We don't have payphones anymore because the machines wanted to get rid of exits.
We don't have payphones anymore because the machines wanted to get rid of exits.
Isn't it just as easy to use electricity to exit matrix than telephone?
I guess a cool movie showing people plugging their fingers into sockets wouldn't go well with the average "intelligence" qpublic.
The Matrix was meant to be a simulation of end 20th century humanity.
The resistance still had to heed some of the rules of that system. Data transfer was telephony based, even T1 lines were supplied by telephony companies. The machines needed to let humanity operate like they did, sharing data over phone lines with one another as they would expect. They monitored, but even they couldn't spot incoming and outgoing minds in a sea of millions of humans sharing office cat memes over email. Why wouldn't they lock down/restrict/disable any other form of hardline data transfer in their 20th century simulator, like makeshift powerline networking? Wouldn't they be able to spot an incoming data transmission over a powerline network if powerline networks weren't supposed to exist at all?
Also, as added to in the sequels, it was the Architect's job to provide the "ones that wanted out" an opportunity to do so, to join zion, and to recruit others as part of the cyclical process, but not allow those deluded resistance fighters to have such unfettered access that they could truly disrupt the system. It was threading the needle of giving them the illusion of progress, without making it easy enough for them to become an actual threat.
If the machines wanted to lock out the Matrix completely from human hacks, they could, but doing so would remove choice from the malcontents, leading to a cataclysmic system crash as happened in the first 2 versions of the Matrix prior to the movies where "entire crops were lost." The vulnerabilities were intentional and essential to equilibrium. The human minds had to be aware at a semi-conscious level that they could seek and fight their way out, which made over 99 percent of humanity mentally accept the simulation instead of having their minds continuously attempt to wake themselves up, again leading to mass system failure.
Do you think an entire civilization of self-iterating sentient AI that perceived data systems as we view our own flesh and blood could ever be involuntarily "hacked" by some flesh monkeys on centuries old dumpster hardware?
It's specifically hard line telephones that are exits, never cellular or cordless. I think it's meant to be a metaphor for how we used phone lines for the Internet at first, well before Wi-Fi.