By Jagdesh Singh | Opinion |
“Do you want to play a game”, the supercomputer WOPR asks in the movie WarGames, on the verge of starting a thermonuclear war destroying the world. The movie was about a hacker who unwittingly accesses a United States military supercomputer (WOPR) programmed to predict and execute nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
I was 10, and instantly fell in love with the idea, while watching the movie, that being a hacker would be a really cool thing. My uncle had afforded a personal computer way back in the 80s, and I was already in love with playing computer games on it. I could see myself as the teenager in the movie playing computer games that never looked different to what I was playing in my uncle’s house.
My heart was set to being a computer whizz.
Then, in 1992, with my own 486 PC my father had bought for me to pick up new skills and use this new phenomenon known as the internet, the movie Sneakers came out. It turbocharged my hacker dream. I was hooked onto the notion of taking control of complex systems owned by governments and corporations that many of us couldn’t trust those days.
The Matrix came out in the year 1999. I was 24 years old and had just graduated with a degree in Computer Sciences. It had struck a chord with many, including myself, for the ultra cool portrayal of a hero raging and rebelling against the machines designed to harvest energy from our minds.
The protagonist or hero, Neo, was an accomplished hacker who could see past the virtual reality he was living in all his life. This romantic notion resonated with me, having learned and getting pretty good at programming software code during my uni days. Being a hacker was the ultimate notion, in my mind, to rebel against Big Brother (or organizations exercising total control over our lives) breaking into systems and stealing the rich for the poor.
Although I did become a programmer, I never got to becoming a hacker, unfortunately. But there was the joy of creation, from lines of code written, appearing as something attractive on the computer screen. As I matured, the rebel in me died a natural death.
But the Matrix trilogy also resonated with my spiritual beliefs. That we are living in some virtual reality, unbeknownst to us what true reality is. That there is this pervasive force that keeps us and our bodies together, the spark that is life. And if we can harness looking past the veil of untruthfulness, we can bend some laws of nature. Our mind can be a powerful weapon, if we conquer it with peace and one-mindedness. Conquer our mind, and we can conquer the world. These ideas were all prevalent in the movies, and fortified the spiritual beliefs that had begun to permeate in my mind when I started exploring the mysticism of the Sikh spirituality.
What stayed with me from all these movies – shaping my vision of who I wanted to grow up to be – was the idea that our humanity would, or should, always prevail over how technology slowly becomes entrenched in our lives. Technology, naturally, improves our lives. Yet, it also makes us all too dependent on it. Every facet of our lives today, whether we like it or not, is held hostage to the use of technology. Life would be a living hell without technology. Yet, we try our very best to remain humane, to cherish our relationships with our close ones, and to remain spiritual however we can. We try to do all this despite technology. We are also raging against the machines, just like Neo in the movies.
Some of us choose to take the red pill, to unlearn things about ourselves and to challenge ourselves to be better humans, to be better to each other. Some of us choose to keep taking the blue pill, stay the same, consume everything in our path, taking for granted how short our lives are.
I can’t wait for the next installment of The Matrix series coming out in December this year. To fall in love again with those spiritual messages that I saw decades ago. To relive the inspirational feelings again.
Jagdesh Singh, a Kuala Lumpur-based executive with a US multinational company, is a father of three girls who are as opinionated as their mother
* This is the opinion of the writer, organisation or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Asia Samachar.
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