While such companies are not powered by anything quite so literal as the hibernating human batteries of the movie's dystopian towers, they do subsist on our humanity-the extracted value of our relationships, ideas, and experiences.
Indeed, our compromises in the digital realm are what allow Google and Facebook to transform our data into supra-governmental economic might in the physical one. But, as should be obvious by now, they are not. Much of the blame for this predicament lies precisely with the nostalgic 1990s idea, implicit in The Matrix, that our real and virtual selves are separate. To simply gain access to today's digital environments, we have allowed a degree of control and intrusion-the tracking and storing of every fragment of our online lives-that we would never accept in what we still refer to as “reality.” Online, we exist in an entirely privatized world with weak governance, few civil liberties, and an entirely commercial raison d'être.
Offline, our infrastructure is largely public, our movement is still mostly free and without surveillance, and laws govern our interactions. Yet the virtual city is a mirror that distorts as much as it reflects our virtual shared space remains radically different from our physical one. Just as much as running water, the city's infrastructure supports the serendipity, anonymity, and reinvention at the core of all our best possibilities. Some companies now favor the phrase “digital twin” to describe this doppelgänger-not even our ghost, but our constantly reshaped reflection. They follow our steps in the real one and are born from the data trail we leave when we post on social media, search on Google Maps, order things from Amazon, or leave reviews on restaurant sites. This new world is inhabited by our digital shadows. In today's landscape of urban data, by contrast, the effect of technology working its way into every body, object, and environment has been to create a parallel world that is bound indelibly to the real one-but, like the Matrix, still operates by very different rules. The Matrix, accordingly, is premised on a clear division: between reality, where the rebels' ship coasts through underground caverns in a postapocalyptic wasteland, and the virtual realm of city streets and office buildings in which most people live out their simulated lives.
As in The Matrix's own influences-William Gibson's cyberspace, Neal Stephenson's Metaverse-a digital, networked reality was another domain, unconstrained by limitations like space and gravity and untethered from our real-world selves. In 1999, the virtual world of computing was still something we thought of as quite separate from our real bodies and cities. This is also where the transition to a third age of information-led city infrastructure represents a break with the past-and where The Matrix, for all its prescience, likely misread the future. Just as much as running water, the city's infrastructure supports the serendipity, anonymity, and reinvention at the core of all of our best possibilities-and the city's generative role in our economy and society. And architecturally, the space you find, empty but with utilities, is not a liability so much as a cultural and social possibility. You see the whole city on your way, but you are, to all who don't yet know you, whoever you wish to be. When you can walk everywhere, you might end up wandering anywhere. It is not just the pervasiveness of infrastructure but its relative neutrality that is at the core of such possibilities. They also brought us the grand expanse of the Champs-Élysées-engineered to cover the enormous masonry sewers that ushered in Paris' ultimate triumph over cholera. These conduits bring us the ubiquity of suspended ceiling grids-designed to screen the mess behind. Yet they inexorably define the spaces we inhabit. Like the blood vessels of our own bodies, the pipes and wires of modern buildings and cities structure our lives while remaining almost entirely hidden. Today, when water tumbles out of the tap into your sink, it is but a cameo turn in an epic journey from faraway reservoir through final sewage treatment, across dozens-even hundreds-of miles, and months or years of time. In response to the waterborne pandemics of the 19th century, the modern European and North American city became defined by sewers and drains so extensive as to be beyond imagining. Earthen conduits moved stormwater in Xi'an, China, millennia ago lead tubes led drinking water under the stone-paved streets of classical Rome.