CONNECTIONS

        A Hacker's Haunting Vision of a
        Reality Within Illusion

        By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

            Forget about waking up as an insect, or whatever it
            is that Gregor Samsa becomes in Kafka's tale.
        Judging from "The Matrix," the nation's top grossing
        film the last three weeks, when we awaken we won't
        find that we have become bugs. We'll find that we're
        their servants. Or at least the servants of creepy
        machines that look like bugs.

        That's because the basic premise of this film -- in case
        you haven't heard yet -- is that we are all under the
        control of a massive computer program run by
        arthropods. Everything we think real is just a virtual
        reality created in our lulled, software-driven brains by
        bug-eyed masters whom we serve but never see.
        Everyday life is a worldwide web of illusion, a matrix,
        an intricate simulacrum.

        This idea may seem
        strange, but give it
        time. It is about to
        become cultishly
        familiar. "The
        Matrix" has inspired
        thousands of
        testimonials on
        dozens of Internet
        news groups.

        At
        www.whatisthematrix.com
        there are hundreds
        more. In Sydney, Australia, where it was filmed, fans
        are mapping out the landmarks. The authors are already
        hinting at sequels.

        This fascination is not just inspired by stunning
        high-tech effects and clever plotting, nor by the skilled
        use of formulas from the sci-fi cyberpunk canon.
        ("Blade Runner" and "Terminator," and Philip Dick and
        William Gibson are all knit into "The Matrix.") There
        is something more. The film has touched a nerve with
        its view of reality as just a massive computer program.
        The fervent devotion being inspired is linked to an
        intricate network of ideas about cyberspace and the
        Internet, your own version of the Matrix.

        The nature of this intellectual nexus can be picked up
        from the film's Web site. The directors, Larry and Andy
        Wachowski, convinced the studio to produce the exotic
        film by preparing a comic-book first, simplifying ideas
        and images. The Web site does something similar in a
        series of "Matrix"-inspired comics about a dreary,
        ordinary world that seems fraught with illusion.

        In one Web comic, a weary stockbroker sitting in a row
        of cubicles says: "I spend my day speaking to
        disembodied voices about glowing, ever-changing
        numbers, representing potential values agreed upon by
        people I don't know and won't ever meet. Sometimes it
        doesn't seem very real."

        In another comic a young computer hacker moans about
        her "hellish life as a pitiful shell of a human," a "ghost
        in a machine." This is also the world of the film's hero,
        played by Keanu Reeves, who is just as bored and gets
        his thrills by breaking codes and jacking his way into
        forbidden computer systems.

        What all of these techno-sophisticates sense is that
        what seems to be the real world (and seems to us to be
        the real world) is not all it's cracked up to be. They
        even begin to watch it crack up, finding its flaws and
        quirks, seeing it as the computer program it really is,
        even if they don't grasp who is writing the code. In fact,
        these fictional hackers learn to see the matrix pretty
        much the way real hackers see our world. In the
        hacker's vision, information -- digital strings of ones
        and zeros -- is the essence of matter and life; everything
        else is just scaffolding, superstructure, illusion.

        But having seen so deeply, the hacker also has a
        messianic mission. The hacker is a rebel, an iconoclast,
        a seer. The hacker is a kind of cyber-revolutionary for
        whom the villains are not economic capitalists but
        information capitalists and controllers: the corporation,
        the government and the media. The digital truth, the
        hacker proclaims, should be free and shall set us free.
        This is what the heroes proclaim in "The Matrix" as
        well.

        The hacker myth is, of course, a comic book version of
        the universe, but it is based on enough truth to have
        enormous cultural power. The revolutionary promise of
        the Internet, for example has surely affected the stock
        market. And the notion that life and social behavior are
        really just complex forms of information processing is
        taken quite seriously. Some economists compare
        financial markets to organisms. Some cyber-biologists
        create computer programs that simulate evolution and
        development, creating forms of "artificial life" (often
        called "A life").

        Many advocates insist that the same
        thing is happening on the Internet.
        Each user is a neuron hooked into a
        worldwide organism that is
        gradually evolving; a living matrix
        is taking shape. There are programs
        that maneuver through the Internet
        guided by primitive forms of
        artificial intelligence, gathering information. Software
        aficionados speak of them, imagistically, as "agents,"
        quietly making their way across cyber-borders. That
        metaphor returns to its origins in "The Matrix," where
        software "agents" protecting the matrix appear as
        hard-core beings equipped with suits and
        secret-agent-shades.

        So the film, despite its kung fu gestures and classical
        allusions, is a restatement of the hacker myth, retaining
        and celebrating its almost utopian hopes. Life is
        information and information life, so what isn't
        possible? What couldn't a master of code accomplish?
        The mechanized arthropods have mastered humans with
        their code; now the hackers must master the masters.

        Is it any wonder, then, that we are drawn into "The
        Matrix"? The hacker myth is so powerful it is difficult
        to resist. It is so dominant it is almost impossible to
        dissect. Reality, we are told, is just software. The
        hacker is our savior. The film's only twist is that the
        truth revealed is so much uglier than the illusion
        stripped away. But that leaves plenty of room for
        sequels about virtual unreality and its masters, and lots
        of time for hacker saviors to take on what are, after all,
        software's recurrent nemeses: pesky bugs.