Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Three)

This essay follows Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part One) and Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Two)

The genetic similarities between the Terminator and Matrix franchises are so obvious, they barely deserve further description. Both depict humanity overthrown from within, by the machines we built to serve us, by the social systems we created and couldn’t control. But the differences between these franchises speak volumes to the options available to humanity going forward. And those differences originate in the contexts that created them.

Written and filmed in the bleakest years of the Cold War, The Terminator assumed the defense networks humans created would identify humanity overall as the enemy. This isn’t a stretch, after all, as the greatest threat to world peace is certainly the humans living on the world. Those of us old enough to remember Ronald Reagan and the SALT Treaty negotiations will remember believing that little fundamentally mattered, because the bombs would drop any day.

By contrast, The Matrix dropped in the late 1990s. As fear of imminent global firebombing retreated, America retreated into a hangover of Furbies, Spice Girls, and NAFTA. Where The Terminator anticipated a war machine classifying humanity as the enemy, The Matrix forecasted humanity’s synthetic workforce rising against us, the bloated consuming class. One franchise considered humanity overprepared for war; the other saw humanity fattened on peace.

What each franchise anticipated arose from its circumstances. The Terminator foresaw a militarized future, where constant war against the machines has become humanity’s default; to be human, in Skynet’s world, is to be permanently part of the French Resistance. Kyle Reese sleeps with his helmet on, cuddling his M-16 like a teddy bear, because gun-toting infiltration units could overrun his bunker at any time. Humans, in The Terminator, are constantly awake.

Compare that to The Matrix, where humans are constantly asleep. Rather than occupation and slaughter, these machines offer humanity comfortable dreams and superficial meaning, in return for our complete subservience. The illusion lets humans continue living, working, and even rebelling, in ways controlled and permitted by the system. Of course, none of it was real, and the rewards generated went entirely to the machines, who owned everything.

Note that before his liberation, Neo alternates between the conformity of employment, and the counterconformity of acid rave culture. He maintains the postures of rebellion, the actions of freedom. But this freedom, this rebellion, doesn’t really exist; no choices exist, except those for which the machines have written a template. He yearns for autonomy, but can’t see past the illusions created by the socioeconomic system.

Please note, though: reality didn’t unfold that way. We GenX’ers whose childhood was dominated by fear of annihilation, haven’t been constantly awake; we’ve largely ceded authority to a gerontocracy that retains control for literally decades, often without improving anything. Millennials and Zoomers, however, those raised on the post-Reagan economic surfeit satirized in The Matrix, are among history’s most politically engaged.

Either way, these franchises promise humanity a singular messiah, a designated deliverer whose unique skills and connection to the system will redeem humanity from its disaster. Whether a military conqueror like John Connor, or a spiritual guru like Neo, both assume that, when circumstances permit, the chosen individual will appear and restore the balance. Our enemies will be routed, our freedom will overcome, and humanity will reclaim its independence.

And yet…

In both cases, this triumph appears transitory. John Connor’s victory in Terminator 2 is repeatedly overwritten in sequels, though these revisions never stick—perhaps, I’d suggest, because the Cold War circumstances that made The Terminator so terrifying no longer exist. Meanwhile, trailers for the anticipated fourth Matrix movie depict Neo having to relearn his messianic nature. It seems, in Hollywood, our sci-fi messiahs never quite stick.

We can attribute this, partly, to the requirements of the franchise. If the characters’ problems are ever permanently resolved, the story ends. (Witness how the stories flailed when Disney tried to keep the galactic civil war alive in Star Wars.) But it also reflects our inability to imagine what happens on the other side of this life. We can’t imagine salvation, or even post-capitalism, except through analogies to this life, which are generally unsatisfying.

No matter whether we grew up amid the nihilism of the Cold War, or the orgiastic backwash that came afterward, we’re conscious, on some level, of the machinery that dragged us here. We know this condition isn’t natural, or inevitable, and we seek someone to deliver us from this system. But that deliverance is permanently in the future, because deep down, we can’t imagine any lasting condition but servitude.