“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” -Morpheus
Your notion of reality is affected by your own perception which is limited by the sensory inputs of your body to your brain. Each person has a different form of reality uniquely his/her own. The collection of these realities interacting with one another designs how the world operates.
Can you expand your senses to increase the sensory inputs? Can you, by the mere act of taking a pill, grow your mind? Upgrade your consciousness? Expanding one’s frame of mind to consider the implications of the sights captured by the Hubble does.
The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck – by @JasonSilva from Jason Silva on Vimeo.
And yet, I can’t help but think of us walking around plugged in to our own version of the matrix. Carefully crafted and curated by Spotify, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc.
Instead of painful direct plugs like in the matrix, we use headphones that we carry with us everywhere around NYC (I am partial to Bluetooth ones). We plug our ears into whatever we desire, our own unique sounds “we chose” which Spotify conveniently has taken to create a “customized weekly” playlist.
On top of that, instead of being in some pod “asleep” like in the matrix, we walk around using our phones to glue our vision into whatever pops up on our small customized phone. That is, the “recommended posts” curated for you by your friends over at Twitter and Facebook.
As I walk around the streets of NYC, I can’t help but notice at certain moments (those in which I myself am not tapped into the matrix) that:
Although I pass by many bodies, I hardly notice a single soul
For each person has been plugged into his/her own matrix, his/her own sense of reality, through either audio or visual inputs tailored and customized.
In these moments I can’t help but stop and ask myself:
What are the implications of everyone tapped into a matrix controlled by companies leveraging big data and looking to monetize the insights gained?
And then my phone vibrates and I check Twitter as I start jamming to some artist Spotify recommended for me.