their ignorance and their active participation in the system in which they exist, opt instead to believe they are being manipulated by mysterious forces. Forces that only a chosen few are able to see — only those willing to swallow the red pill, a medicine dispensed by terminally-online attention-hungry grifters these days. I am perhaps being unfair with the film’s original intentions but I’m sure you’re aware of the kind of swindler who ventriloquises The Matrix in 2023, when along comes the time to mobilise their armies of minions: snake oil sellers who range from far right “Deep State” buffoons, to toxic techbro billionaires, to social media-powered alleged sex traffickers. You join the dots.
The problem with conspiranoia — leaving aside that most conspiracy theories are a form of infantilism3 — is that this kind of thinking always goes to great lengths to explain in baroque ways things that are obvious. With the matrix metaphor it is the same. There are indeed forces controlling us and determining our lives but these are visible to anyone, no need for red pill. Our lives are determined by capital and the ways in which capital is allowed to flow and is sustained by the hegemony that controls it — how it turns into the Market (with capital M) or the State (with capital S), and all the joys and sorrows caused by this embodiment. The rest of our existence — from war to our sex lives to our minds to the cheese we eat — orbits around this rather simple phenomenon and should be no mystery at all to anyone who lives by that journalist maxim to “follow the money”. Want to understand why your life sucks, why you feel hollow and impotent? No, it’s not that girls don’t want to sleep with you or that it’s no longer OK to be racist in public: just follow the money and soon you’ll start to see the flows of capital and perhaps understand your role in the reproduction of those flows, what this costs you, how this affects your existence more than anything else in your life, and the ways of actually resisting, which are never outside of “the Matrix”, since there is no outside. Easier to blame this or that identity politics niche, this or that “cabal” (always a red flag), this or that minority gaining a voice, any dark force to explain the alienation and emptiness of our lives but the actual forces at play4.
In a way, The Matrix was the perfect film for the 90s. An era in appearance devoid of ideology5 found its perfect spectacular incarnation in a film that provided a metaphysical explanation for our very material alienation. A film in which the emancipation of humanity depended (once more) on a messianic figure. Now, in our very online era perhaps it is the perfect film again. Never as the revelation it never was but as a cultural symptom of a collective alienation that refuses to go away, and for which neither right nor left has ever found any credible answers6.
Plato, Descartes, Baudrillard, Zen Buddhism…
Zeitgeist: The Movie (Peter Joseph, 2007) follows closely…
A form of infantilism that given enough almost always ends in antisemitism, as Quassim Cassam argues in his aptly albeit obviously-titled book.
Another major problem is that for a conspiracy to work there needs to be secrecy and there is no possible secrecy in the numbers that would involve maintaining some of the most popular conspiracy theories. Take one of the most unhinged conspiracy theories out there, that the earth is flat. For this conspiracy to work we would need thousands if not millions in cahoots, across different cultures and ideologies, from astronauts, to scientists, to airline pilots, cabin crews, everyone working in the satellite industry, astronomers, and so on. It just doesn’t make sense that this number of people would be able to keep a secret. And can you imagine a better way for the Soviet Union to sabotage America during the Space Race than revealing that the earth is flat and that the Yankees never went to the moon because the moon is a cut on the roof or something like that? Obviously for the conspiranoid the Soviets were also in cahoots... As I am myself, writing this to make you swallow your blue pill… No, not Sildenafil — the other blue pill, the one that isn’t red.
Always in appearance, since nothing is ever non-ideological.
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in the mouth.” — Raoul Vaneigem (tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith).
Excellent. Too short. You've sent me off to look up and read Raoul Vaneigem.
But...but...if the Matrix wasn't a good movie...how will we get into shallow debates?