By Jack Butler
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Earlier this week, we got a trailer for
this December’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a sequel in the
franchise started by 1999’s The Matrix. The first movie’s basic
premise — reality is an illusion malevolently forced on us from which we need
to be liberated — as well as its action and special effects have helped it earn
an enduring place in popular culture. As has its idea of a “red pill,” offered
to main character Neo early in the film to escape the illusion:
You take the blue pill and the
story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You
take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the
rabbit hole goes.
A worldview constructed around the latter choice has
grown in recent years on the online right. Despite its tenacity, it remains
fundamentally flawed.
Even without such a stark scene, The Matrix would
bear more than a passing resemblance to the ancient beliefs associated with
gnosticism: that reality itself is a war between two competing yet equally
matched good and evil forces; that the physical world is a deception foisted on
us by evil; that our bodies, being physical, are also a trapping of evil to be
resisted; and that true knowledge of all this is achievable only for an elite
few. If an idea survives for centuries, then it must have some appeal. Reality
can often seem disappointing; heroic self-conceptions can be fun; and imagining
oneself as the holder of true knowledge amid the horde of rubes can feel
empowering. A digital age in which so much of one’s experience seems to have
some degree of remove from reality likely makes this notion even more alluring.
How did the red pill go from pop culture to right-wing
Internet politics? In an excellent essay for The New Atlantis,
Geoff Shullenberger identifies a kind of dual-track origin for the red
pill as a political neologism. It seems to have come out of the “manosphere,” which
he describes as “an array of misogynist subcultures united around the belief
that feminism controls modern culture and men must free their minds of its
influence,” around 2009. Contemporaneously, it also popped up in the writings
of California computer programmer, neoreactionary blogger, Peter Thiel associate, and now Tucker Carlson interviewee Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin, as Shullenberger puts it, “claimed to offer readers an alternative to
the propaganda of the ‘Cathedral,’ his term for the complex of state
bureaucracies, the university system, and the mainstream media that together
prop up liberal rule.” Yarvin’s thought has been promoted by The American
Mind, a publication affiliated with the Claremont Institute. In 2019, The American
Mind introduced an essay written by Yarvin by calling him
“one of the most influential and controversial figures on the online Right” and
claiming that “as the political scene across the internet has fragmented with
explosive growth, some factions have taken concepts Yarvin introduced — such as
the ‘red pill’ metaphor associated with The Matrix — and
popularized them, sometimes in unhealthy and extremist ways.” It decided to
give him a platform to explain and defend himself and has since featured work
by him and other, similar writers.
It is hard to determine the true origin, spread, and
popularity of online phenomena. But the red pill has become particularly
popular for a certain kind of Very Online conservative. The adjective “redpilled” is
typically used to describe someone or something that reflects a vague, would-be-novel
conservatism positing that most of society is arrayed against its adherents.
The redpilled also tend to have a contempt for politics as it is practiced in
the real world, preferring instead a complete triumph that requires . . . well,
definitely something other than what they believe conservatism
has typically resembled lately. You don’t have to look hard to find instances
of someone online breathlessly labeling a favored development as “redpilled,”
or noting the “redpilling” of someone who apparently accepts their perspective.
In fact, this outlook is now so ubiquitous that, as Shullenberger writes,
“taking the red pill”
occupies a peculiar position in our
cultural lexicon: tainted by its association with some of the most widely
reviled online subcultures, yet instantly recognizable and infinitely
adaptable. The phrase conveys a belief that one is socially marginalized for
daring to believe dangerous truths — yet it describes an experience so
widespread that almost anyone might deploy it. The red pill has somehow become
both culturally central and peripheral, at once a dog whistle and a cliché.
It is indeed a cliché — and an ancient one at that. The
true believers among the redpilled, like the gnostics before them, imagine
themselves an elite sect. Having awoken to what they identify as the truth,
they hold others in familiar gnostic contempt. But they must also explain why
they see what others cannot. To do so, as Shullenberger writes, they “often end
up engaged in something not unlike the Marxist critique of ideology, because
they must explain how most average people have been deluded into a ‘false
consciousness’ that distorts the true nature of reality.” In this also familiar
mode, detractors are reflexively dismissed as hopelessly deceived by the status
quo — or, even worse, agents of it.
This is not to say the redpilled lack arguments, or
sophisticated ideologists among their ranks. Indeed, as Shullenberger notes,
“the redpilled tend to find a new authoritative account that replaces the
orthodox one and offers a manner of suturing reality back together — a process
often reinforced by a newfound sense of being a member of the enlightened few
who have walked the same path.” In The Matrix, this came from
Morpheus, who offered Neo the O.G. red pill; in our world, it comes from
figures such as Yarvin (who, let us remember, is a computer programmer).
Adherents believe that their apparent online numbers,
purportedly sophisticated ideas, and supposed influence in real-world politics
point both to their being correct and the emerging conservative paradigm. All
of these things are hard to measure, not just because of the amorphous quality
of online interaction, but also because of the many layers of irony and memery
in which believers conceal themselves. Still, it is undoubtedly true that none
of this would have happened at all without the Internet. This fact is often
interpreted favorably: The nature of physical reality, it is claimed, makes the
kind of conversation they want to have ever harder, so anything worth saying is
now being said digitally.
But the Internet is at least as much of a constrictor of
thought for the redpilled as it is a facilitator, if not more so. Many of the
redpilled think of themselves as possessing a kind of unique energy, unavailable to the rest of the Right. It is quite
easy to convince yourself of that if you spend all day marinating in carefully
curated digital environments, associating mostly with people who agree with
you, and letting your real-world interactions, such as they are, be flavored
either actively or passively by your experiences online. Insularity is an
ancient human temptation, one the Internet has, surprisingly, exacerbated.
Reddit, for example, consists of a series of compartmentalized communities
(“subreddits”) designed exactly for this. Yes, you can switch between them . .
. or you can stay in one or a handful of similar ones to the exclusion of all
others. And from there, you can become convinced, in concert with other like
minds, that it is the world, and that those who do not belong
to it simply do not understand. Ergo, what you are doing represents a higher
reality — once again, the gnostic impulse.
A true gnosticism requires not just an elect possessing
esoteric knowledge, but also an enemy in charge of the physical world — and an
arena for spiritual combat. For many of the redpilled, that world is social
media, particularly Twitter. Inspired, no doubt, by former president Donald
Trump, and by a misbegotten view that Trump’s tweets were a definitive aspect
of his political success, they view this realm as a battlefield, chasing its
latest controversies and starting their own. The Internet may have begun with
the promise of freewheeling sharing of information and interaction, but in the
realm of the redpilled, Twitter is a place for collectivized, digital mass
action. Believing that tweets are a serious and desirable form of political
activism, they glory in the dopamine rush of likes and retweets, call for
ratios of opinions they deem unacceptable, and take all of these things as
signs that they are advancing their cause instead of adding tiny bits of ember
to a fiery digital hellscape.
There are some things worth remembering about Twitter.
According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, 22 percent of Americans use Twitter daily. In 2021,
Twitter itself measured 199 million daily active users on the site.
This sounds like a lot, but only 38 million of those users are in the U.S. (11
percent of our population). By this measure, Twitter’s total active user base
is about 2.5 percent of the world’s population. Pew’s 2019 estimate also says that 80 percent of tweets come from 10 percent of
users. One study estimates that anywhere from 9 to 15 percent of Twitter users
are bots; 66 percent of all links on Twitter come from bots. All of this speaks to a world that is not merely
self-referential but also self-reinforcing. It sucks people in, convinces them
that it is normal, and then brings out the worst in them as they engage in
futile conversations that are hopelessly skewed by unrepresentative samples of
human beings and disguised machines.
Like much of modern media, Twitter shrinks our attention spans while bombarding us with
things we might not otherwise have ever known or cared about and on which we
have no influence. This is to say nothing of the political slant of Twitter. As
Brian Riedl put it (in a tweet; Twitter has its uses), “Twitter users are D+15
— which would tie HI & VT for the most liberal state . . . the 10% of
Twitter users who post 92% of all tweets are D+43 — which would make it
America’s 2nd most liberal House district.”
This skew can breed, in those who believe it to be
representative, a highly agitated and combative posture. It can make them think
that America is already lost; this is called a “black pill” (the pill boxes of
the redpilled are overflowing). It can make them believe that persuasion and
workaday politics are inadequate to the moment, that only desperate action,
often involving a departure from the constitutional order necessitated by the
one already undertaken by opposing political forces, can bring any hope of
salvation. It can make them believe that the political sphere is or should be a
source of salvation — if only their enemies can be crushed. And so it can make
them believe that only a countervailing force, similarly drawing strength from the
online world and sharing many of its opponents’ attributes, can possibly
contest it. In this way, the hyperpolarization and acute antagonisms of Twitter
feed off each other, require each other, and may in fact reflect each other.
Some of what happens on Twitter may be somewhat indicative of the real world.
But there’s also the fact that Tay, Microsoft’s AI Twitter account whose
personality was formed from Twitter interactions, within a day became a suicidal, sex-crazed, Nazi teenage girl.
So much for reflecting reality.
All of this points to a central irony, and inescapable
contradiction, for the redpilled Neo conservatives. The point of the original
red pill in The Matrix was to escape an artificially created
digital world. But now, redpilling is a phenomenon that depends on digital
interactions. It also deceives its adherents about reality itself, discoloring
or even discouraging their existence in the physical world. It is from this key
inconsistency that so many of their fallacies flow — not least of which is
their compulsive use of online platforms that they deem so pernicious they need
to be regulated differently, broken up, or destroyed. Many of us nowadays
struggle to restrain our use of technology. But that problem will not be solved
by pretending that digital oversaturation is a virtue rather than a vice. Those
who have trouble regulating themselves in this sphere make a curious authority
for how to regulate it in society.
There is nothing magical about the online world. Like
tools throughout mankind’s history, it can be used for good or evil ends.
Facilitating communication, simplifying access to information — such things
have their uses. But the test of something’s verity is not whether it goes
viral. And as a digital form of gnosticism, redpilling has plenty of other
defects that have weakened its utility. For one thing, as Shullenberger notes,
it now exists in a kind of knowing game with its opponents: “The bluepilled
regard the redpilled as deluded by misinformation, while the redpilled regard
the bluepilled as dupes of the establishment.” Clearly, viewing the world as
trapped in a digital binary is a dead end.
For another defect, look back to The Matrix.
Since the movie’s 1999 release, its two directors have come to identify as
trans. Some retrospective analyses of The Matrix, including from
its directors, have imputed a transgender message to the film. The red pill
itself may have originated from the estrogen-therapy pills of the
1990s, which were red. As an ideology, transgenderism is similarly gnostic,
imagining a truer inner self deceived by a false external reality.
Transgenderism is something many of the redpilled would disdain. They might
consider how much of the intellectual framework their worldview shares with it
— or, at the very least, how their gnostic creed is somehow
correct when another one has erred.
Whatever usefulness the red pill may once have had as a
metaphor, it has now become a cliché at the same time that it has become a kind
of twisted faith. It does not liberate its believers but rather constrains
them, trapping them in digital worlds of their own creation. There are superior
forms of conservatism, ones that appeal to reason and to more reliable forms of
knowledge and authority. Curious minds would be better served letting the
redpilled send themselves down endless rabbit holes, and instead pursue forms
of learning and action that have a bit more to do with the world above the
ground.
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