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Sure, grandma…
You’ll all know that meme – the one of an old woman being helped along by a younger one. In every version, the text beneath the elderly woman reads something vaguely anachronistically funny like “in my day, Netflix came in the mail,” or politically scathing like “I remember I was doing my daily Worlde while taking a lateral flow test when I saw a meme that the government collapsed over-night.”
The young girl in the image always has the same text: “Sure grandma, now let’s get you back to bed.”
Bear with us on this one, but this meme is, effectively, the foundation of a Matrix theory (well, two) recently posted to Reddit. And while we know that they’re patently untrue, the way in which they fit into what we know about the Matrix franchise is, frankly, incredible.
The primary theory is that the Matrix itself isn’t an energy farm but, instead, a sort of “wildlife reservation” for humans. The basis of this theory is that if the machine’s sole goal is to use the human brain for power, they’d be much better off harnessing… parrots.
The Redditor goes on to explain: “A human brain contains about 30 times as many neurons as a blue-and-yellow macaw’s brain, but is 70 times as massive. The average human body is similarly about 60 times as massive as the average blue-and-yellow macaw’s.
“In theory, if you were a Machine, you could take a single human-sized pod and replace it with 60-70 parrot-sized pods, and get a much bigger return for the same investment of space and resources. (Plus there’s the side benefit that, if they start to experience ennui and question their reality, instead of creating an elaborate scheme to repeatedly funnel them into a doomed false rebellion, you can just distract them with a plastic cup or something.)”
Jokes aside, one argument against the theory is that in addition to using the human brain for power, the machines were studying sentience and human beings’ ability to hope (as evidenced by the dialogue in the film itself).
Taking this into account, another Redditor posited that the Matrix isn’t a human-wildlife preserve exactly, but rather a retirement home of sorts. They explain: “Humans are the reason the machines exist. Without humans, machine civilization wouldn’t exist. Humans are essentially the ‘parents’ of the machines.
“What do humans do when their human parents are old, out of touch with modern situations, and ultimately a harm to themselves and others? Humans put their parents in a retirement home.
“A nice, safe, retirement environment where they can hang out with people like them, and interact with people their own age with a similar culture. They are given plenty of things to do to keep them active, so they can just ‘live out their lives’.
“The Matrix is a retirement home for an old, out-of-touch species who have proven they are a danger to themselves and others.
“And the machines can learn things from the humans, so sometimes they go into the retirement home and hang out with them, and interact… maybe ask them questions about the way things used to be.”
While these theories don’t exactly fit within the confines of the film, they certainly throw new light on the perceived villainy of the machines. And, if anything, they should make us humans consider how we treat not only our own wildlife, but our planet as a whole.