Inside The Matrix, Morpheus, named for the god of sleep, offers Neo the blue pill or the red one, reality as Neo has understood it or reality as Neo might come to understand it. Choosing the red pill, a reborn Neo complains that his eyes hurt. Morpheus explains: “Because you’ve never used them.”
The Matrix, in a trilogy of films by Andy and Larry Wachowski released between 1999 and 2003, is a program created by the artificial intelligence humankind created. If Morpheus and his red pill are to be believed, we all sleep in matrices of decanters and dream our daily analog lives, while our digital masters harvest our life energy. Our lives are illusion. Our reality is nothing more than passively, unconsciously producing energy for a system that we cannot see, let alone manipulate. Such is the life of “coppertops” in The Matrix.
The red pill is the mechanism to escape The Matrix. To “escape” is to apprehend what is illusion and what is not. The red pill might be a concentrated fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the first step toward value judgments is to see things the way they really are. What follows the consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Bible is all of Judeo-Christian- Islamic history. What follows from Neo’s consumption of the red pill in The Matrix may be a visual interpretation of Foucault by way of Baudrillard, or just the latest update of a tale from the 19th Century.