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SAYS SOMETHING POLITICALLY CHARGED WITH EXCESSIVE EMOTIONAL UNHINGEMENT

The Matrix is interesting because arguably only the first movie was classic. The movies that came afterwards were big and flashy but lacked the impact of the first.

I remember seeing Matrix 2 in theatres, and the scene on the highway is really a good example. There was a massive car chase, a fight on a transport truck, lots of explosions and flash and kung-fu fighting, but I was bored. Back then, televisions were vacuum tubes, and I was watching the movie on a giant movie theatre screen in high definition, but I was bored.

The first film had quiet moments, but it also had tension because a lot of the characters in the movie do die. We see several people die over the course of the movie and they don't come back, they aren't saved by a deus ex machina. It seemed contrived the way in Matrix 2 they basically needed to teleport Neo to the other side of the planet so he could be kept out of a scene and he had to superman it back.

Ironically though, you can do a great story about a character on God mode. Japan has an entire genre of anime where the main character gets cheat powers.

Another way isekai handles the "god mode" problem is to make it so you don't care the MC is overpowered. In The Matrix, the end of the first movie chastens the Matrix. They know Neo is The One, and they respect him deeply even though they're opposing him. It sort of means there's nowhere to go. He's overpowered and everyone knows he's overpowered and everyone is scared of him. By contrast, in isekai often the enemies think they stand a chance and so they use the perceived imbalance to really kick the dog, really make the audience hate them. The fun of a "God Mode" character is seeing an overconfident and really evil antagonist get their comeuppance. They thought they were in control, but in reality they were just a fly buzzing around the MC waiting to be righteously swatted.

Isekai can also make their cheat powers interesting by making learning them an arc. Matrix 2 for example could have shown that the two things Neo did at the end of Matrix 1 were not enough to deal with the strongest threats the Matrix could muster, and so he'd have to use hard work and diligence to learn the fundamentals of his powers and become much more powerful so he could overcome the greatest threats. This could have an inherent tension in The Matrix because he could only train on his powers while inside The Matrix, but being inside the Matrix would also be the one time he was actually at risk from it as well. Instead, we got a whole Zion subplot.

One of the reasons this kind of training arc also works is that it demonstrates that the power alone isn't what makes the hero heroic. Most isekai protagonists with cheat powers are often told their powers are useless and won't be beneficial to anyone. The reason the protagonist is successful isn't just the cheat powers, but because of the hard work, diligence, and ingenuity that helped them master their powers. Outside of Isekai, consider Naruto. He starts off as hated, then has this gross red chakra that makes him more powerful but takes away his humanity and doesn't make him all-powerful as most high-level opponents defeat him in that state. He has to learn how to master chakra and the rasengan, but he also has to use his innate virtue to communicate with, tame, and later befriend the nine tails to change the nasty red chakra into something that turns him into a glowing being of overwhelming power. He never would have earned that power without his innate virtue and his clever intuitions about how to connect with a being that is a prisoner inside of him (with the help of other jinkurichi like Killer Bee).

The final movie could have meant finally transcending the Matrix altogether and having Neo (and his friends who could have been somewhat powered up by the new wisdom Neo gains during his training to keep them relevant) entering the machine mind. The concept of an Agent Smith who sucks people up like a virus is still acceptable, but the movies never investigate the idea that Smith gains his power through non-virtuous means while Neo would earn his power through acts of virtue. In the actual movie, Neo gains real-world Matrix powers that are not in any way investigated or explained for no apparent reason than he's special. Smith ultimately wins because he's more powerful, and only through a philosophical deus ex machina does Neo defeat Smith. It was a cool fight, but it doesn't feel like a good payoff, and it doesn't really feel earned. If instead Neo gains some measure of control over the robots in the physical world because of his brave actions in the virtual world, then that could help resolve part of the Zion plot. In the end, you could still have a major fight between The One Neo and The Many Smith, but it could be framed in such a way that Neo's fight is with power he gained through discipline, virtue, and bravery and the support and love of his friends while Smith's powers were gained through greed, vice, and cowardice but rejecting friendship, and in the end Neo wins because of the attributes inherent to that virtuous rise to power, and Smith would lose due to the attributes inherent to his vicious rise to power.

One final thing is you could tie the concept of virtue vs. vice, of the one among many vs. many subsuming the one and you could help win the war against the machines by convincing the ruling class of the machines that humans and machines can work together after all. There could even be a character who similar to how Dozer and Tank exist entirely in the real world exist entirely in the Matrix. I mean a main character who can join in on Matrix adventures, perhaps Neo's teacher in the second film who is a rogue AI program or something. In that way, the end of the machine war and the end of The Matrix would be representative of Neo's virtue rather than just the fact he's machine Jesus.

I think the reason the Wachowskis didn't go this route lies in the first movie: "Simulations and Simulacra", one of the defining tomes of postmodernism. The rejection of overarching narratives means that ultimately they couldn't accept the victory being because the good guy was virtuous and the bad guy was vicious, because that conception breaks the ideology. This explains to an extent why the Matrix movies have been so disappointing since the first one, and it also explains why they didn't take these clear and obvious steps that would have made the trilogy likely one of the greatest movie franchises of all time. Their ideology simply couldn't accept a broad narrative like that.

I think the fact that Neo is a postmodern superhero is the key here. His job was to deconstruct the established narratives, and once he's done that the movie ends. However, you can't deconstruct into building something, so the later movies feel directionless because of it. You'd have to transition into either traditional narratives or at least into a metamodern conception where you destroy but you balance it with building.

I think I might understand why the Wachowskis failed to pivot from postmodernism: They are fish made of the water they were born in. They might have had pretensions for philosophical depth, but in reality The Matrix was a mirror reflecting the postmodern narratives that had become dominant by the late 1990s. Being well-versed in the philosophy of the age, they were able to produce a seminal work reflecting those values. Beyond that, they floundered because they were able to integrate philosophical speeches into their work, but weren't able to effectively tell stories about those alternative philosophical systems. Similar to if I tried to write a story about living in the barrios of Mexico, I could read some stories and try to create something based on that, but the inauthenticity of the stories would be unavoidable.

Arguably most societies over millennia existed without financial products, particularly the current conception of them in forms like bitcoin and global prediction markets. Financial products in our current conception of them are, at the most charitable, only about 400 years old when the Dutch invented stock markets. Before that we might have had banks, loans, currency, and contracts, but that's when modern (in a literal sense) financial products were invented. Since World War 2, we've seen the invention of postmodern financial products; financial products totally disconnected from creating any sort of tangible good or service.

Bitcoin in particular is a poster child for this problem. You have a currency with a multi-billion dollar market cap that you can't use to buy most tangible goods and services in existence today.

Tesla is another example. While you might be tempted to believe that Elon Musk's Tesla is a company that became valuable by making cool things, you'd be mistaken. Tesla is the smallest car company on a public stock exchange by sales, and while most companies have multiple product categories, Tesla became incredibly valuable selling only passenger cars. Only in the past year did they even get a pickup truck model. Despite that, it's a company more valuable than the rest of the auto sector combined. Elon Musk didn't create an auto company, he created a financial instrument that routinely goes up.

When money ends up chasing games that play money instead of things that produce tangible goods and tangible services that people require, and actually starts to become a cancer, eating up good people and good resources that could have been spent on real wealth. Money going into things because they make money and nothing else is like an ouroboros trying to grow fat by eating its own tail. It may feel sated because it's belly is full, but in reality it slowly starves itself to death because while it consumes itself it uses up resources that are no longer being added to the system.

For this reason, a society that is so focused on financial products and so derisive of real manufacturing or other forms of production of tangible goods or services cannot last the Long haul, and I think we're seeing that right now because the actual quality of life of individuals is worse today than it was 25 years ago. Real incomes have been stagnant for a very long time, but moreover the lack of real tangible productivity has meant that the tangible things that we have left has become increasingly expensive. Because we have entire industries full of people working at desks pushing piles of beans around metaphorically, we aren't building enough homes and so an entire generation, arguably multiple generations of people are completely priced out of the housing market for the rest of their lives. Food is going up in price, which has caused instability in developing nations. Energy has become scarcer, and people always focus on the idea of energy as frivolous but people need to eat their homes or they die. Perhaps most importantly, the spiritual toll that comes from a civilization that knows that they don't actually do anything is cataclysmic.

Now I don't want you to get me wrong here, I'm not saying that we don't need financial products or that I want Bitcoin or prediction markets to disappear, and certainly not just because they're part of a certain product category. What I am saying is our priorities are completely misplaced. I think that it will mean the end of our society and our civilization if we don't course correct. We're already starting to see it where other civilizations that aren't like ours are starting to be much more dominant culturally and in terms of tangible power of us. The amount of sleep lost over the island of Taiwan (that actually manufactures important stuff) should be an eye-opener for all of us.

The realignment would require focusing less on postmodern financial products that are removed entirely from tangible goods or services, and instead focus on financial products which enable efficiency, innovation, or risk mitigation in ways that indirectly support tangible industries. In the case of something like bitcoin, it would require actually solving the problems it has to make it a viable alternative to fiat or commodity currencies in day to day use. This would inherently free up resources tied up in postmodern financial products and would lead to a reallocation of resources towards things with tangible productivity, which ought to be the final goal of financial products in general.

There are two types of change we need to see: Cultural and legislative.

Culturally, we need to see a move away from valuing making money by making money and towards making money by doing something of tangible value in the world. Bitcoin's current market cap is based entirely on people gambling that they will own a piece of all the money on earth when more people use bitcoin, and that's not a healthy attitude or a moral one. The reason China is so powerful and Taiwan is so important is that they make tangible goods people around the world use, and that's because of a cultural philosophical difference in the way Confuscian thought which even in Communist China dominates the mindset in the region. That philosophy holds doing real stuff as important for a harmonious society. We need the same viewpoint in our society or the ouroborus will starve eating its own tail.

Legally, we need to make moves to reintroduce natural forces that would limit the size of a company. Part of the reason everyone is trying to create monopolies they can price as if they'll own the market always and forever is that huge megacorps are so competitive despite being so damn inefficient. Eliminating corporate personhood would be one good step, as well as setting up fines or punishments for crimes to be proportional to the size of the company's market cap so as your company's size grows the risk of gaps in compliance and the like grow disproportionately. We might want to consider for particularly heinous crimes a "corporate jail sentence" where all the assets in a company are frozen and cannot be used for a certain period of time, and a "corporate death sentence" where a corporate charter is revoked entirely and the company assets are individually put up for auction. The idea would be that as companies grow, the risk of running the company grows so much that it doesn't make sense to bother taking on multiplied risk for additional gains.

In a sane world, Tesla should be priced for what it is -- a barely profitable lower tier auto manufacturer. In a sane world, Bitcoin should be priced for what it is -- a rarely used computer science experiment whose actual utility is fairly minimal -- I'd be surprised if more than a few million dollars a year in bitcoin is used as an actual currency, so its market cap should reflect that reality, not the guess that one day it will be all the money.

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