Unless, I suppose, you have access to some cheat code… This still doesn’t help you take care of your kid, or drive to work, or make you a cup of coffee. You can say the world was created by God in six days, or choose the myths of 100 other cultures. Now what?” I think the big picture is that unless you’re at the bleeding edge of quantum physics and trying to analyze how reality breaks down into pixels, then this is just another creation myth. Dick scholar who has written a lot about technology and religion, ultimately says if you grant that we’re living in a simulation, well, what then? What does that change about our obligations of living with other people?īrother Mystwood says the same thing: “I live in a simulation. What I ultimately come away with is that even though the film is shocking-it does have a murder-it can be read as optimistic.Įrik Davis, the Philip K. Glitch in the Matrix is the most universal, most fundamental philosophical “what is existence?” line of inquiry. Room 237 is a window into obsession with a very specific thing. Rodney Ascher, director of weird documentaries. But we all live somewhere, and that place is still pretty weird. After watching the film, I am not entirely ready to say that we live inside an enormous high-powered computer program. Dick, Elon Musk, and Neil deGrasse Tyson-has a cumulative effect. His terrifying tale comes amid a barrage of wacko talk that shreds the fabric of existence, and the way Ascher slowly lets the pretzel logic build-moving beyond online denizens with handles like Brother Læo Mystwood to include thinkers like Plato, René Descartes, Philip K. He looks sort of like a ThunderCat but with a trick up his sleeve. In the film, eyewitness Paul Gude tells his story of “descending into the Null” while rendered (as all eyewitnesses are) as a computerized avatar. (A few days later, I watched the film again-this time beneath a number of comforting afghans.) For a filmmaker devoted to making work about irrational fears, there could be no higher compliment. a person who believes we live in a simulated reality-vividly describes a dissociative episode that I had to close my laptop and take a Klonopin. I’d explained to him that I was so disturbed by an early scene in which an “eyewitness”-a.k.a. “Oh, you tapped out early,” filmmaker Rodney Ascher joked with me after his newest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, had its virtual Sundance premiere.

Glitch in the matrix