Notes on surviving the American matrix (Part 1)

1.

Even for those of us who’ve long expected a bad turn, something about the last few months feels new.

Do you feel a falling? Do you feel a failing? Is the ground shifting underneath us? Maybe. There’s a certain tension underneath the heart.

“I can already feel reality slipping,” wrote David Farrier. (1) It was then one week after the inauguration.

2.

But perhaps this is not so new.

 I am hardly the only one to grapple with a sense that reality is somehow warping. Almost everyone I talk to tells me about people they have lost "down the rabbit hole"-parents, siblings, best friends, as well as formerly trusted intellectuals and commentators. People, once familiar, who have become unrecognizable. Altered. It [begins] to feel as if the forces that have destabilized my world are part of an expansive web of forces that are destabilizing our larger world—and that understanding these forces could hold a key to getting to firmer ground.

from Doppelganger, written by Naomi Klein and published in 2023.

3.

I do not feel reality slipping. Reality to me feels very sound.

Outside, people and cars and animals move about and intersect in normal ways. The squirrels on the back deck continue on their specific and prolific routes. At 8 AM, kids huddle in groups on my street corner. When the bus arrives, they form a line, leaning forward under the weight of voluminous backpacks. The bus tires squeak. At home, my books assemble themselves in their same haphazard positions. The deck still has a hole in it (we will fix it next year). My body becomes hungry and tired and sad on its usual cadence. Yesterday I successfully completed a daring left turn onto the boulevard and felt extremely pleased with myself. All of that feels normal, and stable, and real. Reality is. It does not care what I think of it. 

But when I open my screen, open my brain, I do feel a tilt. A visceral feeling of gravity turning the wrong way, as if I had stepped onto boat which is sinking, on the cant, hovering at the brink of its final pivot.

There is certainly a world slipping its moorings. But it is not the real world. It’s our collective half-dream—the fake world we’ve been curating, and which has been curated for us—turning into a full simulation, rising above the solid earth, slipping its moorings, disconnecting. A literal unhinging.

In one world we have: science, squirrels; the collective experience; the smell of eggs, conversations in coffee shops, toddlers screaming in the parking lot, cartwheels, debates. Consequences.

In the other world we have: AI weirdo bots, with airbrushed faces. Everyone applying the same labels to the same things at the same full-tilt roar. Computer servers, humming, drilling opinions into demographics with machine-like efficiency, telling us who we should hate, love, blame.  Faceless masses hurling themselves at each other. Fake Nazi salutes alongside real ones. Fake people. Real people. Huge captions and trigger words and nonstop outrage, a scream so loud and constant it becomes a lull.

What is that world? What should we name it?

4.

Okay, I said to myself a few days, ago. I’ll go there. You know what it feels like? It’s the Matrix. That thing we saw in the movies. Except now it’s, you know, here.

It seems that the alternate reality thing we sidehustled here in America has turned into a real boy.

And now, with the self-crowning of the American king—the takeover of government by technofeudalists—the boundaries are solidifying.  To live in both worlds is becoming increasingly impossible. The Matrix is here, in your pocket and in your brain, in the pocket and brain of your neighbor, turning all the resources of the world into bits and bots and memes, into numbers, into money, into currency.

It’s separating itself, declaring itself a fully independent state, conceived in fear and power and domination, and dedicated to the proposition that all humans, all living beings, our planet, our water, our time, our children—are resources to be plundered.

It is here, and it is real. It has intent to colonize and conquer. To paraphrase poet Frank Bidart: It really, really does not wish you well.

5.

I began to detect my own citizenship in the Matrix this way:  

Sometime in the mid-2010s, I found myself echoing lines from another world. This world I called, at the time, “Twitter.” 

The thing that made me curious about the opinions expressed, more about the parroting—about the exactness. I felt someone else’s sentences coming out of my mouth, fully formed. I would go into an online space and come out repeating lines from it, verbatim. When I was paying attention—which was rarely—I found this startling: Who was speaking with my tongue? When had I given them access to my voice? 

It is not that these opinions were wrong or harmful, necessarily; it was only that they were repeated. Neat little pings of well-crafted pithy language. Soundbites. Often factual.  Sometimes wise. Just, you know, not from me. This effect was subtle and hard to detect. It came in and out of focus.

Much harder to ignore was what I began to hear from the people who raised me. I think of my father — the twitch in his face — right before he would say something totally unlike him, in phrases copied right out of the mouth of Joe Rogan or vintage Limbaugh or whoever and broadcasted ad infinitum via Facebook networks.

It was an eerie thing to hear from my father, who lived on forty acres in the middle of rural Ohio. In the real world around him, the gooseberries ripened and the farm stank of aging pears; inside his head, there was someone coming for him.

One trigger word and out it would all come: An avalanche of set phrases—different than the ones I used, but more terrifying. A conversation would start out normally, but then I would say the wrong thing, some codeword, and then—an internal pivot. A mask settled on his face. The soundbites flowed. 

I did not quite put two and two together; or I did but did not change my behavior or approach. I assumed the real world was stronger; I assumed thirty years of history in the real world would outweigh whatever the hell was happening.

It did not outweigh what was happening. It became increasingly hard to understand one another until, eventually, we stopped trying.

Now, I believe this was because we were not comparing opinions but straddling worlds.  They were not talking with me, but a shadow they’d named Nellie—someone they’d met in the Matrix and named “daughter.” Perhaps she looked like me. Perhaps that matrix daughter was a “liberal.” Perhaps their Matrix daughter hated them. I don’t know. I am not her but I am forced to live in her shadow.

6.

But I was also fighting shadows.

How many times did I assume their opinion before asking? How many times did I speak before listening, certain that I understood the situation . . . . ?

I believe we were looking, not at each other—not at a person, a living being we adored—but at some phantom we had built in our brain, or had been built for us, and called:  

enemy                liberal               daughter           MAGA                    atheist               fundamentalist               Democrat

We called each other by Matrix names. We saw each other through Matrix eyes.

7.

I feel somewhat sheepish about the language of “matrix,” which is of course borrowed from the iconic movie about alternate realities.

The plot points of this movie, in brief, being:

Regular human Neo discovers he’s living in the Matrix—a simulated world created by machines to enslave humans. Once outside of the Matrix, Neo discovers his true calling, which is to take missions back into the Matrix to free humanity and…establish peace between humans and machines? (That last phrase is per The Internet; I slept through movies 2 and 3.)

It’s strange that I’m talking about this movie at all. When I saw the first movie, I was interested, but mostly by the possibilities of being able to download complex skills—martial arts! helicopter piloting!—through a probe inserted in the neck. (I was learning high school Spanish at the time, by myself and poorly, and therefore extremely interested in such efficiencies.)

Other than that, I remember the usual stuff: Neo bending, Bullets arcing. Pills in primary colors. The child with the bending spoon. All the on-the-nose metaphors.  I turned off the VHS player and went back to my life. I like The Matrix, but I am not and never have been, you know, a "Matrix fan."

But all that imagery is coming back now, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, because the similarities between the movie and real life are becoming uncanny.  Uncanny and, you know, on the nose.

I still clock the Buddhist metaphor at the heart of the cinematic enterprise, but what’s striking to me is that the whole “alternate reality created by machines” is becoming less and less metaphorical.

Now, we really do have a world layered on top of the world, with its own storylines and villains, its safe spaces and vortices—into which people disappear, down and down and down, in and in and in, until they come out with different voices—different names—yoked through the throat to a storyline that often has little to do with the physical world or the body they live in.

8.

The Matrix is the “machine drift” that Kevin Roose speaks of in Futureproof, whereby computers and data models make all our major decisions for us—the route to get to the supermarket, the best shoes to purchase for an upcoming trip, the right way to begin a cover letter. It is a giant game, designed by robots and their handlers, with all possible outcomes predetermined.

As Douglas Rushkoff notes in Team Human:

“. . . Game designers lead all players through the same game story, even though we feel like we’re making independent choices from beginning to end. None of these choices are real, because every one leads inevitably to the outcome that the designers have predetermined for us. Because the interfaces look neutral, we accept the options they offer at face value. The choices are not choices at all, but a new way of getting us to accept limitations. Whoever controls the menu controls the choices. 

 Which is to say: In the Matrix, you feel like you’re making choices while making no real choices at all.

The Matrix is all the suffering of freedom and none of the benefits.

9.

The Matrix is the force of automated opinion. In the Matrix, ideas are spun up, distributed on automation, and pounded in your head through sheer brute force repetition. It’s a place where you need not create a single idea for yourself, because computers are actively programming opinions into your brain for you. 

Whether these are the right (or the nuanced or the compassionate) opinions does not matter to the computer doing the programming. It only cares that it can use these opinions to control your attention as well as, hopefully, your purchase decisions.

That its efforts might result in societal upheaval, family strife, or the dissolution of the web of human relationships does not matter to the computer. It has not been programmed to care about such trivialities.

10.

The Matrix is a constant story, played on repeat by your own brain—a narrative shim through which you view the world.

It is the woman who lives in the suburbs, across from a little park of budding green trees, who eats three square meals daily, who lives with a good man, who has everything to be thankful for, but who—upon a brief scroll through one of her various devices—cannot shake the notion that the whole world is going to hell and taking her life with it. (This woman is me.)

The Matrix is the place where the visions that pass before us need not be beholden to reality. Fake detritus blows past our ears. Unreal mirages unfold before our eyes.

To quote Tony Hoagland, the Matrix is the place "where the information winds howl."

11.

The Matrix metaphor is on the nose, but I can’t resist.

It’s all so stark now. We built this thing ourselves, and now it is building us. How easy it is now to fall into complete delusion and never leave. To walk around the halls of the Matrix, staring into the opaque, digital distance… to call everything by its Matrix name, to see everything through Matrix vision.

12.

The essence of the Matrix is formalizing, but the promises it makes aren’t new.

In America, we’ve been living in a quasi-reality atop a reality for a long time. The dream world-story of infinite progress—endless expansion, a manifest destiny in which we can chew up the world and digest it nicely with no consequences. A reality in which we can use all the resources, run up the bill, and expect the rest of the world and our grandchildren to pay for it. What matters is buying things. What matter is consuming. What matters is propelling the economy. What matter is heading toward the horizon. Making more money. Making more stuff.

We have heard this story everywhere—our media, our myths—and helped to spin it ourselves. We’ve made ourselves quite comfortable here.

All of this materiality has accomplished nothing so well as divorcing ourselves from the material world—devaluing the physical substrate and the physical world that makes life possible.  As Jane Bennett puts it in The Force of Things, “the sheer volume of products and the necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, devalues the thing.”

The real world is subsumed in the fake. We’ve been so bombarded with materiality that we don’t take any of it seriously anymore. Things seem endless, so they must be. There seem no limits, so there must not be. Everything is nothing, so everything is conquerable.

Now that this narrative is hitting very real boundaries in the physical word, our new technofeudal lords are moving it over to the digital world, where they’re no longer hindered by such irritating limitations as time, physical reality, or facts.

If they don’t like reality, they can now just change it, generate an image, a hashtag, whatever—unleash the forces of automated opinion to ensure it catches on—and boom! The story is off and running, inserted directly into your brain and into the brains of people you love, who now project the Matrix onto you, just as you project the Matrix onto them. The Matrix is the real world; the real world is the Matrix.

The line has both solidified and is becoming blurrier. If you’re out, it’s easier to see that you’re out, and what it is you have exited from. But if you’re in, it’s almost impossible to perceive that you’re in.

Crossing the border is what makes the border visible.

Thanks for reading Part One! In Part Two, I’ll try to answer the harder question: What now? How do we live alongside the Matrix without being swallowed?

I don’t claim to have a perfect answer. But I do have some theories. Subscribe below for free to get the second half directly in your inbox.

In the meantime, you might be interested in reading I refuse to submit to the Spirit of Fear or learning How to host a story dinner.