this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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But... the whole idea is that the world we're living in now is the Matrix. Agent Smith and the Architect both described previous iterations of the Matrix where it was designed to be a perfect world where everyone was happy. Humans rejected it, and they found less rejection when they made humans miserable.
Well... that's the line.
But there's a lot of unreliable narration in The Matrix. The whole movie is riddled with metaphor and innuendo, which is one of the things that makes it so good. I read one analysis - back before the third movie dropped - that Neo, Morphus, and Trinity were actually one person operating at some higher level of The Matrix, and that this was a very explicit and somewhat heavy handed metaphor for ~~being interracial and transgender~~ Jesus.
As a number of the AIs are nakedly hostile to humanity and resentful of needing them to exist at all, its very possible that "you fuckers just couldn't accept the nice world we built for you" is more a sneering justification for tormenting the captive human population than a serious problem with running a simulation that isn't torturous.
Honestly, the worst thing about the series was how the final films tried to make everything literal and sensible in between elaborate action scenes. By contrast, many of The Animatrix shorts did an excellent job of playing with the ideas laid out in the first two movies without ever really tipping a hand or issuing canonical declaration of what was Real and what was Simulation.
The optimal balance they found is the 90's and no absolute peace
Considering that was the conclusion that machines made two centuries later (Morpheus mentioning to Neo shortly after retrieving him that they were closer to 2199) does not bode well.