How to Wake Up
I’m watching The Matrix for the first time in a long time. I was 20 years old when it was released, and I’d been steeped in internet culture for a few years.
[If you somehow haven’t seen The Matrix, this post contains spoilers]
Most people think the internet started in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone, but that’s only because that’s when most people were first exposed to it in their daily lives. I’d been messing around with it since late 1996, or maybe it was early 1997, I forget now. By 1998 I’d taught myself HTML and was already building personal websites and writing online. Staying up late drifting through IRC channels, finding people with similar interests and a similar sense that there had to be more to the world than we were shown.
By 1999, I’d watched Akira and Ghost in the Shell, read Snow Crash and Neuromancer, found PKD, and as an English language nerd growing up, was already blending Shakespearean melodrama with my own growing flair for optimistic Nihilism. When Trinity says:
I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer.
I already knew where the dramatic monologue was headed. “It’s the question that drives us, Neo.” And she was right, although “What is the matrix?” in my case was more like “How can I disappear thoroughly and completely from the real word and be somebody online?”
When you think about it, that’s really the same thing Neo was searching for, although in his case, the real world was actually The Matrix, and the simulation he was trying to access from his computer was actually the really real world!
The Matrix was both validating and scary. Validating because the Hollywood machine had “seen into me, into us, clearly” to paraphrase PKD, and scary for exactly the same reason. The iPhone wouldn’t land for another 8 years, and it probably wasn’t until the iPhone 3S or the iPhone 4 that mass adoption really killed the internet, but I didn’t know at the time that I would have another decade to enjoy the the otherworldly-ness of it all. Nor did I know that just a couple of years later, Sept 11th, 2001, would change the world forever.
For me, 1999 and 2000 sit in this perfect liminal space. The internet was big enough to be useful while still being small enough to inhabit. The sardonic overreaction to the 80s in the early 90s had given way to an audience of rigorous skeptics who, for the most part, just wanted you to be honest. But like, not honest in the dishonest way people are today, just like, genuine and authentic and sad and angry and funny and messy and doing their best and not meaning any harm and not watering themselves down but also not doubling down.
The 90s and early 2000s internet gave people so much space to be who they really were. And not in an “anonymity causes people to say terrible things” way either. It was very much more in an anonymity allows people to set aside the fear of judgement and be who they truly are kind of a way, which was a beautiful thing. Not knowing who the person behind the handle was, but still knowing that person.
When Agent Smith calls Neo “Mr. Anderson” in the way that only Hugo Weaving could we understand one thing, which is that real names break the character, chain him to the matrix.
Of course, the irony of all this is that, in the movie, the matrix itself is the prison that holds humans captive, while I, as a 20 year old in the 90s, was actively seeing to escape the real world and be somebody online.
A lot of weird, wild, and wicked things have happened in the 27 years since the matrix was released and, in a way, it’s all come full circle for me. Part of why I’m rewatching it today is because I have had this gnawing feeling for a while now that I want who I am to be more like the person I was in those IRC channels in the late 90s. Quick-witted, charming, melancholy, sometimes cheeky, always helpful, caring when it mattered. I’ve forgotten how to be that person. I’ve fallen into my own little matrix and I need to wake up.