Does the Matrix Already Have Us?

I was recently rereading Culture Jam, the cultural revolutionary handbook by my good friend Kalle Lasn. I also recently watching The Matrix for the umpteenth time, mostly just to enjoy the bullet-time kung-fu sequences while I did yoga. As I was watching the film I suddenly started interpreting the subtext from the perspective of a culture-jammer.

Critical Mass Los Angeles
jamming The Matrix

The Matrix, and it’s intelligent agents, represent the dominant paradigm of American culture today. In this dystopic future future humans are farmed in billions of pods and their energy harvested to power the machines. Guess what? That future is now! We are bred and raised to be productive citizens, to be little batteries that power the capitalist consumer machine. We watch millions of hours of television and are bombarded everywhere by a pervasive advertising environment that blasts us into good little consumer drones. Like the enslaved humans in the Matrix who have no idea of their imprisonment, our mass media machines turn our brains into jelly. Lasn points out in Culture Jam that “capitalism’s consumer culture cannibalizes your spirit over time, it puts you to work as an obedient ’slave component’ of the system without you ever knowing it.” Listen copper top, the Matrix has you.

The resistance fighters — Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, etc. — symbolize the culture jammers. They are people on the fringe of society searching for something different, something more true. There is something about the world that doesn’t seem quite right to them. When they learn that we are all enslaved by a culture of machines and illusions, they find that the glossy finish of consumer culture hides an ugly “real world”.

Television and Advertising jack us in to the Matrix. They brainwash us into believing the lie of consumerism and blind us to our own slavery. The agents of consumerism and overconsumption are very powerful. Machines have become intelligent and deadly in the film, just as corporations have become powerful and dangerous entities in our world. To defeat these mortal enemies Morpheus says you must “Free your mind”. But instead of kung-fu and machine guns, the culture jammer must be armed with information. Lasn’s concepts of anti-advertisements are weapons to “uncool” consumerism and shake people out of their hypnosis.

Free your mind. Fight the Matrix. As Lasn says, “never in human history has so much defiance been needed from so many.”

- Dr. Mangrove