Refusing to be Human?
March 4th, 2005 by Hen(warning: sombre thoughts, it’s been a bad week)
A month or so back, a friend of mine (my boss in fact) announced that he was resigning from the human race. I know how he feels.
On the one hand we have the governments of the world, a more sordid group of degenerates as you could hope to meet. Pick a country, google for that country and atrocity and you’ll probably find some nice allegations. It’s not all old either (of course). We (the ignorant people) discover atrocities of 30 years ago etc all the time, so what will we be discovering in 30 years time. All the time they’re on the take to one level or another.
Then we have the wonder of corporations. Creating a subscription-model, consumer-owning, herd-like society. Their advertising branch (aka the media) keep our minds chained with sweet placebos, while their product branches recycle ideas and invent buzz. We’ve created these entities which are singularly evolved to gorging themselves on us, and they unashamedly do so. If they were predators from the animal kingdom we’d be pointing out how they can’t help do what’s in their nature.
The irony of the Matrix trilogy is not that it could be true, and we don’t know that we’re plugged into the machine; it’s that the matrix does exist, but it’s a far more insidious one of our own creation. It’s the twins of government and economics, criss-crossing the 10,000 year old society we have, and increasingly intermeshed into what makes us human.
Not wanting to turn this into a verbal Matrix masturbation (there are so many online already), but I’d like to use it for material one time more. In the film it’s so easy to be against Cypher (Joe Pantiliano, great rat-faced actor) for wanting to plug back into the matrix, but when you start considering cancelling the cable access, avoiding the boxed-set dvd for christmas, not getting an X-Box 3, avoiding large-chain restaurants and not upgrading to that Powerbook G5; wouldn’t you want to plug back in too?