The seminal 1999 film The Matrix was not, as it appears on the surface, about technological singularity AI or philosophical gibberish about the nature of being. Rather, those things are simply plot devices to illustrate a profound political reality that was and remains timely: The way that systems of control evolve to become parasitic, absorbing the energy of individuals toward ends that neither give them a choice nor work to their benefit.
Origins
In an expository monologue, wise man Morpheus reveals that humankind had created artificial intelligence as a means to save itself from toil, and had begun delegating more and more of its labor and decision-making to machines. This mirrors the evolution of the modern corporation beginning in the years following World War 2, when both the mass-logistics and propaganda science of the world's militarized states became channeled into private entities in the United States: On the production side, most prominently in automotive and aircraft manufacturing, and on the information side, via Madison Avenue advertising.
In all fairness, even the unvarnished reality of these entities was by far preferable to the monstrous totalitarian states that were held up as the alternatives - i.e., Fascism and Communism - so these businesses took on the mantle of "freedom" and promised a limitless "Jetsons" future of unbounded opportunity and ever-decreasing labor for ever-increasing gains. Techno-optimism was only part of it, but the most fundamental message was that corporate bureaucracy would continuously work to the benefit of both consumers and employees. And, in fact, several visionary founders of modern corporations believed in this ideal and worked diligently to realize it:
Walt Disney is the most emblematic example of the visionary entrepreneur of 20th century America who truly bought into this dream. He had planned to use the Walt Disney Corporation as a vehicle for radical social progress, intending to create a utopian city called EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) where modern technology and corporate bureaucracy would be integrated into a seamless whole to basically make The Jetsons real. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, since he never had to see his dreams collide with reality), Disney died before the completion of EPCOT, with only the iconic but useless piece of modern art seen above having been built.
As the famous quote goes, "The Means are the Ends in the process of becoming," and the means through which Walt Disney had begun pursuing his dream were far from utopian: He basically used his money to exempt his company from any sort of elected authority in Florida, picking up land in deals that often went well beyond "shady" and buying himself political autonomy from inconvenient regulation. The results, following his death, when the Walt Disney Corporation has become an autonomous corporate entity governed entirely by Wall Street, have been anywhere from an embarrassing travesty to a monstrous blight on the founder's name. Disney the man had built a corporation to pursue human ends, but in the end, that corporation had deconstructed his vision into cynical means toward zero-sum monetary gain.
No enlightenment is sought, and precious little even permitted - instead, cargo cult zombie versions of Disney's entertainment products are iterated over and over, in increasingly grotesque and fantastical forms, with his practical visions almost completely abandoned. The closest thing to EPCOT that ever came into existence is Celebration, Florida - a creepy, master-plan suburban Potemkin Village where the residents have no say in how the underlying infrastructure is managed and configured: The concept of "community" reduced to its shallowest elements and sold as a service, as now seen all over the country in gated "communities" and similarly fake suburbs where no one knows anyone else or has any kind of substantive engagement.
As Agent Smith reveals in a monologue, the original Matrix was designed to be a perfect world where the machines thought people would all be happy - in the same fashion as the 1950/60s fantasy of suburban life, which was pretty much invented by advertisers as their idea of what people wanted. While it sounds cynical, in fact many wealthy businessmen and advertising people were sincere in their belief that this was what would free people - they were already deeply embedded in the Randian ideology that creativity and productivity come entirely from within, as some kind of magic immaculate conception that doesn't need any sort of social interaction to be born, so they thought the isolation of suburbia would unleash people's creative potential.
Since these corporate business types tend to be profoundly antisocial if not sociopathic, and thus prefer to live at arm's length from others, they projected their own qualities on to society. In a similar way, the machines of the Matrix projected their simple input/output nature on to their human charges, and tried to build a "perfect" world based on instant gratification and simplistic emotional coddling. In both cases, this projection and failure to appreciate the complexity of other beings leads to the fantasy falling apart: As Smith tells Neo, the human mind rejected the original Matrix as a "dream" and kept trying to wake up, causing system failure.
In suburbia, people did not become creative dynamos - they became self-involved, egoistic dullards who sought only mediocrity, and whatever energies were exercised ended up being directed toward anesthesia rather than revelation: Toward purely cosmetic beauty in both the environment and in people, producing a threadbare, taxidermy farce of human community that fell apart the moment it was no longer fed vast amounts of wealth. Meanwhile, in the same way the Matrix met people's emotional needs with trivial Happy things, people of suburbia fed their loneliness and emptiness with drugs and superficial hobbies, but anything resembling true passion or human depth was feared and strictly constrained: Homeowner's associations preventing people from having houses that look too different, outlawing every possible way for teenagers to have fun, enabling the useless scolds and gossips of the community while treating individualistic people as suspicious weirdos, de facto racial segregation enforced by local police departments who harass anyone who looks different, etc. etc.
What people didn't understand - and what, if we are honest, not even the sociopathic corporate people understood - was that the basic, evolutionary reason this lifestyle was being pushed was that it was the most efficient way for business to suck the life (i.e., money) out of people. Businessmen didn't set out with the understanding that the perfect way to turn people into consumer machines incapable of autonomous decision-making or internal fulfillment was to isolate them in suburbs - it was just sort of their instinct, and they created whatever ideas were necessary to rationalize it. So there was no grand comic book conspiracy involved: Just people acting out their nature. So suburbia was really the analog for the first Matrix: A bunch of superficial things that would supposedly make people happy, but really just made them increasingly restless and unfulfilled.
The disaster Agent Smith describes that ended the first Matrix is a profound and cryptically prophetic analogy to the collapse of the financial markets in 2008. This catastrophe was brought about as the inevitable end of the suburban fantasy, when millions of people used artificially over-abundant credit to buy houses they could not afford simply because they had been brought up on the belief that it was the central purpose of their lives and the key to happiness. Two previous cataclysms had occurred that presaged the 2008 collapse - one in 1987, and another in 2001 - but the process of collapse was already snowballing out of control by then, and each time the system responded by simply piling on more Happy pills: Giving people more credit to waste on consumer goods, giving the rich more cash to gamble with, etc. etc.
But fundamentally, the US economy has been The Matrix for decades: A system where individual effort (in the case of the movie, body heat) is harvested by the machinery, and rewarded barely at all - just enough to keep people alive, much like farm animals. Whenever any sort of backlash occurs, all sorts of cheap tricks and workarounds are used to keep the process as it is - if Americans won't tolerate working for nothing, just send their jobs to countries where people have no choice until the former are battered into submission by unrelenting poverty and lack of opportunity. The soaring profits from these moves can then be used to corrupt US government and force legislative changes that the public does not support, such as in the passage of corporate dictatorship laws such as those passed by Scott Walker and Rick Snyder (what is it with Republicans and the name Rick?) in Wisconsin and Michigan - both strongly pro-labor states.
The Dismal Matrix
As Agent Smith tells Neo, the second and more stable Matrix made no attempt to make its captives happy - instead, it allows them free reign to make each other as miserable as they please without benevolent interference, but of course their freedom has limits: They must not challenge the underlying system that contains them, or else they will call into effect the virtually indestructible Agent programs that exist to exterminate disruptive anomalies. We have been moving into the real-world analog of the second Matrix ever since George W. Bush seized power in 2001, but enough people were still living in fantasy land that it hadn't become the standard system until 2010 when Republicans (an imperfect analog for Agents) responded to their massive electoral losses two years earlier by having their Supreme Court justices declare corporations to be people and money to be speech so they could buy the next election and Congress.
This kind of jarringly brazen interference in American democracy (like Bush v. Gore a decade earlier) was analogous to the "deja vu cat" that attended interference in the Matrix by its operators - i.e., they sensed the presence of potential challenges to the system, and created their own disruptions in order to seek out and destroy them. Basically, it's a demonstration that they are not willing to play by the rules they set for their captives, and will arbitrarily break or redefine them if at any point those rules become inconvenient for their continued dominion. Also like in the Matrix, the fact that these acts of interference have been gaining in both frequency and wantonness is an indication of growing urgency (I won't say "desperation" quite yet) on the part of the system operators (i.e., those who benefit from it).
The very reason for the "Dismal Matrix" to exist in the first place was that the machines had discovered that the more control they exerted, the more unstable the system would ironically become - so the ideal solution to their perpetual dominion over mankind would be a system where no control at all is necessary (analogous to libertarianism). Unfortunately, as in the real world, that just doesn't work: Give people freedom, and sooner or later they will defy what you intend them to use it for. So instead the machines build a hybrid system where most events proceed as the peons make them, but every once in a while a potentially dangerous trend has to be crushed through forceful interference by the overlords. But every time interference occurs, the consequences cascade and sow the seeds of further and more evolved disruptions until they reach a point of resonance and the system is met with a choice: Allow a disruption to occur, or be destroyed by any possible intervention on their own part.
The Red Pill
This is where we run into the universal reality of democratic change, and the "long arc of justice": Sooner or later, arbitrary intervention (i.e., rule-breaking) by the enforcers of rules ends up causing more disruptions than it stops, and at that point if you have a system that lacks the intelligence to sense when it is hurting itself, it will become an instrument of its own destruction or crippling. Fortunately for human progress, the very act of an entity sensing that it is hurting itself requires that it first actually do so, which means that a system must always go a certain distance in empowering its own dynamic forces before attempting to tamp them back down. However, even that is too simplistic, because eventually systems become aware of this cycle and harness it to expose potentially disruptive elements in order to eradicate them.
In human history, this is the strategy of employing "provocateurs" to dredge up dissent in order for authoritarian governments to identify and deal with them as they see fit, either through continued monitoring, imprisonment, or elimination. In the second Matrix, the system is described as being designed to channel anomalies into the creation of a single mind - "The One" - that releases disruptive energies along a planned pathway, leading to the recurring destruction of rebellious forces. Real authoritarian regimes are too insecure to stage their own insurrections just to destroy them, but politics and economics are rife with counterfeit rebellion wielded like an anglerfish's lure to mesmerize and distract prey.
From the constant attempts of commercial advertising to portray some mass-market product designed by committee as an act of individuality; to corrupt media that only defies political authority when a law or policy becomes inconvenient to its owners; to astroturf phenomena like the Tea Party; the energies of dissent naturally spawn countless versions of camouflage for forces that serve the status quo to masquerade themselves as its enemies. A live worm on a hook doesn't know it's bait, doesn't know it's part of some plan involving fish and some drunk schmuck in a dinghy, and couldn't really do anything differently even if it did know and could understand - and that's pretty much the same thing with teabaggers, libertarians, and the like: People who are literally tools, believing that they serve agendas they will never, ever realize, but instead always just serving a bunch of rich folks who want to rule the world as kings.
And that is at the very heart of the entire system: Beneath the shallow consumer impulse, beneath the stock market, beneath the professionals who enable it, beneath the politicians who serve it, beneath the deluded Randian priesthood who rationalizes it, beneath the reactionaries who defend it with violent rhetoric, it all just boils down to a few thousand ultra-rich people who are so wrapped up in their own little worlds they literally believe themselves to be the only real humans and everyone else to have been put on this Earth to serve them. They are so insulated from reality that they don't even articulate this belief - it's just there from Day One, largely unspoken, and unfolds organically from every decision they make, amplified through every layer of employment surrounding them.
The "mob market" of Wall Street is just another, more elite Matrix that keeps the upper-middle-class and seven-figure "petty lords" in line with fantasies of The Big Score, the Big Deal, the Wonder Trade, the Jackpot that elevates them into the highest echelons of society and the Inner Party of the GOP. But the only people who are truly, fundamentally served by the system as it has existed for decades number only in the thousands, and you know many of their names: Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, etc.
Even those among them who are intellectually and politically opposed to being given this kind of power (like Buffett) are ironically powerless to stop it, in the same way that it is impossible for a "good" king to "free" his people like so many children's fairy tales claim - in the exercise of power, the basis of that power is affirmed. And mere abdication simply passes power to some other interest that may not have as highly-evolved a system of order as the reigning ruler, unleashing chaos and violence beyond imagining - from Louis XVI to Robespierre, from the Romanovs to the Bolsheviks, from the Kaiser to the Fuhrer - even if there is some interregnum where unstable democracy is attempted.
One of the reasons this happens is that people have been so long buried under oppressive, highly-evolved systems of control, that they don't understand what their choices are: They believe that the choice is to go on as always or else take down the system with a wrecking ball, no matter how many people end up buried in the rubble - even if it eviscerates the creative potential of their society, and turns their entire civilization into a rotting corpse. Lacking the imagination to see what realistic better futures could be achieved, they instead see fantasies of what they believe should be - that no one ever lives up to - and are so embittered by them that they commit societal suicide in wanton acts of genocide or ideological purges.
In light of this reality, one of the massive philosophical accomplishments of The Matrix is that the hero does not attempt to destroy the machines - there is no magical Salvation moment where the deception is turned off and everyone wakes up, which is how Hollywood would prefer to do it according to its own Matrix-like formulas of what people want to see. Rather, the entire battle is about having the access to confront people with a real choice rather than their living and dying without ever even knowing there was something more to life than what the system tells them. It is about every person, and not just some preternaturally insightful elite, being faced with the choice between reality and shallow fantasies that aren't even all that comforting - because, again, we're talking about the Dismal Matrix where even the lie sucks: The unregulated, vulture capital system where people's choices as consumers and workers are reduced virtually to nothing by wealth accumulation and market monopolism, so even the illusory freedom of the 20th century corporate economy is taken away.
So the fear of facing reality becomes less and less the thinner and more ridiculous the fantasy becomes: You're no longer being asked to sacrifice a utopian Matrix / suburban dream life, but rather to discard some shitburg of a system where you're reduced to a battery and given a cubicle job and a dysfunctional marriage for your trouble - a real-world economic system where your life's blood is sucked away by the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of someone who actually worked for a living to make a fortune, and whose vast webs of inherited economic interest make it virtually impossible for you to replicate their ancestor's success.
You are no longer promised a car, a house, a living wage and benefits, a one-income family, free time, healthcare, safe and beautiful communities, and a secure and free country in exchange for your fealty to these people: In fact, you're not promised anything anymore, but they require you promise them everything. They demand that you will not unionize, that you will not complain, that you will not report violations of the law, that you will work as long as they tell you at all cost to family and self at whatever rate of compensation they please, that you will not elect anyone or pass laws they do not approve of, that you will not protest, that you will not exercise any rights whatsoever against them - basically, that you will not contradict them in any way when their every word and deed says you are not human and do not need or deserve to be treated like one.
In essence, the first Matrix - which, as we've said, can be analogized to the 20th century suburban American Dream - degenerated into the Communist system it had supposedly evolved to combat: One where people have no choices, are beaten down by authority and hyper-concentrated power, and the organs of both state and society are controlled by unelected elites who have no merit in the areas they control. Whether in Communism or capitalism, the Dismal Matrix comes to increasingly resemble what it is - a machine to guarantee that the people who have power keep it, and everyone else gets no say in the matter. Soviet Russia had the Politburo, and we have ALEC - both examples of people who were officially just political advisors or lobbyists to their governments, but in practical fact were the rulers. That much has become clear in our case as ALEC legislation overwhelmingly opposed by the public sails through the political system on both the state and federal level with minimal obstruction.
And to seal the deal, they isolate people from the knowledge of our choices by controlling the media - corrupting information until so-called "news" basically sounds like it was written by and for people who still feel irked that Daddy only gave them one Ferrari for their 16th birthday. That is the struggle we all face today: Not to destroy The Matrix / the corporate economy, since it is the natural byproduct of the negative aspects of human nature. Rather, the struggle is to reach people with the true choice, between reality and freedom vs. continued enslavement to a system that no longer serves them beyond giving them the pathetic security of being inconsequential. The struggle is to show people the path of danger and possibility - to irritate them with knowledge of its existence, and the nagging awareness that lingering in the status quo is just one of many options, and often not the best one.
But even while acknowledging the naivete of the American Dream as originally envisioned, we must resurrect that Dream for ordinary people in a stronger, more robust form, because it's not acceptable that people who simply lack vision have to spend their lives working at Walmart for $9.00 an hour as serfs to some scumbag billionaires. Dullards and mediocrities have a right to a safe, quiet, and prosperous existence, just as those who burn with the fires of discovery and creation deserve to have clearly-marked exits from The Matrix rather than being hunted as cancers. You cannot have one without the other: There is no such thing as "Going Galt" - if your workers are impoverished foreign peons with no social conception of what makes your output worthwhile, good luck doing anything more than lording over them as a master of slaves; or else build a society that dampens creativity in service to mediocrity, and watch the slow-oozing entropic disintegration the entire Western world has been experiencing for decades. Sooner or later, you have to acknowledge that this is all part of one thing, and plan accordingly.
The Matrix will always be with us, as long as human beings are capable of cowardice, denial, and shallow thoughts and emotions, but freedom is the point of balance - the worldline pivot where people have the practical ability to choose their destiny in moments of decision. That is the underlying truth of democracy and liberal society - not acts of destruction, nor paternalistic acts of subservience to weakness. Good government is that which most clearly provides people with real choice rather than just sticking different brand labels on the same crap that all only serves a tiny minority of people. It is government that neither cuts off awareness of the road less taken nor treats humble people with simple ambitions as marks to be preyed upon; that neither throws people to the wolves nor puts genius in silk-lined cages.
That is the real American Dream, that made our society originally so radical and catalytic for the rest of the world: The fundamental recognition of people having a choice in the course of history rather than being chained to some fate inherited from their parents or God. The mundane American Dream of increasing economic prosperity was simply a consequence of this far more basic and profound belief, and one that follows naturally from the health (or declines naturally from the illness) of our awareness of that principle. Robust awareness means that anything is possible - at least over time, with sustained effort - so sooner or later, a day or a millennium, people always run out of excuses and end up once again taking up the mantle of freedom to build a better future. I just don't see any purpose to waiting any longer.