I remember the first time The Matrix made sense to me. It was a sunny afternoon at a Seattle multiplex in 1999; I was about thirty minutes into watching the discombobulated world of existential musings and wacky technological discontent when suddenly the whole thing clicked: The red/blue pill polarity that divided truth and illusion, how the advent of thinking machines threatens our individuality, the epic battle between those willing to break down and understand the world in all its true colors and others willing to blindly accept it. A few months later, The Sixth Sense would leave me scratching my head for several days before I made peace with the final act twist, but The Matrix offered instant satisfaction. I left the theater energized, ready to challenge my own notions of reality and match Neo’s heroic ambitions as the One. Then I went home and played a video game in quiet solitude.

And so we arrive at the central paradox of The Matrix paradigm: Technology can set us free, but it also threatens to bind us from the real world. Today marks the tenth anniversary of The Matrix’s triumphant theatrical release (a special edition Blu-ray DVD hits shelves on the same day). A decade after directors Larry and Andy Wachowski established their fictional timeline for humanity’s enslavement at the hands of artificial intelligence, several of the movie’s predictions about our relationship to new media have started to come true.

At the time of its release, the dot com bubble was on the brink of bursting, the inventors of Facebook and Twitter were in high school, and some people thought the world faced imminent destruction from the Y2K virus. With The Matrix, the Wachowskis suggested that technology would indeed precipitate our downfall — although not quite so soon. Still, many of its imaginary conceits proved strikingly prescient. Take the following detailing of its accuracy as an exciting testament to modern progress, a harbinger of the apocalypse, or some unseemly combination of both.

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