Then came the first meditation of Descartes (1641), speculating that everything his senses told him might just be the work of an “evil demon”. In the allegory of the cave, Plato presented humanity chained to a cave wall, taking passing shadows for reality. In fact, as sibling co-creators the Wachowskis alluded to on screen, the film was just the latest in a long line of variations on a theme, nestled in the mainstream of philosophy.

People fretted about the “millennium bug” and reality TV. Despite sunlit economies and political stability, a strange ennui and mistrust of technology hung over the end of the 90s. Of course, Neo chose red, as we told ourselves we would, too. How would we know? More ticklish still, would we want to? If, like Reeves’s weary hacker Neo, we were approached by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, would we take the blue pill to return us to life as it merely seemed to be? Or the red that promised us – however terrible – the real? But the premise was what made it a phenomenon, the idea our whole reality might be a virtual concoction. Yet for a relic, it never slipped far from view – still a familiar reference in a world divided between internet and IRL (in real life), its characters endlessly circulating in memes and gifs, often as vehicles for the acrid politics that define our 21st century.Ĭharli XCX and Troye Sivan on the cover of ‘1999’īack in the 20th, much of the highest excitement was reserved for the visuals – the “digital rain” of green code, the bullets slowed to a stop while Reeves swayed around them. “1999”, the recent song from Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, features wistful lyrics (“Those days, it was so much better”) and cover art in which the millennial pop stars wear the black leather costumes made famous by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as they battled the machines enslaving humanity. By the time of the first sequel four years later, they were already half-vanished, replaced by a private army of Nokias and Motorolas.īut now The Matrix is a relic too, a quaint slice of 90s nostalgia about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Payphones were still everywhere in western cities when the film came out in March 1999. For all who never want to see the people of our nation experience another catastrophe like Katrina, it is time to take the red pill.T he Matrix has barely started when a phone booth is demolished, left as a smashed pancake of glass and metal. With Hurricane Katrina, we are experiencing just such a disturbance. However, occasionally, just as in the original Matrix film, there is a disturbance in the matrix. Our rulers, dedicated social constructionists, declare proudly that “we create reality when we act,” as if no obdurate reality exists outside spin. Lies are repeated until they are accepted as truth. We too live inside a matrix, and the hegemonic power of the matrix has only strengthened since September 11, 2001. Because he chose the red pill, Neo became aware for the first time of the oppressive, parasitic nature of the Matrix.

In the first episode of the film trilogy The Matrix, lead character Neo was given the option of taking a red pill, which would enable him to understand what was actually occurring outside the illusion created by the Matrix, or a blue pill, which would allow him to return to experiencing only that illusion.

Significant Multi-domain Incidents against Critical Infrastructure (SMICI).

Nuclear Facilities Attack Database (NuFAD).

Microlearnings: Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V).Microlearnings: Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).Subscribe to receive notifications about START Training Opportunities.Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism.

Matrix red pill or blue pill