Perfect Bodies Summer 1999

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"I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans."—Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949)

Q. How do you speak seriously to members of a culture reduced to comic books and video games? A. Ask them this question: What is the Matrix? Then answer it in the comic-book and video-game format that they've become so addicted to.

William Gibson's Neuromancer meets The Last Temptation of Christ on the set of Brazil with Playstation fight sequences to the Mission Impossible soundtrack. An information junkie's rush of intravenous Alice in Wonderland. Marshall McLuhan on FeedForward. Two hours and fifteen minutes of synapse-popping, cerebrum-stretching parable, allegory, myth, and cultural commentary—all predicated on the religious foundations of communication theory. That's The Matrix, the movie.

But what is the Matrix itself? If you don't ask that—before and after seeing the film—you've missed the point. Even the movie's web site is at www.whatisthematrix.com. The Matrix, one knowledgeable guide in the movie intones, is the "world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Within the movie's ingenious (and initially somewhat confusing) plot, it's a collective illusion created by machines to keep human beings docile and helpless. But in plain English, the Matrix is simply the Technological Society come to fruition.

Indeed, The Matrix is the ultimate antidote to Ray Kurzweil's optimism about artificial intelligence [see "We Are All Computers Now"]. Like 2001, Terminator, and Robocop, The Matrix envisions a world where artificial intelligence is not only more appealing than flesh-and-bone reality, but more intelligent than the species that created it—and not ...

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