The fear of "The Matrix"

Warning: Movie Spoilers. (The Terminator, Dark City and The Matrix)

A common fear of moving our culture towards technology culture is the loss of self. This loss is illustrated in several films over the years such as The Terminator (1983), Dark City (1998), and The Matrix (1999). The Terminator and The Matrix have a theme that illustrates a post apocolyptic outcome of the rise of the super machines taking over human life. In the Terminator life is destroyed, and in The Matrix, human life is harnessed as energy. The Matrix and Dark City share the theme that the machines have created a simulated world for humans, subverting them into a false beliefs of reality. All of these movies illustrate the fears that many people have about using technology: if we become more dependant on technology, and it becomes more advanced, it will take over our lives.

For the purpose of this study, I will be discussing The Matrix, only. The idea came to me while reading the last lines in Arts Education @ the Edge of the Net: The Future Will Be Moist!, Roy Ascott (UNM NET ID Required). When Ascott is speaking of the future of the way people will think of technology he says"It [moist media] will reverse the debilitating nihilism and despair of late postmodernism and spawn a post-biological culture invested with a sense of radical constructivism. It's a case of "Bye-bye Baudrillard," and signals a reversal of the sense of terminal decline that characterized art at the end of the millennium." The reference he makes is to the attitude towards simulation that Baudrillard talks about in his book Simulacra and the Simulation. It is also referenced in the movie The Matrix when Neo opens up the book itself revealing that there is no book inside, just hollowed out pages used as a hiding place for hacked software. The simulation of the simulation is not even a real book.
Since, I realize, I am no expert in the writings of Boudrillard, having only read once and I don't want to make reference to a book you may or may not have read yourselves, I will discuss the idea through the movie that attempts to illustrate that fear.

A Simulation of a Simulation of...Nothing?

If you have seen The Matrix, you understand the basic plot, that reality is a simulation to hide the truth from us; reality as we know it does not exist. (For now, we will put aside the plot point of the post-apocolyptic robotic take-over and of the hero that overcomes it) Let us put ourselves there, now, in the matrix: the world as we know it is a simulation of our own idealized version of the world. Everything we feel is simulated through our minds to our nerve endings, touch, smell, sound, sight; it is all created by a complex robotic network of thought. Now, since the movie only explains the war between "man and machine" we are lead to make some assumptions about the origin of this phenomenon. The matrix is networked, you must be "plugged in". We can say the same thing about the internet, it is networked, we must be "plugged in" to be there. The matrix in The Matrix is actually a complex form of something we have recently created. So, in the matrix, reality as we know it is not altered, it was never correct in the first place. The truth in a simulation is that there is nothing, at least, not what you thought there was.

Are we taking the Red Pill or the Blue Pill?
I will take this analogy further through the idea of the red pill and the blue pill from the movie. If Neo takes the blue pill, he will go back to his life as he lived it before, without actual knowledge that his life is simulated. Or he can take the red pill and he will wake up to the truth. This illustrates the fear that I am talking about. The fear of technology as the non-truth, a simulation of real life. If we continue with this analogy into my own life, then I am taking the blue pill. If you use the internet you are a tool for power, your individuality is diminished in a matrix of thought that is simulated.