![]() ![]() “A Glitch in the Matrix” is divided into chapters (“Revelations: Seeing the Code,” “The Kingdom of God: Notes Toward a Digital Theology”), and each one is introduced by a clip of Dick, filmed in 1977 speaking to a roomful of fans in Metz, France. He thought of his novels as documentaries, in which he was writing down the things he’d glimpsed from an alternate reality more real than our own. How did he come up with it? Simple: He believed it. Dick, the science-fiction visionary who died in 1982, but not before laying down, in many of his stories and novels, the grand foundations for simulation theory. But the one who really paved the way for it - who gave it cachet, and a certain scruffy literary cool - was Philip K. So it’s both a reality theory and an extraterrestrial theory you could say that the alien cults of the late ’70s and ’80s paved the way for it. Here’s the metaphor the people we meet in “A Glitch in the Matrix” believe: that our lives are a computer simulation, engineered (and controlled) by an advanced civilization. If “A Glitch in the Matrix” is evidence, simulation theory is now threatening to turn a whole lot of us into Bill and Ted. Elon Musk says reality isn’t real! Whoa! Where can I sign up!? It’s hardly incidental that “The Matrix” starred Keanu Reeves. We see clips of Musk on a talk show saying, “The odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.” What his minions don’t understand is that he’s selling himself as an out-of-the-box mod futurist. ![]() Elon Musk is their tycoon celebrity hero. It’s got animated sequences that are like puckishly staged video games, and it features an ironic cast of giddy talking-head incels - a total arrested boys’ club, alternately fascinating and annoying. The movie takes the pulse of how science fiction has merged with our imaginations. “ A Glitch in the Matrix,” the new documentary directed by Rodney Ascher, who made the thrilling cinehaulic conspiracy-theory deep dive “Room 237” (which was about people who think that hidden messages are encoded in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”), gives each of those metaphors a workout. You could also call it a rabbit hole, a looking glass, or this generation’s acid trip - a chemistry-free way of turning reality inside out. You might describe that as a philosophical stance, one that can be traced back to Descartes or even the parable of Plato’s Cave. There are words, and many metaphors, one could use to describe simulation theory: the belief, popularized two decades ago by “ The Matrix,” that the life we’re living - the people we know, the experiences we have, what we see, touch, think, and feel - is literally an illusion, an artificial façade orchestrated by minds far more developed than our own. ![]()
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