Baudrillard Reloaded

In Larry and Andy Wachowski's cyberpunk epic The Matrix, a classic technological Singularity scenario has played out: intelligent machines, awakening to diabolical sentience, have conquered the world, subduing and exploiting the human population by porting their minds into an elaborate computer simulation that the humans have no way of knowing is not real. Viewed as a narrative of Singularity, the film raises a haunting possibility: perhaps the Singularity has already happened and, far from opening human consciousness onto vast and exhilarating vistas of postbiological liberation and transcendence, its chief effect has been to obscure the fact of the new postsingular reality through the simulated continuity of banal, pre-Singular existence. As far as the humans in the film know, nothing has changed, and – as long as the programming of the Matrix prefigures their perception and constrains their aspirations – nothing ever will. To the extent that its makers take pains to signal that their narrative proceeds from a reading of Simulacra and Simulations, the movie offers not just a characteristically cyberpunk, but a distinctively Baudrillardian, take on Singularity.

In the period Douglas Kellner describes as that of the ‘almighty code’ we have arrived at the supremely pessimistic moment in Baudrillard. At this point, like the inmates of the Matrix, we are completely enveloped and dominated by code. Any possibility of a society of symbolic exchange – whatever that means – has been lost forever, if it ever existed to begin with.