Only Human: The Age of Cambridge Analytica and the Matrix
Writer: George Leith
Images: Grace Crossley
There’s a moment in 2016’s Hypernormalisation when Adam Curtis suggests that Hollywood disaster movies of the 90s acted as cinematic harbingers of the ‘dark forebodings’ of the 21st century. In their own way, the fictional realities of America’s attack from external forces — be it by Godzilla, meteorites or aliens — picked up on a latent paranoia in American society that would eventually find it’s reality in 9/11 and the war on terror. Culture, Curtis reminds us, can predict and inform the conditions of our reality.
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Recently re-watching The Matrix made me think of this. Only, The Matrix is a very different kind of 90s disaster film. Instead of the disaster being the destruction of the White House or fleeing explosions on the streets of Manhattan, the disaster is in the reality of the human condition itself. Existing in a duality of the truly living and the computerized, the programmed and the real, the Wachowski brother’s dystopia reveals humans as slaves to a computerized system of data, dictating their behaviour and defining their lives. Neo, by taking the red pill, can escape the ‘real’ for the true real. Instead of his office job, the daily grind of day-to-day working life under capitalism, he can see the world for what it really is.
Like Curtis’s cinematic montage predicting the early years of the 2000s, The Matrix, even more prescient, goes some way in understanding the duality we live in today. Increasingly, we are beginning to understand the influence machines and algorithms have upon our behaviours in ways we cannot fully understand yet. This has been clear for over a decade in personalised Facebook ads, for example. But further: revelations surrounding the collaboration between democratic campaigns and company’s like Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ go some way in illustrating the potential of technology to not only analyze our identity or voting tendencies, but to define them too. Like Neo emerging from the primordial gunk in his vessel amongst millions surrounding him, we are starting to understand how invisible, almost otherworldly forces at play define our reality and behaviour. Of course, the aesthetics of The Matrix do not quite fit into the world today — although the analogy of servers as millions of sleeping humans kept in pens is tempting. The line is blurred and subject to control. Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Vote Leave’s chief strategist Dominic Cummings in Channel 4’s recent feature Brexit: The Uncivil War, on discovering of the ability of Aggregate IQ to seek out new voters via the internet, says he can ‘order the matrix of politics’ with this new political weapon. He did, but quickly society’s awareness and antagonism toward these conditions is sharpening as more information emerges about the ways that the mass collection of data is being used to shape our behaviour.
