NEO OR PALEO? (via <~text text="Charles Murtaugh">

The Matrix: It's Harry Potter with guns. (Chris Suellentrop, May 1, 2003, Slate)

As Alan Dean Foster puts it in Exploring the Matrix, an anthology of essays by science-fiction writers, Neo is "Everynerd": "His perceived world is a sham, a mistake, a carefully crafted fake, and you know, deep down, that yours is, too." But the movie has a special appeal to that subset of misfit, the computer geek. When we first see Neo, he's living alone in his cramped apartment, staying up all night on his computer. He's a programmer by day and a computer hacker by night. When he is rescued from his miserable existence, he discovers that he and his friends can learn anything--kung fu, how to fly a helicopter--just by downloading it. By the end of the movie, Neo learns that his mastery of the digital Matrix makes him master of all mankind. It's an EverQuest player's dream come true.

There's just one problem: It looks like Neo and his band of revolutionaries want to destroy the technological utopia in which they live. In an essay on the official Matrix Web site, proto-cyborg Kevin Warwick complains about the movie's man-versus-machine approach to technology. "Neo is kidnapped by Luddites, dinosaurs from the past when humans ruled the earth," Warwick writes. "We really need to clamp down on the party-pooper Neos of this world and get into the future as soon as we can--a future in which we can be a part of a Matrix system, which is morally far superior to our Neolithic morals of today." Is Warwick right? After all, if Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo succeed in their quest to liberate humanity from the machines, we'll all be left to eat slop in the dreadful real world of post-apocalyptic earth, rather than becoming fashionista superheroes in the fake world. What kind of liberation is that?

Fortunately, Neo's closing lines in the movie offer a way out of this dilemma. He addresses the machines that have enslaved humanity, and he offers them an olive branch: "I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

The implication is clear: Neo wants machines and men to coexist in peace. He doesn't want to destroy the Matrix. He just wants people to understand it so they can play with it and enjoy it as much as he does. He's an evangelist for the product.

Neo's not a Luddite. He's an early adopter. Just like his fans.

Brother Murtaugh pointed this essay out to us last week. Hopefully Mr. Suellentrop is wrong about where the series is headed--reflecting the geeks' desire to become machines is one of the most disturbing trends in scifi, not to mention our politics--though it looks from that final line like it's conceivable it could go either way. One question though: what remains of a computer program once the rules are removed or of a computer once the controls are gone? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2003 9:41 PM