<story><title>All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)</title><url>http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>I had a friend who posited that the Wall-E&amp;#x2F;Inception scenario would have been a far more interesting prequel backstory for The Matrix than what was actually presented in Reloaded and Revolutions.&lt;p&gt;Basically, that the remaining &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity&amp;#x27;s own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.</text></item><item><author>titzer</author><text>We are not only being colonized by machines, we are becoming machines, and gladly. We are already acting like and being treated like idiots by our technology. In the car it is turn by turn navigation, on foot it is stumbling with our phones in our faces, for music it is auto-tuned, formulaic pop songs, for dance it is the robotic pop-and-lock dubstep moves that amaze us...we defend our heads with noise-canceling headphones the size of earmuffs, are interrupted every moment by smartwatches...we bumble from one mediated moment to the next, always alone, always accompanied by no one--just the glow of a screen or a hum, a talisman. We&amp;#x27;re not sane without checking our notifications, need entertainment...can&amp;#x27;t stand not watching something, can&amp;#x27;t stand dead space, can&amp;#x27;t stand our own thoughts, can&amp;#x27;t stand our own minds.&lt;p&gt;Please take my mind over, AI, we constantly beg. Put us out of our misery and upload us to the digital nirvana.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;yea I know hackernews ain&amp;#x27;t exactly the right place to blah that out there, but couldn&amp;#x27;t. stop. --karma</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clouddrover</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Narrative differences aside, this is what happens to Morpheus in the Matrix movies though. In &lt;i&gt;The Matrix Reloaded&lt;/i&gt; Morpheus comes to realize that finding Neo doesn&amp;#x27;t end the war with the machines and that the prophecy he believed in was just another system of control. Morpheus says, &amp;quot;I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)</title><url>http://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>I had a friend who posited that the Wall-E&amp;#x2F;Inception scenario would have been a far more interesting prequel backstory for The Matrix than what was actually presented in Reloaded and Revolutions.&lt;p&gt;Basically, that the remaining &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity&amp;#x27;s own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.</text></item><item><author>titzer</author><text>We are not only being colonized by machines, we are becoming machines, and gladly. We are already acting like and being treated like idiots by our technology. In the car it is turn by turn navigation, on foot it is stumbling with our phones in our faces, for music it is auto-tuned, formulaic pop songs, for dance it is the robotic pop-and-lock dubstep moves that amaze us...we defend our heads with noise-canceling headphones the size of earmuffs, are interrupted every moment by smartwatches...we bumble from one mediated moment to the next, always alone, always accompanied by no one--just the glow of a screen or a hum, a talisman. We&amp;#x27;re not sane without checking our notifications, need entertainment...can&amp;#x27;t stand not watching something, can&amp;#x27;t stand dead space, can&amp;#x27;t stand our own thoughts, can&amp;#x27;t stand our own minds.&lt;p&gt;Please take my mind over, AI, we constantly beg. Put us out of our misery and upload us to the digital nirvana.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;yea I know hackernews ain&amp;#x27;t exactly the right place to blah that out there, but couldn&amp;#x27;t. stop. --karma</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>titzer</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a really cool thought. It&amp;#x27;s great that the Matrix is set far in the future, after the rise of the machines. There are a lot of possible tie-ins&amp;#x2F;mashups, e.g. with Terminator.</text></comment>