The Metamatrix, the realworld and Us

- Soumil

In the last essay in the previous issue of the magazine I wrote about rebellion and how it’s carried on from one generation to the next by referring to a very good show named Andor. Now, Andor is a part of a merchandise, arguably of one of the biggest franchises ever: Star Wars.

The story started as a war against evil, then with its audience it matured into the smaller pieces of the puzzle against that evil with classic moral tales of redemption, friendship, valour and most importantly sacrifice. When George Lucas sold off Star Wars to Disney, he did it because he wasn’t done with the story but he had other stories which needed him, he had his family which needed him. Disney tried to reboot and relaunch the whole franchise by Star Wars: The Force Awakens and it received huge box office success—but everything went downhill from there as Disney tried to shove it’s woke agenda into the characters and changed them so much that they didn’t resemble what they were one bit. It continued to go further downhill but Disney kept using it as a successful brand by doing something called “nostalgia-bait” and “cameo-porn” targeted to feed pieces of same old familiar bits in new combinations to an audience who just wanted to enjoy what they had already enjoyed before.

But what happened?

The world is burning, people can’t protest for their favourite characters after all—THEY DON’T EXIST!

Streaming and OTT platform changed the industry forever, I won’t harp along how…Disney tried to launch a transmedia franchise story-telling—something which was successfully done only by the Matrix franchise before. But Disney failed since the primary motive was huge box office returns and hiring writers who wanted to impose their agenda through the characters. 

The market was flooded. How many versions of the same toy can you buy? How many same versions of the phone can you buy? But capitalism adapts and evolves—that’s how it survives. Products die or are consumed faster than before now. You’ve multiple soaps where previously there was just one soap and that was enough. You have hand showers now and even fucking three shower heads pointing at you so that you can have the most refreshing and relaxing bath ever while the other parts of the world get scorched due to water crisis.

Capitalism couldn’t stop the protests…no one can…so capitalism asked the protests to occur through capitalist modes only. I see millions of people arguing in Facebook and Instagram for their rights, for their ideologies…and they do all these in a capitalist app designed to make you spend more and more time in it: in a virtual world distant from your own. And there’s this ever looming suspicion of people watching you…recording you…

So Andor, even though it brings the right message to its audience at the right time and gives the one thing that Star Wars is supposed to give since it birth: hope—it is a product nonetheless and you have to spend your valuable data or wifi and get a subscription to watch it. 

But still Andor is what Luthen does… “doomed to use the tools of my enemy”…and they do it to spread a call, a beacon of hope for eons.

But again we come to the question which our parents always ask: but what to do?

We can’t keep away from our devices—it’s impossible now. It can be controlled, yes. We can always spend time in the real world. Your friends are far away? Don’t worry, they’ll visit you, trust me…if they don’t speak with you for one day and fall out then they really aren’t friends. There’s a saying that you can’t make old friends. There’s also a saying tell your new stories to old friends and old stories to new friends. That’s how it works. That’s how it has worked for a fucking long time. 

What we can do is remember that the real world is where it all matter actually. I don’t know if the real world is a simulation but god damn if it is then it’s a very good one because that feeling I get while laughing with my friends…well, if that isn’t real I don’t know what is. You can flirt for hours through WhatsApp, profess your love and all but going out with such a person, outside in the real world and oh no it’s raining, and you two are in the same umbrella stuck together with your shoulders occasionally brushing each other…yeah well, if that isn’t real—no matter what happens after that—I don’t know what is.

As a character in Ready Player One said, “The real world is where you get a decent meal”…the real world IS the place where you get everything: the good and the bad ad the things you can’t decide if they’re good or bad. You can’t escape the Meta-Matrix, all of us will have various health problems in our thirties when all the time spent in the metaworld finally will catch up to us…but even then I would like to lie on my own bed, feel the bedsheet, the pillow beneath my head, the curtains rising and falling as evening bleeds into the sky. I would like to see my best friend who will obviously say something like, “Fucker, we were supposed to die together with cancer or some shit” and his voice will travel into my ears, not a god damn voicemail, but the real voice I knew of and I would laugh a genuine laugh, not a goddamn sticker.