We Are Batteries
Everyone talks about "waking up from the Matrix". This phrase appears everywhere in memes, videos, and posts. Today, however, I want to draw your attention to another detail from the film: human farming.
One of the film's classic scenes is when Neo, the protagonist, wakes up from the Matrix and realizes that humans are now produced by giant energy farms. Each human is kept asleep and used as a battery for machines for their entire life. My question is: how real is that nowadays?
I believe we are already serving as batteries, but in a different way than in the movie. Instead of organic, material energy, we provide our time, attention, money, and freedom. In other words, we provide our minds as batteries to the machines. But what are the machines? Or rather, who are the machines? To answer that, let's consider: who wins in this scenario? Who is the biggest beneficiary of our money, attention, and time? The answer is easy: today, the machines are big corporations, platforms that depend on your attention to make money, and also the State, which benefits from our distraction and unawareness of real problems to advance its own goals.
The worst part is that most of us don't notice any of that. We live in an illusory world, one built to distract us from true reality, exactly like the people inside the Matrix. In a previous post I briefly mentioned that we don't use social media, they use us. And it's true. Let me give you a real example from Brazil.
A few years ago, the Brazilian Civil Police started an investigation into national gossip and news social media profiles. What they found was a complete scheme of multiple interconnected accounts with a shared posting agenda. Profiles with followers ranging from thousands to millions would post about the same topic at the same time to generate an artificial wave of virality and urgency. The people at the top of that pyramid had the power to manipulate public opinion about a specific event or person. And that's not an isolated case. That was just one scheme that came to light, but this type of manipulation is present everywhere. We are surrounded by fake and manipulated news and numbers that distort apparent reality. That's the Matrix, that's how they keep us in the pods. While we spend hours consuming the garbage they produce, they make money. They win.
Returning to the movie analogy, the big corps' strategy is to keep us in the pods, asleep, living in an artificial world where everything is industrialized, manufactured, and inorganic. While we are unconscious, they drain us. They are making us less alive. That's bad. What can we do about it? How can we wake up?
First, understand the enemy's game
How do they make us prisoners of their system? Start researching how algorithms seduce us by giving us what we want. Try to understand the strategies they use to hold our attention for hours. Nothing is by chance, everything has a purpose. Every button, color, element arrangement, and sound is designed to keep you imprisoned on the screen. Pay attention to the screens you use day to day. Notice the hidden strategies that make you curious and excited about the next thing. One example: YouTube recommendations. They are everywhere. If you open a video, you will see a list of recommendations in your sidebar. And if you switch to theater mode, you will see that the recommendations are still below the video, visible to your eyes. So your curiosity makes you scroll down to see them. Even in full screen mode, you will receive recommendations at the end of the video, and if you scroll down, they will appear there too. Be alert to the traps on screen.
Second, know yourself
What are your most vulnerable moments? I mean, the moments when you are most likely to get trapped on a screen. Maybe at lunchtime, before sleep, or all the time? Also understand your weak points. Detect patterns. Discover what makes you fall into unconsciousness, a state in which you don't see time passing. Maybe it's short videos, message notifications, or even reading messages from a specific group. Be alert to your habits.
The third step: take action
The third step, and the most important one, is divided into two parts:
Take action
Big corporations spend billions of dollars trying to make you use their platforms, so just don't. As simple as that. Start caring about what you feed your mind. Start caring about your focus and mental clarity. Don't give them up so easily to social media and advertisements. Disable notifications, leave that group, uninstall the apps, "clean up your screens". By cleanup, I mean using tools (like browser extensions) to hide elements on platforms, like recommendations, trending rankings, like counts, comments sections, and so on. Also, stop consuming artificial content like celebrity polemics (they are intentional), political fights, clickbait or ragebait posts[2], or any other content you feel or know is completely useless and designed to catch attention.
Turn around
So far I've only told you to remove things from your life, but that's just the first part. The other part of the "take action" step is: be intentional. Choose deliberately what you consume. Select the video, post, book, or movie based on your own decision, not impulse. Learn to defer consumption. Save the video to watch or the article to read and say: "I will watch this tomorrow" or "I will read this on the weekend". I'm sure the interval between deciding and consuming is enough for you to know whether you really wanted to do it or whether it was impulse.
Conclusion
Answering the initial question "how real is it nowadays?": Real enough to change our actions. Stop being someone else's battery. Start using your energy smartly. Wake up, remove the cables, leave the pod. Stop feeding the machines that are trapping you. Stop eating the garbage they throw at you. Start making your own decisions. Be intentional in your choices. Learn to say no to your impulses.
Understand the game, know yourself, then act.
Your time, your energy, your attention. Take control and manage them wisely.
[1] You can read more in my "My DeGoogle Journey" post, where I talk about a social experiment Facebook ran to manipulate users' emotions.
[2] Clickbait is a deception strategy used to make you click on something by promising what it does not deliver. Ragebait is a strategy used to increase engagement by deliberately provoking anger in users.