Welcome to the Desert of the Red Pill
This essay originally appeared in Curious.
For more of my critiques of conspiracy culture in Medium, click on THEORY/ON/CONSPIRACY.
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Red Pill America. On May 17, 2020, Elon Musk tweeted “Take the red pill.” Soon the same day, Ivanka Trump tweeted “Taken.”
Flashback. Exactly seventeen years earlier, on May 17, 2003, I was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN about the meanings of The Matrix.
Flash-forward. Elon’s tweet has 554K hearts, while Ivanka’s has 91K hearts. Red pills are proliferating—copies of copies of copies!
As Morpheus said to Neo at the philosophical climax of The Matrix: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Now it’s a desert littered with red pills, the copies that have replaced the real red pills.
Flashback: “Mapping the Matrix” in 2003
So why was I being interviewed by Anderson Cooper about The Matrix? The occasion was the opening weekend of The Matrix Reloaded and a symposium called “Mapping the Matrix,” which I hosted on a Sunday morning at the university where I was a professor. What happened that morning is much like what is happening around America now.
Mostly forgotten is that The Matrix Reloaded generated massive buzz in the media, even rivaling current Star Wars openings. This was before Facebook and Twitter. Front page stories in newspapers, huge sections in the weekend guides, and coverage in radio and TV talk shows. Speakers at the symposium were interviewed on local radio stations. The speakers included:
— William Irwin, editor of The Matrix and Philosophy (2003), one of the best-selling philosophy books of all-time
— Read Mercer Schuchardt, contributor to Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (2003)
— Elisa Durrette, a friend who was the corporate “futurist” at Fedex-Kinkos
— myself.
Everyone has their “Matrix”
That Sunday morning, the atmosphere in the auditorium was electric, with more energy than I have personally experienced in any symposium—across 30 years as a grad student and professor. Since the semester was over, there was no extra credit for students to artificially populate the room.
The auditorium was packed, standing room only, with people sitting in the aisles. The crowd was diverse across age, gender, and ethnicity. Some Morpheus fans were in trenchcoats, others in Trinity-inspired shiny black pants, most just there because they were stoked about the ideas in The Matrix. It was like Comic Con meets philosophy symposium. Red pills everywhere, with differing effects. In the vibrant Q&A, it was clear that “the Matrix is everywhere” and everyone had their own version of what it was and who was in control. Just like 2020.
Neo’s Book
In The Matrix trilogy, there is only one book shown and it is in Neo’s apartment. Early in the The Matrix, Neo opens a dark green book called Simulacra and Simulation; the book is a hollowed shell containing computer disks and other items. With the facade of a book, the Wachowskis are referencing the key concept of controversial philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard is often misunderstood, both by “postmodernist” followers and “political” critics, who don’t get the metaphorical style of his writings. I’m not a follower who agrees with everything written by Baudrillard, who disavowed postmodernism. So do I, as an existentialist in the vein of Jean-Paul Sartre. But I embrace the aesthetic role of powerful metaphors to highlight our cultural conditions and contradictions, as presented in “Simulacra and Simulation.” That’s what art (like The Matrix or Sartre’s No Exit) and poetic theorists (like Baudrillard) can do—make something visually clear that is often lost in the dry writings of most thinkers. Obviously, Lana and Lilly Wachowski got that when co-writing and co-directing The Matrix.
On the first page of Neo’s book, Baudrillard wrote:
Let’s sort out that metaphorical passage. We like to think of media technology as “maps” for our world, as suggested by Google Maps, Facebook status updates, and endless social media pics and posts. But, almost always, over time, the situation is paradoxically reversed — the media maps are generating the territories to which our culture and consciousness conform. Obviously, that seems insane, or at least radically counterintuitive. But bear with me. Simply put, Baudrillard argued that society mirrors the dominant media technologies, just like cities mirror the technologies of cars, suburbs, highways, and skyscrapers. If those technologies can transform cities with models of mass production, then why can’t media tech transform consciousness with models of mass reproduction?
That’s often a hard thing to grasp, but it is the “reality” we are facing in 2020 and beyond.
Below are three key concepts from the passage. A shot of tequila might help wash down the following sections. Or your fave drink.
1. The Map is the Territory
Baudrillard believed that the map has overtaken the territory it is supposed to represent, such that the map is the territory. It’s a metaphor. The “map” is media technology, the “territory” is reality.
What’s the dominant media now? Screens and cameras connected via networks spanning the planet. Total screen and media usage [home, work, coffeehouses, TV, internet, news, video, music, gaming, etc.] now averages 10–14 hours per day, which means the screens are our daily maps and territories. Following the rise of television, the media maps no longer merely “represent” reality, they generate the realities we recreate in society, realities old and new.
“The map is the territory” is an updated take on Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the massage.” McLuhan first used the term “matrix” when discussing “automation” in his 1965 book Understanding Media (p. 364). Baudrillard’s and McLuhan’s phrases both mean that technology massages and shapes consciousness in the image of the technology’s forms, rules, and realities. Here are some brief examples.
Television produces some great shows, but reduces book reading and leads to Las Vegas and 24/7 entertainment culture.
Hollywood produces some mind-blowing films, but also leads to celebrity worship, Disneyland, and dreamworlds as the preferred daily existence—the dream “reality” of Keeping Up With the Kardashians consumed on screens across the planet.
Social media curate news for us, but also shrink attention spans and reproduce the “global village”—with everyone in utmost proximity, everyone in everyone’s face, flame wars, hot takes, and tribal conflict.
Social media reproduce the screen worlds of television and Hollywood, where everyone is a star, super special, with a “truth” to entertain or enrage us. From influencers to internet tough guys to Twitter Gods. That’s how a reality-TV star becomes a celebrity president. That’s the map overtaking the territory.
2. Hyperreality and Simulacra
Powered by screens, we live in a “hyperreal” world where the signs and symbols of the real have largely transformed the real or replaced it. The real and fictional are no longer dualities. Simulacra is plural for “simulacrum,” the copy in which the original is no longer present, needed, or desired. Even the “red pill” has its simulacrum, as evidenced by those claiming to be red-pilled, such as Elon and Ivanka. Copies of copies of copies.
Morpheus taps into Baudrillard when he says: “The Matrix is a system.” As the technological “system” advances through innovation, it produces model after model of the new desired “reality.” The models then crank out endless copies and clones, replicas and reproductions, fakes and facades, substitutes and simulacra. They are all reliant on each other for meaning and value. It is models that generate the brands of mass production, from Big Macs to Grande Lattes, Jeeps to Teslas, 501s to Dos Equis, Pradas to Ray-Bans—all of which are empirically real, but are presented as if original or authentic, special or sexy, or just super-cool. Even the high-rises and suburbs were generated in models.
Media and advertising generate endless models for lifestyles (goth, gangsta, hipster, etc.), music styles (rock, rap, country, electronic, etc.), and sports fandom (Cowboys, Patriots, Longhorns, Trojans, etc.). The models proliferate, which is why there is a fervent quest for meaning and authenticity, in a world filled with brands, logos, flags, religions, and spectacles—the Oscars, World Cup, megachurches, and so on.
The planetary sprawl of hyperreality is the cumulative effect of Las Vegas, Disneyland, Hollywood, television, social media, and the proliferation of screens. Cleverly, the “fake” worlds of Vegas and Disneyland mask the fact that the rest of society and “reality” are bound up in copies and simulacra. The Super Bowl is one giant hyperreality, a staged event, a simulacrum of tribal conquest—yet it is watched as if it is the realest and most macho thing in our part of the Milky Way. That’s why celebrities, footballers, and presidents generate such loyalty. In a world of fakes and facades, they are the most hyperreal things to love, to worship, to obey—they’re more real than real, more true than true, more beautiful than beautiful. No wonder the real territory of Earth is pillaged and polluted to power the maps and models.
The system is perfected with capitalism, but it also works with fascism, socialism, and religion because “the system” is the mass production of goods and mass reproduction of images—which are done in any political system for profit or propaganda. For Baudrillard, all life is absorbed and reproduced within the system, including all resistance to the system. Rebels are reproduced and red pills proliferate. As shown with Elon and Ivanka, red-pilled rebel simulacra are everywhere. Endless copies of copies of copies.
That’s why being a real rebel is so damn hard. The copies replicate, the copies gain power, any real rebellion is neutralized or marginalized, and “the system” stays intact, in control.
Lady Gaga’s Hyperreal Halftime
Hyperreality presents a media universe that is “better” than the real “universe,” especially in America’s biggest events. A perfect example is Lady Gaga’s halftime performance during the 2017 Super Bowl in Houston. Gaga begins the performance atop the open roof in the stadium. Behind and below her, we can see the glowing sprawl of Houston in the background — not a star above is visible. The Milky Way is erased in the skyglow of electric lights, the nighttime Matrix for our cities. As Gaga begins singing “God Bless America,” the white lights of drones appear behind her in the night sky — the simulacra of the stars no longer visible, no longer necessary, no longer desirable.
The drones soon turn into a red, white, and blue America flag, prompting Lady Gaga (suspended by a cable) to drop into the stadium and its total hyperreal spectacle. Cheers erupt. In America, patriotism and nationalism are religions now dominant in the other universe of illusion — hyperreality. For many Americans, there is no worthy universe beyond mythical “America,” no worthy reality beyond hyperreality — the glowing Matrix suspended by fiber optic cables above the desert of the real.
3. The Desert of the Real
Shreds of reality are scattered across our screens, distant territories beneath our glowing maps, powered by silicon sands. The “desert” is no longer merely “out there” in the American southwest or in Saharan Africa, but is also just below our screens, just beyond our mediated perceptions of the world. The remaining “real” realities — if they exist according to Baudrillard— reside in “the desert of the real.” Those are the natural deserts that exist far outside the metropolises, or maybe the cultural deserts that exist in the fissures within the metropolises. In the voids, the shreds, the cracks, the fragments, there might be openings for new territories, new autonomous zones, new moments of adventure and liberation for daily life, as with the “Situationist International” movement of the 1960s.
This is where the real rebellion can begin, getting a foothold in the voids and fissures in the system, to address the social injustices, equity imbalances, the ecological impacts. Like lava flowing from a volcano that makes new land on Earth, new territories can erupt and emerge amid the maps, lands seeking to be more just, fair, equal, peaceful, factual, and sustainable—as with Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, the Women’s March, the Science March, the George Floyd protests, or with the Apollo 8 “Earthrise” image and the first Earth Day fifty years ago. The existential and social challenge is to keep the new territory from being checked by “the system” (in all its forms), from being lost or buried in the glowing maps of hyperreality and consumer society. Any changes must be real, not hyperreal, not simulacra, not another map filled with the signs and symbols of change.
There is No Exit
For Baudrillard, there was no conspiracy, no secret cabal, no mysterious puppet masters. Hyperreality was the evolutionary consequence of technological civilization, coupled with humanity’s perpetual unhappiness and emptiness — which it seeks to fill with ever more consumer goods, ever more gods, ever more technological wizardry, ever more maps that are territories. This is where capitalism and tech innovation merge to create the endless consumer-entertainment-celebrity society, which continues to expand despite its devastating impact on the environment.
In his more radical texts, Baudrillard asserts that the real (or authentic) reality is no longer accessible, no longer existing outside our mediated perceptions in hyperreality. All that was left was to try to hack it with nihilistic theory. That’s why he thought The Matrix ultimately missed the real meaning of hyperreality and his works. The movie offered hope. But, for Baudrillard, there is no exit—there is no red pill.
“The Matrix” Has Many Readings
Like all great art and science-fiction, The Matrix can be read on multiple metaphorical levels. Historically, The Matrix is a powerful retelling of “Plato’s Cave.” In Plato’s famed allegory, the prisoners were limited to viewing the shadows and images on the wall, unable to exit and discover the real reality in the sunlight outside the cave. In another reading, The Matrix presents a deep state conspiracy theory about an artificial reality — “pulled over our eyes” — that is patrolled by armies of artificial intelligence, the Agent Smith clones.
In an August 2020 interview in YouTube (three months after this essay was originally published), co-director Lilly Wachowski says The Matrix was a metaphor for a “trans narrative” in a “world that wasn’t quite ready for it yet.” Wachowski explained: “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view, and so we had the character of Switch who was like a character who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix.” Wachowski added: “I love how meaningful those films are to trans people … I’m glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention.”
Add on the Wachowski’s reference to Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and it clear that the The Matrix is a complex and multi-layered film that many find inspiring. That’s why the film belies any shallow reading that suggests there is an easy, sure-fire way to break out and find “freedom.”
The Desert of the Red Pill
“Red pills” proliferate among conspiracy theorists — The Matrix of new world orders, deep states, false flags, Flat Earth, Young Earth, UFO coverups, Area 51, fake moon landings, ancient aliens, Bill Gates, and so on. The evil conspirators’ goals supposedly are coup d-etats, one world governments, maintain power, impose tyranny, take away freedoms, and implant chips to track us (even though our phones already do that quite well).
The networks of the 21st century internet and social media are dense, complex, and span the planet. Images and information pour in from all over, some true, some false. Layer upon interlinked layer. The more one digs, the more one becomes immersed. Everything seems connected, deeper and deeper. Endless links, blogs, sources, websites, and YouTube videos. Propaganda, government lies, corporate coverups, and now photoshop and deep fakes. It’s hard to tell what is true and false. Information overload. Hyperreality everywhere. The “Matrix.”
The JFK Red Pill
What’s really true? That’s how I often felt about the JFK assassination when I read several books about it in my youth, along with seeing some documentaries. To my eyes, the Zapruder film of the assassination clearly suggests two shooters, thus a conspiracy of some kind. The U.S. government lied and covered up information surrounding the assassination, thus there was definitely a conspiracy. That was my red pill.
So I get why people believe in the JFK conspiracy. There was, in fact, a coverup or conspiracy of some kind, but more likely a smaller conspiracy rather than larger one. I never understood why the all-powerful forces could kill Kennedy, yet not bother with taking out conspiracy theorists whose books and films claimed to know who killed Kennedy.
The JFK assassination is ground zero for 21st century “Red Pill America.” Since then, JFK conspiracy theories have spiraled into hyperreality. This culminates in Oliver Stone’s “deep state” vision in JFK (1991), which captured Boomer angst about lost hopes and tarnished ideals, but still ended up as a hyperreal fever dream with the map burying the territory.
The Deep State Matrix
Agent Smith represents the deep state, the secretive mysterious force being resisted by the red-pilled rebels in The Matrix. In America, current “red-pilled rebels” include (but are not limited to) the Alt-Fact battling Fake News, the anti-science freedom fighters mocking the mask-wearing sheeple, and Elon Musk battling the pandemic shutdown with tweets wildly off the mark about death rates, while calling the stay at home orders “fascist.” Meanwhile, real fascism is spreading in America, on the maps and territories, from racism to border walls to militarized cops and unchecked police brutality—all while the Trump White House ratchets up power, corporate America counts its profits, and Hollywood cranks out endless maps and movies glorifying war, cops, violence, paranormalism, and pseudoscience. How many more maps, movies, and shows must there be that glorify badass cops, fully militarized, kicking in doors and busting heads?
Deep state theorists scour the internet for conspiracies, yet seem to rarely bother to research the real science of pandemics, vaccinations, evolution, and climate disruption. These rebels complain about their freedoms being lost, yet fail to grasp that the internet and social media provides them a global platform to shout their theories worldwide, albeit inside the Matrix like this essay. So they take their red pills and bring their semi-automatics to the state house, threatening legislators, like the heroes they were trained to be at Fort YouTube. The Matrix needs heroes and it reproduces them. Real, fake, and everything in between.
Whereas the original “red pill” in The Matrix was more about discovering a philosophical liberation in a new worldview, it seems current red pills now are about reinforcing existing worldviews of power and profit—nationalism, patriotism, militarism, theism, racism, unchecked capitalism, and hyperreality everywhere. Rather than reinforcing, it seems real rebels should be challenging those ideologies—the existing “Matrix” of massive power, profit, and domination.
Thinking Reasonably in Hyperreality
Given the layers of social media and the internet, it’s no wonder “deep states” and conspiracy theories are proliferating, spiraling beyond reason and right into Baudrillard’s hyperreality. The conspiracy maps overtake the factual territories—conspiracies more real than real, more true than true.
I don’t blindly trust governments, corporations, or political parties, for all deceive or mislead far too often. The U.S. government lied about atomic radiation, lied about Vietnam, lied about Iraq. Institutions and organizations often conspire, but we have to be reasonable in how we take on that problem.
It’s not easy, especially amid hyperreality. In thinking about alleged conspiracies, I do my best to apply reason and logic to known evidence, while realizing the constructs of hyperreality. That’s why I know Apollo 11 landed on the moon, why there is no “Ancient Alien” conspiracy, and why the “Flat Earth” and “Young Earth” theories are scientifically bogus.
Alt-Fact Theology of Power
Many conspiracies are a blend of pseudoscience and religion. As sociologist John Gagnon once said, “the difference between a conspiracy theory and a scientific theory is that a scientific theory has holes in it.” Unchecked conspiracy theory functions like a religion with hidden supreme beings running the world, an Alt-Fact theology of power.
Mapping a Chaotic World
In a fully-mediated world, the bigger the horror, the bigger the map. JFK shot down in broad daylight, thus a massive conspiracy theory. Jetliners imploded the Twin Towers, thus the 9/11 “truther” movement. The universe is vast and doesn’t care about us, thus creationism and the “Young Earth” and “Flat Earth” theories, with evidence supposedly denied in a giant conspiracy by world scientists. Big horror, big map, the Matrix.
But, what if the massive maps mask the real horror—fears of chaos and events being “out of control.” Perhaps the world is, indeed, chaotic? Wasn’t that the lesson of “chaos theory” in the 1980s and 1990s? Science shows that small singular events can trigger huge aftermaths, what is known as “the butterfly effect.” The universe and Earth are filled with chaotic unpredictability, with sudden singularities triggering massive effects. But, the human mind fears chaos, evolving a massive pattern-recognition processor in our brains. To cover for the chaos, we create ever larger maps.
We fear a chaotic world with things “out of control,” so we want to believe someone or some being is in control with a perfect plan. So we map massive conspiracies. We know we can’t solve our big problems in a vast universe, so we invent gods and superheroes, to comfort us, to make us feel special, to show we deserve to exist in a meaningless universe. The idea that an unseen Supreme Being created and controls the universe is the biggest Matrix of all.
All of the above is why the “Science March” of 2017 may end up as little more than a glitch in the Matrix, a momentary gust of sand in the desert of the real.
Elon and Ivanka
Humanity loves gods. So we invent them. That’s why we love heroes and heroines. We love people who we imagine as game changers, economic disrupters, and big players challenging the Establishment. Worthy or not, we surround our heroes and heroines with media maps that make them god-like, especially if they become rich and powerful. Plus, Hollywood produces numerous films celebrating “rebels” and rule-breakers.
Elon Musk may well be a cool dude, I never met him. But, it’s obvious he is far more inside the Matrix than outside. Elon champions terraforming Mars into a mirror suburb of Earth. What’s more Matrixy than turning the Red Planet into a copy of Earth, imposing the industrial models and maps on to an entire other celestial body? Isn’t Musk’s Starlink satellite system just another layer of the global media Matrix? Musk plays the role of bad-boy rebel simulacrum, eagerly defended by fanboys and fangirls. Do they really think a SpaceX launch or Tesla car means they’ve freed their minds with a red pill? Judging by the response to Elon’s “red pill” tweet, 554K apparently think so.
Ivanka Trump is a product of the billionaire entertainment Matrix, inheriting a VP position in the Trump Organization, a hyperreal capitalist corporation that has long shredded reality. Yet, her “red pill” tweet garnered 91K hearts. Ivanka played a boardroom exec on The Apprentice and is now a “Senior Advisor” in the White House hyperreal.
Led by President Trump and Vice President Pence, the White House is overseeing a deranged pandemic response that has contributed to 100K deaths (and counting), precisely as Corona shreds the reality of human lives beyond the screens of Fox News, beyond the conspiracies of Trump’s tweets.
Red Pill America
“Death Valley and Las Vegas are inseparable; you have to accept everything at once; the unchanging timelessness and the wildest instantaneity.” — Jean Baudrillard, America (1988).
America is ground zero for the Matrix, with red-pill rebel simulacra everywhere in hyperreality. Copies of copies of copies … ad infinitum.
Technology has erased the night sky and pushed nature far away, leaving humanity as cosmic narcissists and the center of everything, buying and battling inside hyperreality while we ravage the planet and effect a sixth extinction event. The universal narrative has dissolved into tribal warfare, the timeless insight into the electronic instant, such that a common bond and shared destiny seems impossible on the territories of Planet Earth. Yet, it is the common bond that humanity so desperately needs. Empirical reality exists in fragmented and polluted shreds, far too often buried by the glow of electronic screens, where hot prevails over cool, heat over chill. Are truth and reality mere subjective power constructs inside hyperreality, or do the images of Earth from space or the Hubble telescope images suggest there is a objective universal existence we all inhabit?
In his book The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard wrote that technology and the hyperreal have murdered reality and got away with it — “the perfect crime.” Is not something similar happening in America, with more than 600,000 total deaths from COVID, a pandemic that millions think is a typical flu exaggerated by scientists, doctors, and the “lamestream” media to take away their freedoms?
In the spirit of Baudrillard’s metaphors and The Matrix, poetics work best to sum up America. A second shot of tequila might help finish this up!
Lady Gaga leapt off the roof in the Super Bowl against a drone-filled night sky, symbolizing an “America” suspended in the darkness above Badwater only by the light beams shooting skyward from Las Vegas — and radiating throughout the vectors of Hollywood, Disneyland, and Silicon Valley. Are there enough lights on to prevent the fall? Like a once-mighty Atlantis, Trump’s America, the simulacrum of freedom and democracy, is imploding inside the Matrix, with the White House and its cult of followers poised to plunge everyone into the Death Valley of the real — a final philosophical resting point in the Badwater basin, the carnage of America 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America.
500 miles south across the desert, Trump’s Wall is baking in the desert sun.
Welcome to the desert of the red pill.
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