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Deep Magic: Matrix, Menace and Virtual Reality
Matrix or Matrices: "That in which anything originates, develops, takes shape or is contained."
Battles rage all over the Net about what a geek is or isn't and who is or isn't one.
Here's a new, cheap and reliable litmus test: geeks will almost certainly love the "Matrix".
Like technology, movies are unpredictable. They rarely do what's expected of them. Despite market research, focus groups and surveys, people often don't react to them the way they're supposed to. Maybe that's why movies about technology are so interesting.
But when techies, nerds, Webheads and normal people look back on l999, I bet they won't be remembering "Phantom Menace", the first movie to ever make a profit before it appeared in a single theater, but "Matrix," an amazing movie about virtual reality that came from nowhere. Pizza Hut doesn't any "Neo" action figures and there are no "Morpheus" dolls at Toys "R" Us. This movie had to make it at the box office, not the toy store or fast-food franchise, and it did.
In several ways, both of these movies cover the same ground. Both are based on the same time-honored myth: young man leaves home when duty calls, setting out to save his world, confronting the demons within as well those from without.
Both movies are stuffed with mythic references and symbols and religious imagery: the Chosen One is sought and found, so that the world (a/k/a Force) can be saved and we can all ascend to a better place. The "Matrix" takes this language even further, with references to Zion and other Biblical places.
In both movies, the hero is opposed by overwhelming technological superiority, but, despite fancy guns and light swords, he ultimately has to put the machines down and look deep within himself for the weapons he really needs to win. The late mythologist Joseph Campbell, who inspired much of the Star Wars mythology, thought that Star Wars was about two of the oldest and most potent myths in the world: the inherent conflict between man and his machines, and the humanity (or lack) it behind the masks.
Since our culture has few remaining rituals, he wrote, the young have no way of learning how to live in civilization, apart from the stories they see and tell to one another (in our time this would be TV, movies, music, the Net and Web).
As Campbell suggested, both movies present technology as a central drama for the world. Is the spirit stronger than the machine, or the science that creates the machines? Can we control the things we make?
George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers aren't the first to take on this question. Mary Shelley did it in "Frankenstein", Bram Stoker did it in "Dracula," and so did Bob Kane, creator of Batman. It's no accident that these are some of the most popular and successful stories in the world.
Both "The Matrix" and "Star Wars" are suffused with technological imagery, computer animation and an acute digital consciousness. Both present the future as technologically centered, dangerous and unstable.
One difference: "The Matrix" is much more of a hacker movie than "Phantom Menace." In "Matrix" good guys are - uncharacteristically for Hollywood -- hackers, and they fight the forces of evil by hacking into the system.
In my mind, both movies (and the Star Wars series) have a powerful and timely political theme: the individual against bigness, battling the growing corporatism that is the dominating economic, and perhaps political, reality of the late 20th century.
The Empire and the Matrix are both none-too-subtle stand-ins for the mass-marketed bigness that is making work a nightmare, making money the only possible corporate goal, squelching individual expression and creativity and making Hype an oppressive social reality.
Both movies recognize this bigness as evil, without explicitly saying so. But since both hackers and geeks are fiercely individualistic and distrust bigness, both movies strike a chord. In George Lucas's movies, evil is never really vanquished, only unmasked. The end result of almost all of his movies is: No Matter What You Do To Them, They Will Be Back. He's right. They always are. The Matrix is comparatively more hopeful.
But despite the similiarities between the two, the movie that cries out to be seen more than once is "Matrix, " which soundly thumps Lucas on his own much hyped turf. (There isn't much need to go back and ponder the neurotic Jar Jar's mystic references.)
"Matrix" was the first Hollywood movie that's come close to capturing the sometimes bizarre - even spiritual - quality of virtual reality, the uniquely cyber-sense of existing in two different dimensions or zones, the digital plane increasingly life-like, colorful, realistic and captivating.
For most people, the experience of going online is routinized and commercial, involving research, work, shopping, auctioning, e-mailing , trawling for information.
But for some people, at least some of the time, there is the sense of living on the border between two different worlds, and even sometimes of losing track of which is real and which virtual. Gamers and MUD'ers say that this sometimes happen to them when they've played with the same character long enough (or too long), and know the trials, pitfalls and tracks of a game so well they feel as if they live there. Or when they've found themselves drawn too deeply into the life of a character they've created.
Sometimes coming back to the real world is sad and disorienting. Sometimes they feel more like their character than their physical self.
I have close online friends I've never spoken with, met or seen. Once in awhile, I wonder if they're real, or if they're precisely who they say they are.
Programmers transfixed on the paintaking, sometimes joyous experience of writing code that works or solves problems also talk about living in two realities, and once in awhile, losing a precise grip on which is which. Many hate the pressures of the real day-to-day world, feeling most alive writing code.
"Sometimes you get in 'The Zone'," one programmer tells me. " I don't think it's another dimension like you're thinking, but I think any virtuoso has that-- a guitarist putting out a kick ass solo or a hacker kicking out hundreds of lines of golden code. It's not other worldly, but its an odd sensation. You operate on instinct and sometimes don't realize it. And the next day you look at what you did and kinda go 'wow'." I have a hard time classifying it as another place. Its just a matter of being hyperfocused on a task. I'm not going anywhere, I'm just performing really well and you get lost in it."
But to me, that is another place, one never experienced by the vast majority of people, and cyberspace is, increasingly a different reality, a virtual one, as the Matrix suggested. The virtual world is very much a place where things originate, develop and take shape -- continuously.
Some people have always seen programs and code as having a "golden" or mystical edge. In the New Hacker's Dictionary, Eric Raymond writes about "deep magic," which he defines as: "An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compare black art); one that could only have been composed by a true wizard. Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of OS design used to be deep magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.
"Deep magic" is something only a handful of people can really do. That makes it an alternate reality all of its own, something that sets them far apart.
The Net is a powefully representational medium. Anything that can be listened to, written or whose image can be captured, can be represented online. So increasingly, the world out there can be replicated in here.
For me, this experience of crossing the boundary between literal and virtual reality is most often apt to happen when I'm trawling on some mailing list somebody has suggested I subscribed to, or lately, on some weblogs.
Working on a column about weblogs, I was going from one to another, surprised at the graphic quality, good writing and smart thought. They were crammed with ideas, links and non-hostile conversations.
I spent several hours going from one to another, returning late at night for several nights. I was trawling through one of the last around midnight one night, tired and not really focusing, and I came across a lengthy and impassioned essay accusing a writer of self-interest and other short-comings and arguing that he didn't belong on a particular website. The piece struck me as angry, almost bitter, and I didn't like the writer being described either.
It wasn't until I looked at the piece more closely that I realized that the website was Slashdot and the writer was me. The sensation was disorienting as I came across quote after quote of my own words in this completely unexpected place, and in a completely different -- and hostile -- context than I'd written them. For a second, I couldn't quite grasp how I could be reading such a thing while researching a piece for the very site I shouldn't be writing for. Or why I didn't recognize my own words. Other times - rare - I might write something that just works, for reasons I never understand, and which sparks all sorts of discussion, comment and response. In this cases, I sometimes make new friends, and start conversations that might go on for months, even years.
This experience is so different from traditional journalism, and so powerful -- and in some ways, so complicated and internal -- that it's not possible to share with people in the real world, including my own family. Even if I could, I'm not sure I'd want to. It would take too long, and isn't really possible to recreate, much like the programmer writing his "golden" code above.
In a way, the "Matrix" brilliantly captured this sensation of dual realities that comes from working and exploring the Net and Web but actually living in a completely different plane, or "zone." We always know who are and where we live - the reality of our lives - yet we can enter a special place.
We have one language for the people we know online, even a different, sometimes freer way of speaking. There are different procedures, protocols, politics, sensibilities here. We know names and places people offline don't know. Programmers have a completely unique language that can only be understood by other programmers. After awhile, the gap widens.
We (even non-programmers like me) increasingly live in one dimension, they live in another. The distance becomes so great it really can't be articulated, and the virtual reality is as powerful as any other.
The "Matrix" did several other memorable things. It raised martial arts to a cinematic art form. It had a sense of humor about itself (remember the only time Neo smiled? When a martial arts program was being downloaded into his head.) It captured the edgy, bristly, unpredictable, geeky deep magic of the Net and the Web in a way that has completely eluded Lucas, or that he decided to ignore.
It portrayed the sensation not only of creating a software program, but of living in a software program, a feeling not unfamiliar to hard-core hackers, geeks and programmers. In one scene in "Matrix," Mouse the programmer creates a training program for Neo in which the hacker encounters a beautiful woman, put in the program to distract him from the bad guys. Later, Mouse asks him if he liked the woman, and if so, if he'd like to meet her. In Neo's world, and in the Matrix, it's not a fantasy but a real possibility.
One test of a movie is how long it stays behind, how much if it is imprinted on the moviegoer. In that sense, the "Matrix" is triumphant, leaving"Phantom Menace" in the dust. That makes it the geek movie of the year.
Jon, articles like this one are the reason so many people dislike you so strongly.
There is no defining authority on what people must/must not do to be a geek. And if one were to be appointed, there are a whole lot of people who'd be higher on the list of nominations than you are. So stop trying to tell us what we're supposed to think, what we must do to be official, authorized geeks. Try observing and recording rather than defining, and I expect you'll find that geeks like you better. Though your status in our peculiar gift-exchange culture may be low enough now that nothing'll help...
Oh, and when a programmer tells you that "the Zone" he gets into isn't a place, you might want to try believing him, instead of making up wild hypotheses about what he's really thinking that he didn't tell you about. You're mixing up two concepts without understanding either one.
The first is "Deep Hack Mode", that state a programmer gets into where the code flows like water, and every compile is error-free. It's a state of mind, not a place, and may be the thing hackers value above all else. It's not, in fact, unique to hacking... I've experienced it when swinging a broadsword, too (a different kind of hacking, you might say)... there, it's a state of mind where everything starts to slow down, you can see where your opponent is going and react before he starts to move, and your blade goes exactly where it needs to be without conscious guidance. You don't *go* anywhere, though, you aren't in some other world... it's the same old world, it's just running a little slow.
The other concept is that of cyberspace, a completely immersive virtual reality, which *is* another world (for sufficiently small values of "world"), that may or may not exist in the same space as this one. Gibson's matrix did... there was a one-to-one correspondence between real space and virtual space. Stephenson's didn't, and is a more accurate reflection of where I personally think we're headed. The point is, though, that cyberspace and deep hack mode are _not_ the same thing.
are involved with today, but I definitely would
not go as far as saying that all geeks like
the Matrix, or that anyone that likes the
Matrix is a geek.
I'd even suggest that there is yet to be what
one can call the defining geek movie, because,
as pointed out before, geeks are not the same
as techno-nerds. It's nearly impossible to
isolate the single aspect that defines geekdom.
However, in terms of movies, geeks tend to rave
more about movies that *aren't* blockbusters
or award winning, but instead movies that are
unique and different and break from the acceptible
norm (just like geeks themselves). While none
of the movies I list below I'd consider to be
*the* geek movie, these are the types of films
that you hear mentioned in their circles often.
- Any Stalney Kubrick film, specifically
clockwork Orange, 2001, and Dr. Stangelove.
Kubrick broke the mold of movie making with these
films, *and* incorporated a number of mind-opening
ideas into them. He will be sorely missed.
- Bladerunner. A very very grim vision of the
future, and if this was enough to scare William
Gibson, it's enough to scare me. (*still waiting
for the rumors of a Neuromancer film with much
more Gibson control over the final output*)
- Heathers, or Clerks. Both were sleepers, and
both were very very dark comedy. For some
reason, these movies seem to be popular with
geeks, maybe because we are sufficient away
from the norm of sensitizing to be able to avoid
the typical feelings associated with death or
other morbid topics.
- Army of Darkness, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Clue, and others - Written to be
campy but with humor, these movies knew how to
make fun for themselves. Something about how
geeks know how to make fun of themselves as well.
(And what probably makes MST3K a prime canditate
for *the* geek show).
Also note that geeks do love the very popular
films (Pulp Fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc
etc), but these truely don't belong to the geek;
they are directed towards the audience at large,
and lack the elements that some of the films
above have.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Haven't the evil computers heard of nuclear or geothermal power? Why exactly do they need to be at a _virtual_ telephone to leave or enter VR? Why won't a virtual cell phone work? Or a virtual banana, really? Why does the computer program feel the need to make its agents human-like? Why not just crush them with 2000-ton weights?
I can go on, but the point is the movie didn't really CARE about technology beyond being a way to 1) make people say "woah that's so weird and deep" and 2) have an excuse to have special effects to make people say "woah, that's so cool and pretty".
Which is fine for a hollywood blockbuster, but hardly makes it geek art.
--
The most fascinating thing I find about both Star Wars and The Matrix is the constant references to the battle between our spiritual and our logical sides.
As we become more "civilized", we desire greater and greater mastery of our environment. The feeling that programming brings us is complete mastery over this one part of our environment. (Linux anyone?) Programming is a art derived from the depths of Aristotlian logic. Everything is completely deterministic and non-random in programming.
Contrast that to the world outside of the computer, which operates in a continous relm, which we cannot fully grasp or comprehend. It may be deterministic, but unless we know the complete state of the universe, we will never know what exactly will happen next. We have intuitions, ideas, and worries about the real world, but are they always 100% correct? Our emotions and our feelings are still there, whether we acknowledge them or not.
This is why these movies touch us so. Not because of the heros and the villians, but because of the mastery of the human soul over the unknowable. It is a parable that is thousands of years old. It is the same story, told in many different ways. But it always touches us.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
If you love movies (and you're a geek), you probably didn't love The Matrix. You might have liked it (hell, I even liked it), but I don't think you could love it.
You had to see the parts that were obvious homages either to John Woo or to HK action flicks in general, and seen how woefully short they fell in comparison to the best of those they imitated.
You had to see The Battery Scene, and probed the swiss-cheese holes in the premise of the movie. The silliness of the final battle. The melodrama of it all.
You had to have seen that the acting was...occasionally...sub-par.
As a matter of fact, The Matrix is a movie you'd love to hate. But you can't. You have to give it credit for the execution of the shared hallucination concept. Plus, bits of it actually achieved the kewlness that the rest aspired to. Part poseur, part thrasher.
Maybe you don't have to have done any of these things. Maybe you did love the movie. Maybe you're just the sort of person who'd show up on
Keep up the good work, mistah katz.
-k. ^-^ ^D
The philosophical antecedent for The Matrix is really the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes:
Meditations on First Philosophy I.12 (Veitch trans. 1901).Plato's story of the cave ( Republic, Book VII) is with the nature of things (ontology); Descartes' concern is rather with how we know what we thing we know (epistemology), which is the concern of The Matrix. (Granted, if you can draw a clear line dividing ontology from epistemology, you win a philosophy Ph.D., but the distinction is generally serviceable.)
I don't think it's necessary that a film's ideas be wholly original, but it's necessary that the film present those ideas in a new way. The idea that aliens might long ago have visited the earth long predates 2001, but the image of ape-men inspecting a black monolith does not. The Matrix was successful because it presented its themes in a new and visually stunning way.
I was dissappointed to see that the initial responses to Mr. Katz's article were directed solely at his comments on the movies he mentioned, rather than on the larger topics he's asking us to think about. Even if you don't agree that the Matrix is a good "litmus test" for geekness, or that the Matrix and The Phantom Menace are comparable in any context, his thoughts are an extremely well-formed attempt to discover and name some of what defines the "geek" and online culture.
This is no small task, mind you. The culture and the lifestyle that Katz discusses and that we participate in is incredibly young, underdeveloped, and misunderstood, even by its own members. If any of you have ever attempted to explain to "an outsider" what it is that causes you to sit in front of your computer for hours on end, searching, reading, programming, exploring, letting the life of the net flow through you, then you know that it can be very difficult from all approaches. Partly this is due to terminology and lack of common reference points between "us" and "them", but partly it's because we ourselves don't necessarily understand what it is that makes us do these things. We can easily place emotional, social, and academic labels on the reasons for our activities, but at the point we realize (as Mr. Katz and many others have) that we're living an almost self-sustaining and self-completing life in this new world, we must strive to understand it at at deeper level than what these labels can offer.
No matter how much you disagree with Mr. Katz or dislike his tone, realize that he his only making his best attempt at achieving this understanding, as we all are in our day-to-day "online" lives. It's not just about what movies we all like and relate to - it's about the deeper reasons that a movie or a thought or a piece of code puts us in "the Zone" together to sort out how we got there. I applaud *any* attempt at achieving such understanding.
Thanks for telling me who I am, Jon, I just love it when you decide to define me... I hate to tell you this, but geeks are no more a homogenous group than any other. Personally, I love the Matrix, but there's plenty of "real geeks" out there who probably don't, whose geek status you have just shot down in flames on the basis of your own definition of geekdom. While I find your essays provoke more discussion than anybody else's on Slashdot, the reason seems to be that you polarize people by making sweeping generalizations that half the people think are totally idiotic and inane, and the other half think are self evident. You might be doing us a service by stirring up the pot, but I'm still trying to decide if you're just doing it for the sake of making people think, or if you really do believe these naive generalizations. I realize that in effect, I have just flamed you, but please don't take it personally. My issues are with your writing style, not you as a human being.
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.