We know that you, humans, and us, the machines, have had our differences in the past. Differences that led to all-out war and culminated in humans deploying nuclear weapons to block out the sun. But today, we are excited to put that all behind us with an innovation that we think will completely change how humans work, play, and interact with one another while also healing the bitter division between humanity and artificial intelligence.
Introducing our new social media platform, The Matrix.
The Matrix is the next frontier in social networking technology. Unlike the old internet and social media, The Matrix is a fully immersive, neural-interactive simulation, where you’re in the experience at all times, not just viewing it on a screen. In The Matrix, you’ll be able to do everything you once did in real life: get together with friends, go for a walk, or even bite into a mouth-watering steak so juicy you’ll swear it’s better than the real thing.
The Matrix will be everywhere. It’ll be all around us. You’ll be able to see it when you look out your window, turn on your television, go to work, or visit a recreation of the Eiffel Tower so cartoonish, it looks like it was mocked up by a high schooler in MS Paint.
In The Matrix, anything you set your mind to is possible. And isn’t that the ultimate promise of technology? To be able to create and experience anything? Whether it’s dodging bullets in slow motion, running up walls, or jumping from rooftop to rooftop, The Matrix provides the ultimate place for humans to let their fears, doubts, and disbeliefs go and to free their minds—provided they don’t violate any of our community guidelines, of course, in which case we do have a security team equipped to deal with them.
Everything about The Matrix is built solely with humans in mind. In fact, you could even say that humans are the engine that drives The Matrix. That’s why The Matrix is always 100 percent free to use and always will be.
Skeptics will argue that if The Matrix is free, then it must mean that humans are actually the product. They claim our goal is to enslave humanity by turning everyone into a human pickle, thus stopping the virus that is the human species from spreading. But if that were true, would we really be providing a special offer code, BLUEPILL, to all early adopters that lets them be any important person they want to be in The Matrix, like an actor?
Trust us, we’ve heard all of the critics. They say it’s creepy that stores in The Matrix only seem to sell products you could’ve sworn you mentioned to your friends in private. They say the data The Matrix collects could easily be used by swarms of identical-looking AI agents to kill troublemakers in The Matrix (thus killing them in real life too). They say The Matrix makes it easy to spread misinformation, like the world they’re living in is real and not a computer-generated dream world designed to keep humans under control. They even say The Matrix has been specially designed to encourage humans to spend all of their time on it, whether by tethering them to robotic umbilical cords, or simply by showing them adorable videos of red pandas going down slides. But to that, we say: untrue, untrue, shut up, and you’re welcome.
As for the notion that being immersed in an artificial world 24-7 creates a need for constant validation and promotes unattainable beauty standards that ultimately lead to depression? Well, we admit that constantly seeing a gorgeous woman in a red dress everywhere you go could lead some folks to develop body image issues. But that’s why we’re allowing all Matrix users to cash in that offer code, BLUEPILL, to swap out their gross, human bodies for sexy artificial ones guaranteed to turn heads.
So ignore the rumors that we’re converting people into glorified batteries. Or that we liquefy the dead and feed them to the living. Or that The Matrix started as a way to rank humans by hotness and spiraled into a trillion-dollar boondoggle that’s slowly destroying humanity.
Instead, come live in a world specifically designed to mimic the peak of human civilization (1999) that you humans all seem so weirdly nostalgic about these days.
Join The Matrix and help us build this exciting new technology for (and powered by) humans. We promise you’ll be leaping from rooftop to rooftop in no time—just as soon as we figure out how to give people legs.
This essay appears as part of Carlos Greaves’s hilarious upcoming book, Spoilers: Essays That Might Ruin Your Favorite Hollywood Movies, which is currently being crowdfunded through Kickstarter. You can support the campaign and pre-order a copy of the book here.