[Vision2020] Obituary: Baudrillard On "Matrix, " Protest In Modern Society

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2028464,00.html

Such had been Baudrillard's name for the defining problem of the age since
the 1970s, when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been
replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation. He
thus anticipated, by a decade or two, later arguments about the nature of
"virtual reality". Pop culture paid tribute to Baudrillard's prescience in
Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 film The Matrix, about a near-future Earth
where human society is a simulation designed by malign machines to keep us
enslaved. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software in a
hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher's books, and rebel chief
Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) quotes Baudrillard's most famous formula:
"Welcome to the desert of the real."

Baudrillard was invited to collaborate on the sequels, but declined. He
later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong: "The most
embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is
confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the
kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to
produce."
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In subsequent works, including The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of
Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977), Baudrillard developed
arguments about the increasing power of the "object" over the "subject" in
modern society, and the way in which protest and resistance were
increasingly absorbed and turned into fuel by the symbolic "system" of
capitalism.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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