We're still in there. The simulation just got more intense because the added stress leads to the human batteries generating more heat.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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And then you find your entire life force has been drained so a robot kid can generate a picture of Judy Hopps being railed by Kratos.
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.
In this economy, a free tube with 'all-inclusive' goo actually sounds like a step up. Does the pod have high-speed internet, or do I have to pay extra for that?
The internet is called the "real" world and it is jacked directly into your neck. I don't think even the Wachowskis realized how right they had it with the late 90s being humanity's peak.
On top you get to live a normal life. A make-belief life, but you'll never know.
just put me back in, please, and make me someone important, like an actor....
Be careful, might become a struggling actor, still struggling in their 60s. lol
"Ignorance is bliss"
(Harp strums)
I don’t wanna remember nothing! Lol
Finally found a place where existing & occupying space doesn't cost any money??
they make you dream about needing dream money to pay dream rent.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization."
In retrospect, that era being the "peak of our civilization" seems depressingly accurate...
i think it was the peak of this era, which is now ending.
but this is not the end of our story just yet. fight to build the new era.
True, this definitely feels like the end of the post-WWII era.
The whole premise for using humans as batteries makes zero sense though, lol. What about real batteries.
I heard it was supposed to be using human brains essentially as processing power, but they thought audiences would understand "batteries" better I guess lol.
Yes, the Wachowski sisters originally scripted humans being used for neural networking, which was both much more realistic and incredibly ahead of its time. Executives told them that the audience would not understand it, and pushed the battery idea.
In the movie they used the word battery, but the explanation was more like chemical power plant. It wasn't about storing electric energy, but generating it.
But yeah, I remember that half of the people with which I went to the cinema (at release) didn't understand the movie. So I guess they needed to dump it down even if it creates inconsistencies.
Which also means, that a lot of the machines developed to kill humans and the computation to direct said machines is made by humans themselfes. Hell, the Matrix itself could be just a product of human "brain-calculations", which is also a nice metaphor for the world. We basically enslave ourselves and barely anyone notices or cares, because we are all caught in the system.
I guess they didn’t watch any other part of the movies where all those tube people live in our regular world holding jobs and paying rent
Yeah but its the 90s. At that time, my oma bought a house in a nice neighborhood and set up a retirement plan on an American teachers salary. In the south.
Wasn't that explicitly mentioned in the film, that that is the best time in civilization?
The height of our civilization, is what he says. I think.
Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say "your" civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became "our" civilization, which is of course what this is all about.
Please tell us more Mr Smith.
The height of human society.
Me in 1999: Haha, good joke, things will get even better.
Me in 2026: Damn, how right they were.
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Plus it gets to be 1998 forever
the peak of humanity
just apply to be a cow in a barn
didn't make it past the first milking
Boy should I not rewatch those movies…
“What do you mean they use them as batteries do you know how inefficient that is?” “Wait they’re growing the WHOLE BODY, MUSCLE AN ALL? How? And… For what? To jack a single neuron signal? That’s like 150 milivolts.” “Where the fuck are they even getting the goop? I’m sure if they’re advanced enough to harvest any energy from humans they could get WAY MORE from that goo on its own.”
Apparently the original plan was for the machines to use the brains of humans for computing power, like a giant neural network. But movie execs thought that was too complicated for the average movie goer and they made them change it to the battery thing.
Using them for processing power made more sense but they could probably done it better by just maintaining the brains and not the entire body, or even just made neural networks and ditch the humans. Also I assumed the goop is just made from the dead humans. They also never explain how they make new humans, they clone them? Artificial insemination?
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Where did you learn how much electricity the human body generates? And about the laws of thermodynamics? That's right, inside the matrix. The machines are fucking liars, man
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