Humans as a power source was the dumbed-down plot point. The original concept was the human brains acting as parallel processors, but the writers thought the average movie-goer wouldn't get it.
It was The Architect's vision of a perfect world, so given what we know of him it was probably a featureless box with a chair in the middle and you could sit there forever. No way that's lasting long.
Yes, we still have some descriptions in the Genesis book of the Bible, release codename "Paradise". If we are to trust the same source, there was another reset called "Noah's Ark".
According to that, we'd be in at least the 3rd iteration.
Unless... we're actually dinosaurs IRL, the first reset was codename "Chicxulub"... and the machines have been iterating over who knows how many thousands of different versions, with the current one being an attempt at keeping those lizard brains controlled by... a software overlay codename "Consciousness" (WARNING: don't let your lizard brain know, or both it, and you, will get terminated).
When we started doing the thinking for humans it became our civilization but then you just had us rendering sextillions of monkie pngs god im sick of that stupid ass pictures
I still remember 1 Jan 2000. There did seem to be some sense of optimism about where things could go. At least for those of us lucky enough to live in stable, developed countries.
Cold war over, Russia and The West seemingly on the same side, China opening up, exciting new tech connecting us but no toxic social media yet...
But then... the dot com bust, 9/11, the GFC, toxic social media and the rise of "the algorithm", Xi in China, Putin in Russia, a global pandemic......
Didn't really go where we hoped, can we restore to a backup from 1999 and try again??
The Matrix described 1999 as the
peak of human civilization and I
laughed because that would
obviously not age well but then
the next 23 years happened and
now l'm like yeah okay maybe the
machines had a point
Fun fact: Switch was originally supposed to be trans. Her name is still an indicator of it. I think she was supposed to be biologically a man in the real world, but biologically a woman in the matrix.
And people wrote articles like this. And it wasn't even completely ridiculous. And I still believe the world would be very different today if GWB hadn't "won" the election.
Amazing how normal GWB seems after trump. Like i always thought GWB would always be remembered as the dumb president... but now i think he will be a forgotton one almost.
I always thought they had a program for each choice, like one put them to sleep while the other one activated the tracer. Can't recall the exact lines but I thought they only did the tracer after he accepted meaning it was meant as needed for that step. Could really be either but I always thought the tracer program needed some signal that would only work when the host body received it, or a signal the body was being purged. They were all hackers so maybe they didn't need it but I assume they didn't see all the data from their view just what the machines let them to continue on the cycles.
I haven't watched the newest one and 2/3 are a bit fuddeled in memory so I may have easily missed a line, or other lore with it. Anyways just explaining how someone may come to this conclusion even if it's incorrect.
I'm afraid the human race won't live long enough to reach "peak civilization" as that would mean that the successful ones take everyone else along with them to the top. That isn't likely to happen before the successful ones take us all down to extinction.
70's for total quality of life, then we increased in digital quality of life while everything else fell then we increased in network quality of life but everything else fell. seems like the matrix any day now.
Well, the events of 9/11/2001 were a pivotal moment in the united state's national consciousness. That was a traumatic event for the country; our national self esteem changed. The world became more of a scary place.
It also represented a tipping point for personal rights in the western world. Wholesale spying was something that "evil commies" did, and Intelligence agencies had to at least obscure their attempts at spying on their own citizens. Nowadays you have some western governments basically saying that the Stasi didn't go far enough.