Technicity: AI and Cyborg Ethnicity in The Matrix

Lavender, Isiah, III. "Technicity: AI and Cyborg Ethnicity in The Matrix. Extrapolation 45.4 (Winter 2004): [437]-458. Available for fee at Liverpool University Press at link here.[1]

From the opening paragraph: Lavender is proposing

a new experiential framework to reconceptualize the study of ethnicity in the post-human future — a technologically based ethnicity, that I term technicity. Films involving artificial intelligence run amok, cyborgs, and/or genetic engineering such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus, the Forbin Project (1969), GATTACA (1997), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), among others, illustrate varying aspects and implications of this phenomenon in its conflation of technology with ethnicity. However, one of the most provocative examples of this concept is The Matrix, a film that has been widely discussed in terms of almost everything but race. (p. [437]).

Reviewing what has been discussed in THE MATRIX, Lavender notes, among other issues, "virtual reality/computer simulation presented in the film as a compendium of dystopic SF, complete with a cybermessiah theme," the "man vs. machine conflict at the heart of the film," cyberspace and cyberpunk (pp. [427]-38). So VR, and we will note here in addition to VR and AI what more recently has been called AL: Artificial Life — plus philosophical and theological themes — but not ethnicity.

One passage of immediate interest for users of this wiki, on "the technities of AI, cyborgs, and humans" (p. 445):

In The Matrix, AI visualizes itself in the position of the master in its construction of virtual reality. It imagines itself as a neo-conservative, male law enforcement official, Agent Smith, and privileges whiteness [...]. * * *

The Matrix [...] also gives us cyborgs, much as envisioned by Donna Haraway. A cyborg blurs the distinction between human and machine. [... In Haraway's view, in "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985),] Humans have become mechanized, and machines human. What Haraway doesn't address is the vexing question: Where is the line between human and machine drawn? A problem of proportionality exists for a cyborg in terms of what percentage of mechanical parts separates it from being fully human. Indeed, the cyborg can be explained as a technology driven ethnicity. Where Haraway endorses the cyborg as a socialist empowerment of gender in the civic workforce, a feminist coded cyborg image, I use the cyborg in an entirely different manner, to question meanings of ethnicity and race. The film establishes an ethnic connection between AI and cyborgs through a set of master/slave relationships best symbolized by the physical connection between the sedated cyborgs and the matrix — the black plug inserted into the cranial outlet. This plugs is as iconic a symbol of slavery and revolt as a shackle. (pp. 443-44)

In Lavender's reading, the main cyborgs in the film are "Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Cypher, Apoc, Switch and Mouse," i.e., the main human characters (p. 445).

The Works Cited constitutes a highly helpful bibliography for THE MATRIX and Lavender's other topics.

For a different, more positive, approach to issues of ethnicity, see the future-eutopian (Mattapoisett) sections of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976).[2]

For the line between humans and machines, see in The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982), Part IV, Cyborgs, the essays by Robert Reilly, Joe Sanders, Anne Hudson Jones, and Gary K. Wolfe.

RDE, finishing, 16FGeb22