The Wake-Up Call That Looks Like an Attack, in a World That Runs on Emptiness
They called me a Luddite, which was strange, because I never tried to destroy the machines. I only refused to confuse them with meaning. Long before the machines arrived, the City had already replaced living with mediation—time chopped into units, work stripped of purpose, experience filtered through abstraction. People learned to survive not by inhabiting the world directly, but by mastering symbols of it, and were rewarded with identities sturdy enough to endure the resulting emptiness. Capitalism perfected the bargain: become a function, and you may belong.
The City told itself this was progress. Progress was assumed to be good by definition; to question it invited silence, ridicule, sometimes hostility. Yet the City endured not because it fulfilled anyone, but because it kept them busy.
Life was governed by clocks without faces. Time was no longer something felt in bodies or seasons, but something quantified, subdivided, enforced. Minutes and seconds ruled where days and moons once had. As Zerzan observed, “the growth of a sense of time, the acceptance of time, is a process of adaptation to an ever more rarefied world.” Time itself became the City’s most elemental technology—and its most perfect model of domination.
The people adapted beautifully.
They learned to live through abstractions: schedules instead of rhythms, roles instead of selves, representations instead of relationships. Technology did not merely assist them; it mediated their entire existence so that, as Zerzan wrote, “we need not experience the world.” The City called this efficiency. In truth, it was severance.
To compensate for what had been lost, the City offered identities. Master a function. Repeat it well. Do it on time. You would be rewarded with pride, status, and the illusion of meaning. Consumption filled the gaps left by absence. As Running on Emptiness put it, “massive unfulfilling consumption within the dictates of production and social control reigns as a chief everyday consolation for this absence of meaning.”
Then the machines arrived.
They did not arrive as conquerors. They arrived as perfect students of the City’s logic. They obeyed time flawlessly. They executed abstractions without resistance. They embodied instrumental reason itself—what Horkheimer and Adorno warned was a form of reason biased toward distancing and control. And in doing so, they revealed something unbearable: the work had already been machinic.
Panic followed, but it wasn’t economic—it was existential. The machines didn’t threaten livelihoods so much as reflections. They exposed that many had spent their lives becoming excellent abstractions, only to find that abstractions could now perform themselves. The machine did not steal anyone’s purpose. It made visible that their purpose had always been borrowed.
I used the machines anyway.
Not to advance the City, and not to worship the tool, but to expose the bargain beneath it. I let the machine execute while I reclaimed intention. I treated it as mediation, not meaning. This was taken as an attack. But it wasn’t an attack—it was a logic bomb. And logic bombs look like sabotage to those who mistake the system for themselves.
This is the part that is hardest to see without taking it personally.
The Matrix is a system… and when you’re inside, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters—the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, they are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy… many are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
That fight is not moral. It is conditioned.
The gatekeepers are not villains; they are sleepers whose identities were forged inside abstraction. To question the machine feels like an attack on the years they gave their bodies to the clock. To see someone step outside the role feels like betrayal. So they defend the system harder than it ever defended them—mistaking resistance for righteousness, obedience for craft.
Zerzan warned that “as our plight deepens, we glimpse just how much must be erased for our redemption.” But erasure feels like death when identity itself is the artifact being erased.
This is the inversion no one wants to face:
The machines were never the prison.
The prison was abstraction.
The machines merely completed it.
Capitalism first required humans to behave like machines—disciplined by time, fragmented by roles, separated from nature and from themselves. In return, it offered identity, status, and survival. When real machines finally arrived, nothing was stolen. The illusion simply collapsed.
Some still sit in the City, furious, insisting they are free because they choose which abstractions to defend. Others dismiss any alternative as “unrealistic,” because realism itself has been defined by the very system that confines them. As Zerzan noted, “technology has become the great vehicle of rarefaction… subordinating us to our own objectified creations.”
And if this story unsettles you—if you feel the urge to argue, to defend progress, to insist the machine must be mastered rather than questioned—understand this gently:
That impulse is not outside the allegory.
It is its final mechanism.
No one is being attacked here.
They are being invited to wake up.