The Matrix

I watched The Matrix on a computer.

That is almost too neat a memory, but it is true to the way the film entered my life. The monitor was small, the speakers were ordinary, and the image was not good enough to justify cinematic reverence. Yet by the end I was looking at the machine differently.

Not because I believed reality might be a simulation.

Because the film had taken things I already knew—code, screens, networks, programs, interfaces—and made them metaphors for the world outside the computer.

The red pill and blue pill are famous because they reduce a philosophical problem to a choice simple enough to hold in one hand.

Comfort or truth.

But truth is attractive when discussed abstractly. The film is more interesting after Neo discovers that truth is cold, unpleasant and irreversible. Knowledge does not make him happy.

It makes him responsible.

There are smaller versions of this in ordinary learning. Once you understand how software works, software stops appearing entirely natural. Once you understand how a network is organized, the internet looks less like magic. Once you see how an institution makes decisions, its official language can become difficult to hear innocently again.

Knowledge removes some kinds of comfort.

I remember the first time I opened the source code of a program I had used for months. The interface had always seemed fixed, as if the buttons occupied their places by natural law. Seeing the code produced a ridiculous but important realization.

Someone decided this.

Users experience systems as environments. Makers see decisions.

That difference is at the center of The Matrix. Morpheus wants Neo to stop seeing the rules as physics and start seeing the structure producing the rules.

Programmers know the intoxication of that moment.

An interface says: this is what is possible.

Code says: this is what someone implemented.

Agent Smith is frightening partly because he is less a person than a privilege level. He uses the environment more completely than the people living inside it. He can appear where the system permits him to appear.

Some problems work that way outside computers too. They are not one bad individual. They are properties of a structure.

Arguing with one instance does not remove the system that keeps producing instances.

Years after first seeing the film, I watched someone struggle with a badly designed form on a government website. After several failed attempts he said, “It won’t let me.”

That phrase reminded me of The Matrix.

Interfaces quietly define action.

When the film ended that first time, my desktop returned. Icons, folders, a taskbar. Nothing had changed.

For a while, though, every element looked contingent.

Every system has rules.

Some rules belong to reality.

Others were written by someone.