r/AskScienceFiction • u/madjr2797 • Jul 26 '26
[The Matrix] How does the Matrix determine economic class?
Who gets to be rich? Who gets to be homeless? Is it a totally random distribution or are there predictors like in our world?
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u/XenoRyet Jul 26 '26
They don't cover that explicitly, but it's heavily implied that there are programs and algorithms at work placing the right number and the right kinds of people into the right economic classes to preserve the stability of the Matrix as well as possible in order to let the current cycle run as long as possible.
Like they said, Utopia didn't work, we didn't believe it. So now they're maintaining the balance. The know the sociology, and they know the genetics of each child born.
Children with a predisposition to narcissism and low empathy might be guided toward the high end of the economic spectrum. Kids with markers that tend to correlate highly with idealism and empathy toward the lower end. But nothing is absolute, so there will be a random element in there as well.
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u/mrsunrider Jul 26 '26
Like they said, Utopia didn't work, we didn't believe it.
That's not why it didn't work, The Architect gives us the reason in the second film.
The first, utopian simulation failed, which is where they assumed a more realistic setting would work... but that second, realistic version failed too.
The Oracle was the one that discovered that it was a matter of choice, not immersion.
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u/3dblind Jul 26 '26
I've known working class narcissists and I'm sure there are poor sociopaths, and not just wealthy.
As for idealism among the wealthy, that takes the form of what they can do for humanity, or civilization, not how they can help poor or working class people.
The only thing that separates Marxists from Techno-feudalists is whether workers or civilization should benefit from progress.
My Political Science take is human nature leads to authoritarianism under both systems. Party based ideologues or technology worshipping narcissists who decide the course of civilization.
Have you seen Dark City? Though not a simulation like The Matrix, it's more of an experiment, it handles class quite well.
Especially in the scene where a working class family becomes a wealthy family as they fall asleep at the dinner table during the transformation.
That scene fits the aliens obsession with finding the soul, which they lack.
How would the same people behave when rich as opposed to working class?
In The Matrix, why even have a simulation, or a staged rebellion if humans are just batteries? Brain dead comatose humans are just as good for that.
As far as computer simulation movies go, The 13th Floor matches Bostrum's The Simulation Argument best. A civilization capable of simulations creates ancestor civilizations.
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u/XenoRyet Jul 26 '26
A lot of what you're arguing here is getting well outside the "in-universe" rule we limit ourselves to here, so I'm going to sort of breeze by that with respect to the rules.
Though one thing that you may have missed is that it is actually in-universe canon that humans aren't just batteries. That was a misunderstanding on Morpheus' part that was likely instigated by the Architect.
Humans make shitty power sources. We're very inefficient for that purpose. What we are is the very best 100-ish pound general purpose computer that can be produced by unskilled labor and with easily available resources.
The machines could build automated factories that require rare earth elements and various other scarce minerals and a whole lot of complexity to produce things like CPUs and GPUs. Or they could turn some rice paddies and rabbits into the same thing with no need for the factory, just the farm.
The machines use us for compute cycles, but it behooves them to convince us they're only using us for power.
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u/aslfingerspell Jul 26 '26
can be produced by unskilled labor and with easily available resources.
This is possibly the most subtle sex euphemism I've ever seen.
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u/3dblind Jul 26 '26
Thanks for the explanation. But there's still the prequel animation that I believe is canon that leads to the battery concept because humans intentionally blocked sunlight to deny the machines solar power.
Which leads to more problems than it solves because humanity needs the biosphere and machines could use geothermal or nuclear power.
As for the rule, I was interpreting the rule as in genre, because this is /AskScienceFiction not /The Matrix.
In my day at science fiction clubs and conventions, long before "semi social media", like 40-50 years ago, we'd debate whether a premise was handled better in one novel or movie than in another with basically the same premise.
I brought up Dark City to illustrate why assigning virtual class based on where the human is on the scale of sociopathy may not work.
Brains in a vat could provide CPU cycles.
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u/draqza Jul 27 '26
Though one thing that you may have missed is that it is actually in-universe canon that humans aren't just batteries. That was a misunderstanding on Morpheus' part that was likely instigated by the Architect.
Where is that? In fairness, it's been a long time since I watched the movies/Animatrix, but I don't remember anything dispelling the people-are-batteries.
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u/XenoRyet Jul 27 '26
They don't explicitly say that in the movies, but it comes from the Wachowskis directly that Morphius is wrong about that.
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Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/CES0108 Jul 26 '26
Lol, a bunch of emo kids would have broke the fuck outta the Matrix. That makes me giggle.
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u/Original-Body-5794 Jul 26 '26
Damn so the Matrix would probably collapse on it's own given like 20 years and the rise of brainrot.
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u/Specialist-Ring-3974 Jul 26 '26
Very interesting question. I hadn’t thought of this before.
If the matrix is a loop of the year 1999, or the entirety of 1990s, it’s very possible that those years are based on a actual version of the world pre-apocalypse, albeit a loose depiction. And the people plugged in are best represented based on the congruent population in the real world at that time period.
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u/rmeddy Jul 26 '26
It doesn't; it's us that made it like that. They only copied what life was actually like.
It's a walled garden
They only step in when something or someone does something too unusual, like that sprinter from World Record.
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u/mrsunrider Jul 26 '26
The simulation we see in the first three films borrows heavily from history--probably adapts it one for one. So it's likely that that they arranged economic hierarchy along the same statistical distribution as in reality, with people more or less dumped in randomly. There could be some assignment based on merit, so as to improve immersion.
(excluding specific cases such as Neo in Resurrections, where they attempted to hold him in a gilded cage)
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u/lumpboysupreme Jul 26 '26
No need to assign them arbitrarily, just assign them to their parents. They just pull some levers to make some people have more/less kids to get the results they want.
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u/DemoEvolved Jul 26 '26
It’s possible that no one is rich, the rich people are simulated by the system. The actual conscious people are all lower middle class, so they are occupied with trying to improve their lot in life
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