Counterfeit worlds

What starts off as an exploration of the idea that we may all be living in a vast computer simulation ends up becoming a disturbing portrait of mental instability

A Glitch in the Matrix

Dir Rodney Ascher, US 2021 Dogwoof, DVD £15.99, Blu-ray £19.99

“When I pulled the trigger, it messed me up really bad...”

Is this world that (we think) we’re living in actually a simulation in some vast computer somewhere? It’s not a new idea, of course; you could say that the shadows in Plato’s cave were an early thought experiment along the same lines, as is mentioned in this somewhat odd documentary.

A Glitch in the Matrix begins with director Rodney Ascher ( Room 237) commenting that we have viewed the brain (and/ or consciousness) working, by analogy, over the years as a series of aqueducts, then as a telegraph, then a computer; the idea of our consciousness being a simulation, then, is just the latest analogy. Not so, says Swedish philosopher and AI specialist Nick Bostrom, who has famously written academic papers on our living in a simulation; not so, also, says a handful of true-believers.

There are a lot of talking heads in this film, via Zoom interviews – some, such as Bostrom, TechGnosis author Erik Davis and artist and historian Emily Pothast, appearing as themselves, while the true-believers are portrayed by CGI comic book/SF/alien/robot avatars. It’s a clever gimmick, but it doesn’t really add anything: a talking head is still just a talking head however it’s dressed up – and there are a lot of them.

Predictably, the documentary focuses on Philip K Dick, with numerous clips from a talk he gave at an SF con in France in 1977. True, many of PKD’s novels question the reality we live in – but there’s no mention of Daniel F Galouye’s Counterfeit World (1964), the classic novel about discovering that we live in a computer simulation as a market research exercise – and compare the same idea in Frederik Pohl’s short story “Tunnel under the World” (1955), albeit mechanical rather than virtual. The classic film, of course, central to this documentary, is The Matrix (1999).

Bostrom says his theory “does not assume that all the details of our world would be simulated to perfect subatomic precision all the time… If you have infinitely fast computers, sure… But you would be able to create a simulation capturing only enough that to the simulated creatures, they couldn’t tell the difference… to leave more detail in a particular part of reality when we are paying attention, but then, not simulating all of those details all the time.”

Those arguing for our living (or existing) in a simulation come up with a lot of dodgy logic, poor reasoning and reliance on inner, subjective experience. There’s a lot of equating our “lives” with being characters in games, and with the difference between real players and stock characters supplied by the game; one truebeliever says: “I am a real-life non-playing character.” Another suggests that “since no one was watching, the program would stop working” – an echo of Bishop Berkeley’s tree-in-the-forest idea.

Erik Davis says: “People seem particularly drawn into their own sort of solipsistic world… We go into solipsism, we go into psychosis, we go into paranoia.”

And so, a long way into the film, we’re in the realm of mental illness, of serious psychosis, of believing that no one, including yourself, is real. One person comments on “an inability to separate the real world from digital realities”, citing the 2013 New Zealand shooter who live-streamed his killings. “You get into a place where you treat reality like those are digital, disposable bodies.” Another had watched The Matrix hundreds of times – obsessive behaviour. “Maybe there’s something with this Matrix thing. Maybe it’s real. Maybe it’s not so fake after all, you know; who knows?”

The most tragic outcome of this is that one of the talking-head avatars, Joshua Cooke, is telling his story from prison. In 2003, the 19-year-old Cooke, having watched The Matrix yet again, went down to the basement of his house and shot his adoptive parents dead. Although Cooke didn’t use it himself in court, this led to “the Matrix defence” of the perpetrator being unable to distinguish between reality and the digital world; Cooke believed he was living in the virtual reality of The Matrix. “When I pulled the trigger,” he says, “it messed me up really bad because it wasn’t anything like I had seen on The Matrix. Real life was so much more horrific.”

The end comments in the film sum up the problem. “I never want to get locked into the idea that this is all fake if in fact the reason I thought it was fake is because it was an easier way for me to deal with the complexity of human existence.” Emily Pothast adds: “I think loneliness and isolation and trauma play very heavily in the kinds of realities that people construct for themselves.”

In some ways A Glitch in the Matrix is quite a clever film; in other ways it’s a bit of a mess. It’s too long and too repetitive and doesn’t really put forward any consistent argument. There

are too many talking heads, and none of them is identified after their first appearance – hence the non-attribution of some of the quotations above. And in the end, it’s not about simulation at all; it’s a disturbing portrait of mental instability, of how people who can’t cope with reality find a persuasive and, for some, believable solace in virtual reality.

David V Barrett

★★★ ★★