XPost: rec.arts.tv, alt.movies.the-matrix, alt.whine

nIn May 2020, Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill.” It was unclear
precisely what he meant, but those with enough cultural context had a
decent idea of what he was trying to say. That hunch was then affirmed
by the enthusiastic response of Ivanka Trump, whose father became
president at least in some minor part because of forces associated with
the symbol that Musk was evoking. She quote-tweeted him cheerily:
“Taken!” she said.

Less than an hour later, Lilly Wachowski chimed in. One of the two
directors responsible for The Matrix—the film in which the modern
concept of the “red pill” originated—Wachowski didn’t appear very
pleased with these people, neither in general nor in regard to how they
were continuing the strange legacy of her metaphor. “Fuck both of you,”
she replied to Trump. The way they were tossing her symbol around was
likely a lot different from what she and her sister, Lana, had in mind
when, more than two decades earlier, they composed the indelible scene
in which Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has to choose between taking a
blue pill, which would cause him to remain who he is in a fabricated
reality, or a red one, which would officially transform him into Neo—
the chosen one, who alone could take down the grand enslavers and
illusion makers.

The widely viewed Musk-Trump-Wachowski social media dustup, a collision
between celebrities of the industrial, political, and entertainment
variety, traveled into territory where those three camps tend to get
pretty muddied. The pill’s symbolic journey has been long and gnarly,
and has led to more confusion than clarity. What, really, did the red
pill signify anymore? What was it supposed to be telling us about the
world? Musk’s Twitter feed is typically defined by his anti-tax, anti- regulatory libertarianism, or by his often overbearing—read: relatable
—desire to be loved for posting clever memes. Ivanka Trump is a member
of the family who was in the White House at the time and remains at the
heart of the Republican Party. Wachowski is a prestigious transgender
filmmaker whose largest work has become one of the defining cultural
and political texts of the 21st century.

But this rhetorical clash between three very different, very famous
people was only the latest occurrence in a long and still-active war of signifiers. For 22 years, there has been a semiotic battle over how to
define the ideological import of the thing that Morpheus handed to Neo
so that he could free his mind and fly. Wachowski’s only semi-direct
response to how the pill has been co-opted for two decades by
misogynistic and reactionary internet communities (and eventually by professional conservative media) is still just that terse response on
social media. But promotional material for The Matrix Resurrections,
out this week—the trailer, the posters, the music—has pills, both red
and blue, everywhere. Beyond once again entertaining us in a singular
way, Resurrections stands as a chance to reflect on the metaphorical
chaos its predecessors inadvertently wrought.

TheThe red pill was first presented to us 31 years ago. In Paul
Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi epic Total Recall, protagonist Douglas Quaid
(Arnold Schwarzenegger) is offered one in order to snap out of a
professionally induced dream state. If he refuses, he is told, he will
be stuck in a “permanent psychosis,” strapped down in a chair and
lobotomized in the actual world as his consciousness remains trapped
within his exciting-yet-horrifying fantasy. Quaid pretends to take the
pill to assuage his enemy, but then whoops his ass, spits the pill out,
and continues his fact-or-fiction odyssey in a way that is, by design,
never resolved.

Verhoeven and his screenwriters’ intention in presenting us with this
prickly ambiguity was, presumably, to craft a probing speculative
narrative that inspires us to consider how blurry our sense of reality
may become as technology advances to a point that can make absurd
fabrications seem real. Such notions were first approached in the
film’s source material, Philip K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It for
You Wholesale”; Dick’s story about the possibility of memory implant
technology (which is ultimately less ambiguous than the movie’s take on
the subject) does not contain the red pill.

The pill itself is one of the less-remembered elements of Total Recall
—it’s hard not to be overshadowed by things like, you know, this. The Wachowskis, though, noticed the red pill, described in Verhoeven’s film
as “a symbol of your desire to return to reality.” Nine years later in
The Matrix, Neo takes one during a now-iconic philosophical-crossroads
moment. When Morpheus offers him a choice between it and the blue pill
—the numbing complacency drug to the red pill’s freeing, journey-
starting powers—Neo does not spit it out like Quaid. There is no
ambiguity about it: Our protagonist, by swallowing the red pill, will
reveal for himself and the audience the true nature of this universe.
And as it turns out, he has been trapped, along with basically every
other person, inside of a giant energy-harvesting tower of goo
chambers, pinned into a spell that convinces him that his boring
cubicle-bound existence is real.

It’s a simple yet powerful premise: live a dreary life, meet a weird
guy, take a drug he gives you, discover the truth that your mundane
existence is all just a setup. Neo’s dismal day-to-day state was not
his own fault; his life had been rigged this way. But the pill would
show him how to begin reconstructing his reality. Neo’s pilled
awakening leads to his becoming the baddest of all asses: the no. 1
cool fighting guy, a nobody turned messiah who learns to destroy all
forms of enemies via flying, martial arts, an otherworldly mastery of
weapons, and even the re-creation of elemental matter on the fly. By
the end of the Matrix trilogy, he has defeated the ultimate malignant
virus (Agent Smith) and brokered peace between man and machine with
both his fists and his imagination.

The Matrix was a surprise megahit, netting more than $460 million
worldwide. Roger Ebert called it “a visually dazzling cyberadventure,
full of kinetic excitement.” But The Matrix didn’t immediately become a founding text for theories on our technocentric modern world.
“Information didn’t move the way it does today,” Joshua Topolsky, a
tech and culture journalist, says. “People were really concerned about
the world ending because of the Y2K bug, which was probably a bigger
part of the Matrix hype than anything about the red pill.”

But the presence of the internet grew massively in the wake of The
Matrix’s 1999 release. In a kind of confirmation of what the movie
presaged, the World Wide Web became what it still is: the closest thing
that the world knows to those towering goo chambers. Here is where we
place our brains daily to understand the world around us—a process
that, paradoxically, often involves our becoming more confused about
it. In the early 2000s, forums rose specifically to discuss one of the
major components of the movie: ever-evolving artificial intelligence.
There were now open-ended internet conversations that previously had
happened only among academics who studied this subject full time. They
wondered whether AI would come to enslave us—as it does in The Matrix—
or enhance us.

The title of the seminal AI chat board SL4 is short for Shock Level 4.
“A Shock Level,” an explainer page on the site’s archives says,
“measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate without being
impressed, frightened, [or] blindly enthusiastic—without exhibiting
future shock.” The site inventories these concepts, clarifying that
“Shock Level Zero or SL0, for example, is modern technology and the
modern-day world.” SL1 includes virtual reality and e-commerce, a.k.a. cryptocurrency and NFTs, which still shock and befuddle many today,
including Keanu. The rest remain beyond our current day-to-day
technological imagination: “SL2 is interstellar travel, medical
immortality or genetic engineering, SL3 is nanotech or human-equivalent
AI, and SL4 is the Singularity.”

The Singularity referred to by SL4 is the concept of a profound
technological shift—a hypothetical inflection point at which artificial intelligence develops past the control of humans, and technological
growth becomes irreversible, exponential, and infinite. This occurrence
is embedded in the backstory of The Matrix and in a lot of popular
sci-fi. In the world of Dune, for instance, the events take place
thousands of years after a human rebellion against overgrown AI called
the Butlerian Jihad—an antidote to a singularity of sorts, which
results in a new moral code that bans the creation of thinking machines
by penalty of death. (The full arc of the original Matrix trilogy can
be understood, to some extent, as a kind of Butlerian Jihad.)

The tenor of debate on SL4 was dry, intense, humorless, and deeply
under the radar. This community evolved, though, producing offshoot
sites like Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, which launched in 2006 and
2009, respectively. These were blogrolls featuring voices who—unlike
the authors of The Matrix, Dune, The Terminator, or Total Recall—
advocated for the enthusiastic embrace of quickly improving technology.
As the titles of the sites suggest, the ruling belief of the groups
behind these sites was that AI presented a path closer to utopia and transcendence than to serfdom and suffering; should we accept and live
by the terms of machine thinking, we might better marginalize ugly wars
and the drudgery of our world. Though these sites didn’t exactly
explode in popularity, their standard blog format and sense of
authorial voice offered a presentation that made them more accessible
than SL4.

Much to the chagrin of many in these communities, the sites’
increasingly appealing templates would soon be retooled. Silicon Valley software developer Curtis Yarvin (known online as “Mencius Moldbug”)
launched a blog called Unqualified Reservations in 2007 that, while
similar to these sites both linguistically and in its diagnosis of the
problems that humanity faced at large, came to much different
conclusions. One of Moldbug’s earlier, catchier posts was called “The
Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills.” This screed merged AI
theorists’ concerns about the human race’s collective irrationality
with a gobsmacking cultural reference, as a way of introducing
Moldbug’s neo-monarchist polemic to the world. Moldbug posited that the
issue people face is not exactly that they are flawed animals whose
thinking can be aided toward better patterns by machines, but rather
that too much liberalism has maximized human stupidity rather than any
kind of righteous will. As Robert Silverman, a journalist covering the
online right for the Daily Beast, puts it: “Moldbug’s apparent solution
to the problem wasn’t, ‘Well, let’s all put our heads together and try
and figure out theoretical tests for a form of AI that doesn’t exist
yet,’ but rather, ‘Actually, the answer is fascism.’”

Take one of Moldbug’s 10 red pills, and you will see that we ought to
fully enable our executive branch—so much so that the president is
actually a king. “At best,” Moldbug writes, “democracy is sand in the
gears of freedom and law.” Imagine that the flying, demonic, squid-like sentinel robots that keep humans trapped within the Matrix are not born
from the AI singularity, but from New Deal–style politics, and you will
see what Moldbug is trying to say. Come 2009, Moldbug grew more
specific about who the Agent Smith in his thought-voyage is: “We’ve all
seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You
can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the
counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in
Red #3.”

That Moldbug was coming so hard for a political theorist whose ideas
were only lightly familiar to the larger public speaks to how niche
Unqualified Reservations was. But Moldbug, the reactionary offshoot of
a “Rationalist” school of thinkers who were determined to use
technology to augment humanity’s shortcomings, was shockingly
influential to a small and powerful group at the intersection between
political eggheads and tech professionals. He has been linked to mega- billionaire tech investor and world-shaper Peter Thiel for roughly a
decade. In 2013, tech entrepreneur and current cryptocurrency mogul
Balaji Srinivasan gave an oddly political speech at a start-up event
for young programmers that was believed to be directly pulled from
Moldbug’s work. By 2017, it was reported that Steve Bannon was a fan of Moldbug’s. Most recently, Tucker Carlson had Moldbug on his new daytime
talk show this past September, where he was called by his birth name
and made some familiarly myopic appeals.

In contemplating the lasting impact of Moldbug’s red pill co-optation,
the spectacle-stirring Bannon is probably the best comparison point to consider. Both men live by Moldbug’s truism that “nonsense is a more
effective organizing tool than the truth”; people like Donald Trump,
whose campaign Bannon managed, do better in a world where basic textual literacy is lacking. The Matrix trilogy is about insurgents in an
oppressive system, but many of those still celebrating its imagery want
the president to be much more powerful. “The comedy is that the people
who want guys like Trump to be in power, [who want] Daddy Trump
stepping all over them, are the guys who think they’re radical. ...
It’s such an incredible perversion of the concept,” Topolsky says.

But as influential as he may be to bigger voices, Moldbug has never
been anything like a household name. And although some of the tech-
optimists who inspired Moldbug met him at his bespoke overlap of
Silicon Valley, cool action movies, historical literature, and fascism,
many also hated his co-optation: Slate Star Codex, the more
contemporary bearer of the blog-torch for the rationalist movement,
features him prominently in their Anti-Reactionary FAQ, which is
designed to discourage further crossbreeding of their ideas and his.

The Wachowskis, meanwhile, have never formally responded to the use of
their core symbolic imagery. (Hugo Weaving did, though.) In the late
’00s, such a measure would likely have been overzealous: Moldbug wasn’t
big enough and neither were other remixes of their movie’s meaning. It
is entirely possible, even probable, that the Wachowskis had no idea
these ideas were even blossoming out there. But the Redditization of
the red pill was on the way, and with it a reshaping of the emblem too
large to ignore.

It’sIt’s worth considering one of the larger questions of the red
pill’s symbolic life beyond The Matrix: Was the source material ready-
made for these types of readings? The most logical answer to that
question is that the Matrix movies are, like the work of Socrates that
inspired them, or a Coldplay song, written vaguely enough to be a
parable for just about anything you want. They do not demand to be
interpreted in one definitive way. At the same time, though, there is
no denying how some of the fundamental demographics at play might
attract lonely men who want to believe that there is something more conspiratorial and insidious at the root of their personal failures,
and that there is also a hidden network of truth that might make them
powerful enough to fight back. What if an epic action movie showed
these men a white single male computer hacker whose voyage was just
this? The Matrix could be described as a movie about a Wojak (the term
for the animated meme-archetype of an unremarkable man, which you have
likely seen online) who takes a pill of enlightenment and becomes the
ultimate alpha, or Chad—which just happens to be the name of Trinity’s
fake Matrix husband in Resurrections.

That being said, The Matrix is one of the most popular blockbuster
action movies of all time. Millions of people have seen it without
going there with it. It can simply be, and for most people is, a
riveting sci-fi adventure that, while a bit more serious and
philosophically loaded than most, is not worth reinterpreting reality
over. The Wachowskis bear no real responsibility for what happened
next, just like comic artist Matt Furie bears none for his cartoon frog
Pepe becoming a Photoshopped symbol of the alt-right.

Nevertheless, in 2012, r/TheRedPill was born. It’s not clear whether
there is a bridge between the subreddit’s usage of the pill and
Moldbug’s. That link is either nonexistent or too old, tenuous, and
fleeting to fully trace. An exact etymology of a decade-old meme is an
almost impossible task. It could be that these different usages of the
red pill were totally separate islands, terraformed by different men,
all trying to use the movie’s power to advance their own truth brands.
Or it could be that the ideas within Moldbug’s dense, smarmy political
science trickled down to more base messaging; most people don’t give a
shit about Chomsky, but everyone cares about sex.

Anti-feminist evocations of the red pill had been organically trending
for years before the subreddit was founded: In 2010, in a comment
section on the men’s rights activism (MRA) blog A Voice for Men, a user
named “redpill” stated that “Women are the natural enemies of men. No
matter what anyone says and how good women claim to be, that is just
the truth. This will never stop and men will continue under the tyranny
of women.” r/TheRedPill went on to crystallize sentiments like this, aggregating animosity found in the columns and comments sections of
wounded male pride blogs like AVFM and The Spearhead. MRAs merged with
the pickup artists community (PUAs) to create a space that was hostile
to women in myriad ways. Among the (sometimes incompatible) beliefs of
the community: A woman’s rejection is not really rejection, women
secretly want to be dominated, and women are biologically predisposed
to cheating. A popular acronym, AWALT (“all women are like that”)
emerged to lazily justify every essentialist claim. In 2015, alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos did an Ask Me Anything session on the
subreddit, before going on to infamously say that “feminism is cancer”
in the spring of 2016.

That same year, a documentary called The Red Pill was released,
seemingly inspired by the subreddit (though the “Dispelling Myths” page
on the film’s website denies any substantive connection, asking us to
be credulous enough to believe in such a large coincidence). In the
movie, a self-described feminist named Cassie Jaye changes her tune as
she uncovers the ways in which a supposedly “gynocentric” world has
failed men. Largely funded via Kickstarter, the documentary is believed
to be bankrolled for the most part by MRAs from the subreddit and
related communities—it is often, as a result, also discredited, and
many of its initial screenings were canceled in reaction to protests of theaters planning to show it.

Before being permanently quarantined in 2018, the r/TheRedPill had
close to 300,000 users at its peak. The community lives on to some
formal extent, archived on its own webspace with the homepage sporting
a Medgar Evers quote: “You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea.”
Tucker Carlson and Republican Senator Josh Hawley seem to agree: Both
have recently taken to their soapboxes to deliver speeches that could
have been lifted directly from r/TheRedPill about how masculinity is
under urgent attack in America.

The r/TheRedPill archive space also stipulates in its FAQ that anyone
whose posts are visible in the archive is free to contact the host and
have any potentially identifying details scrubbed. This is because
known membership on the red pill subreddit has proved to have serious consequences—its founder, according to the Daily Beast’s investigative reporting in 2017, was a Republican lawmaker from New Hampshire named
Robert Fisher. Among the many misogynistic comments authored by Fisher
was the claim that “Every woman wants to be attractive enough to be
raped.” After initially resisting calls for resignation upon discovery
of his internet activity, Fisher stepped down a little less than a
month after the Daily Beast’s reporting. Upon his resignation, he said
his behavior was misrepresented and that he would still “stand strong
for men’s rights and the rights of all.”

Fisher’s downfall was part of a larger trend during the Trump
presidency in which institutions attempted to grapple with the strange,
angry forces spreading throughout the internet (that were often noted
as a framework for explaining how Donald Trump won the 2016 election).
The amount of causation that toxic new internet communities had in
Trump’s victory is debatable; some pundits center it, while others
prefer to lean on hard data, focus on stray comments overheard in rural
diners, or argue about the supposed power of various slogans until they
are blue in the face.

But there’s no question that the words “red pill” had taken on broad
new cultural association by the mid-2010s. The emblem had traveled well
outside of what the Wachowskis envisioned when they decided to wink at
Total Recall. Now, it was the central metaphor for a huge hodgepodge of
loosely affiliated online communities known as the “manosphere”: PUAs,
MRAs, incels, the alt-right. “Taking the red pill” had come to mean
opening your eyes to a world that was conspiring against men and
empowering women, who were seen as fickle, savage, and evil by nature.

Over the past several years, the red pill metaphor has broadened even
beyond the domain of men looking for allegorical explanation, taking on
more widely reactionary qualities. Likely to Moldbug’s delight, it has
come to be understood as a more general right-wing conversion drug. “It
has kind of shifted to becoming this way to talk about making an
intentional decision to reject liberal hegemony,” says Ryan Milner, who
is the chair of the College of Charleston’s Department of Communication
and the author of The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and
Participatory Media. “It’s a really resonant metaphor, and lines up
easily with a conservative worldview,” he says, because of how it can
be presented as a counter-truth to what might otherwise look like a
losing battle in a culture war.

Media personality Candace Owens produced one of the more famous “red
pillings” of the 21st century when she formed a friendship with Kanye
West. Owens was then the host of the YouTube channel Red Pill Black,
one of the places where she presented her anti-liberal plan for Black Americans; she also founded the organization “Blexit” to organize a
mass exodus of Black members from the Democratic Party. West was
spending time with Owens around then and tweeting positively about her,
and in 2018 he infamously said slavery was “a choice.” In 2020, he
tweeted gushingly about her latest book, Blackout: How Black America
Can Make Its Second Escape From the Democratic Plantation.

This racially inflammatory, ahistorical brand of red pilling is just
one of the many radicalization variants that have grown from the
original subreddit. In September of this year, Joe Rogan displayed
another version: “I took Ivermectin and it’s part of my red pill
regimen,” he said at a comedy club, invoking the symbol for no reason
other than to own the libs.

Unlike the sobering effect it has on Neo as he discovers the sockets in
his flesh, this pill tends to have the same effect as going too deep
into any research hole on the internet without proper barriers. It is
much more likely to create further distress, alienation, or just
outright absurdity than it does clarity. “Have you just awoken?” asks
Annie Kelly, a PhD student researching anti-feminism and conspiracy
theories, with a focus on far-right communities online. “Have the
scales fallen from your eyes? Or have you been dragged into this really deranged world that is just making things much less clear for you?”

Kelly’s question gets to the heart of the modern legacy of the red
pill, and more broadly that of getting “pilled,” or ingesting something
from some exciting new source (Morpheus, or just some guy on the
internet) and going on a corresponding vision quest. Frequently, these
sessions are more psychedelically paranoid than they are educational.
And the internet offers countless opportunities for them. Hari Kunzru’s riveting 2020 novel Red Pill depicts exactly such an online neuro-
excursion and illustrates a modern truth: To the extent that the World
Wide Web is our Matrix, our various pillings tend to take us further
into the goo as opposed to out of it. Spending more time online, as red
pill warriors tend to do, is a lot different from what Neo did; when he
takes his pill, he leaves the sludge to breathe real, fresher air. Much
to the contrary, most contemporary notions of getting pilled result in
getting lost in the sauce.

MisguidedMisguided interpretations of the red pill continue to develop
and lift the symbol away from its source and further into a right-wing
context. A few months after her tweet at Musk and Trump, Lilly
Wachowski showed just how far this retconning had strayed from her own
creative intentions when she confirmed certain fan theories that the
movie was actually composed as a metaphor for her and her sister’s
struggle with gender identity. She said that at the time “the world
wasn’t quite ready.” The character Switch, she explained, was initially
meant to bring these themes to the surface—Switch was originally
written as a man in the real world, but a woman in the Matrix.

Wachowski did not frame her explanation as a direct rebuke to the co-
optation of her symbol, but, given the timing—and her aggrieved tweet
reply—it is certainly easy to read it that way. Meanwhile, conservative
media, to the extent that it cared about Wachowski’s reframing of her
movie, held tight to their version. Breitbart called the red pill “a
symbol of those who have seen past the mainstream media filter” and
referred to the trans subtext as “bullshit … pure pandering to those
who crave being pandered to: the shallow, stupid, and spoiled brats we
call Wokesters.”

Based on Lana’s previous work with her sister Lilly (who is sitting out
for The Matrix Resurrections), we aren’t in for a straightforward,
didactic response to the unfortunate cultural mangling of the pills
anytime soon. The Wachowskis prefer to work in more allusive and
allegorical ways, and the consignment of two literary novelists (David
Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon) as cowriters of the new screenplay won’t
change that.

The closest we get to anything so direct in Resurrections is when
Thomas Anderson—who must again discover his inner Neo—sits in a meeting
with a group of people who offer up their hard takes on what The Matrix
(a video game in Resurrections rather than a film) was “about.” It’s a transparently meta moment meant to emphasize the grand folly of
audience interpretation.

But even if the new Matrix movie were to plainly reject the red pill’s
current place in the culture, it’s hard to believe such a gesture would
be very effective. There will always be room to impress a wide range of
ideas onto mythologically powerful work. And that is what The Matrix
is: In a richly realized fantasy, the Wachowskis portrayed anxieties
about current and oncoming realities at the end of the 20th century.
What if we lose ourselves to technology? What, in our rapidly changing
world, can really be trusted? What is being hidden from us, or stolen?
Is all of this progress … good? But parts of the audience took these
concerns in their own directions and stretched the touchstones of the
movies to graft them onto more irrational and pernicious fears about
humanity. This is simply what some people do with epic, messianic
works—have you heard of the Bible?

Whatever exactly Wachowski means to say about the red and blue pills in
2021—or about any other interpretations of her work—with the latest
text of The Matrix, there will be no way to deter people from taking a
movie that makes them feel something and glomming their emotions and
ideas from elsewhere onto it; perhaps wrongly, perhaps collectively,
perhaps in an obfuscating and destructive way. Simply put, there is no
medicine for that.

: John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago.

--
Let's go Brandon!

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