this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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There was a youtube video I saw about this recently that suggested that it was never actually humans that blotted out the sky, it was actually the machines that did that, since most life on Earth depends on sunlight (directly or indirectly), humans were hurt more by the sub-blotting than the machines ever would've been. Plus, there's a reference in the script for one of the movies that talks about the clouds in the sky being some sort of nano-machine clouds or something similar.
Zion has been destroyed multiple times and rebuilt by the machines themselves, so any history that the Zion humans have is what the machines want them to know and has likely been tainted. They also point out that Zion uses geothermal energy for its power needs, there's really no reason why the machines couldn't also harness this power (and since they're the ones rebuilding Zion, they would obviously already have this technology). I've heard that if the machines really wanted a living power source, they'd have been better off using cows and just make the Matrix simulate green pastures, rather than waste all the time taking care of humans.
I've not actually seen the last Matrix movie, so no idea if this was brought up/contradicted in that, but seemed like an interesting idea.
In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.
Not only does that make more sense in the sense of "humans don't make a great power source" (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.
My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.
On the point about why they didn't use cows instead of humans as an energy source. I think I've read that in the original conception of the Matrix, the humans' brains were meant to be used for computation for the machines, rather than the humans being energy sources. This was changed since computers were new to the general public in 1999 and it was believed the concept would be too confusing.
It's also kind of important to remember that ultimately, it's a metaphor. The specific scifi handwave is just there to justify the whole "Humans as a disposable resource" imagery that exists to underpin the film's anticapitalist themes. The Wachowskis never really cared for subtlety, and I don't blame them. Even the obvious goes over most people's heads.
I tried to watch the last matrix but it just isn't nearly as good as the trilogy.
This was the original script. Humanity wiped themselves out fighting each other, the matrix was a time capsule so society could restart without losing everything once the skies cleared up.
It was judged to be too complicated for the masses so we got "machine bad" instead.