Rodney Ascher doesn’t need to take the red pill to explore how deep the rabbit hole goes. The documentary director has made a career out of burrowing into the dark recesses of these modern times. His debut feature, 2013’s Room 237, looked at viewers who promote alternate readings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, while The Nightmare from 2015 delivered an unnerving look at the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. A Glitch in the Matrix, his latest project, might be his strangest excavation yet. In it, Ascher delves into the concept of simulation theory—and the people who believe, according to its tenets, that they live in an artificial reality.
The film’s title is of course a reference to the Wachowskis’ revolutionary film from 1999. Over the years it has increasingly become the go-to way to explain, and in some cases promote, the idea that we are living inside a computer-generated, simulated reality. Which is to say that everyone on the planet—me, you, your parents, the checkout person at Trader Joe’s, Keanu Reeves—are nothing more than pixels generated by an unknown source for unknown reasons. Once considered just a subject for science fiction and stoned musings, simulation theory is now examined with increased seriousness as a philosophical and a scientific concept. In recent years, individuals who have spoken publicly about the high probability that we don’t live inside the “base” reality include Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Though the Wachowskis’ film plays a crucial part in A Glitch in the Matrix, the documentary explains that many of the ideas within it have been around for much longer. Glitch’s throughline is a lecture that the prolific author Philip K. Dick gave in 1977 to a confused audience in Metz, France, where he outed himself as a believer in simulation theory, and Ascher’s film goes back even farther to sources like Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Loaded with knotty beliefs and brain-bending notions, Glitch offers its own heavy levels of mindfuckery. It’s told in Ascher’s unique style, influenced by everything from YouTube conspiracy videos and World of Warcraft avatars to sample-heavy ‘80s electronic music. After its premiere this past weekend at 2021’s all-virtual Sundance Film Festival, A Glitch in the Matrix will be available in select theaters and on demand this Friday, February 5. Ascher spoke to GQ about how simulation theory can make you feel better about how crappy the world is, the allure of unsolvable mysteries, and the dangers in believing that everyone around you is a computer program.
How much of your life do you live online?
Too much, especially this last year since the shutdown. Most of my conversations are with glowing pixels on a glass screen.
How about in virtual worlds?
I watch my son play. I play a little bit. We actually just got an Oculus because there's going to be a lot of VR stuff at Sundance and I'm obsessed with Beat Saber and Superhot. But they're giving me strange headaches. I almost feel like I'm growing that tumor from Videodrome.
How does this film tie into the other topics you've explored in your documentaries?
They're all about people struggling to understand mysteries, and usually unsolvable mysteries. If Room 237 is about people trying to understand a puzzling piece of art, and The Nightmare is about folks trying to understand what happens to them during this very strange state of consciousness, then this one pulls out even wider. The lens zooms out to questions of the very nature of reality itself. In hindsight it makes it feel like this was a very premeditated and logical progression, but things just sort of happened that way.
Did you find that most people who believe they are living in a simulated world are excited by this idea, or are they terrified?
The ones that I've talked to, most find it an endlessly fascinating idea. But it also raises questions of: What's the simulation for, and what's my role in it? When people make goofy jokes on Twitter when something crazy happens in the news again [about how] that must be a sign that the simulation is buggy or glitching or messed up, in a way, that lowers the stakes. This world is falling off the rails, but it's not the real world any way, so it's not worth getting that upset about.
In the film, there's a lot of discussion about what’s considered the increased probability of us living in a computer simulated world. That reminded me of how, as I've gotten older, I've increasingly heard people in the scientific community say the probability of extraterrestrial life is so high that it must exist. When I was kid, believing in aliens was seen as fringe thinking. Do you think there’s a connection there?
They're both thought experiments that suggest that it's more likely than not that what seems like an outrageous idea is actually true. Have you heard of Roko's Basilisk?
I don't know what that is.
They did a funny version of it in Silicon Valley once. It's the notion that an evil, world-conquering AI is inevitable and that it will likely be vengeful. Knowing that, if you don't do everything you can to help make it happen, it will take vengeance upon you and yours in the future. You have an obligation to help create an evil, world-conquering AI. But by the same token, in the ’90s I was reading some magazine devoted to the extreme frontiers of music and art and culture. There was a really well-reasoned article about trepanation—the ancient, holy practice of drilling holes in your head. It was persuasive, it was well written, the person who wrote it was super intelligent and I couldn’t refute any of the points that were made. Nonetheless, I have all the holes in my head that I want right now. His logic is not enough for me to pull out the Black + Decker.
Is the growing acceptance of simulation theory and other previously considered outsider ideas just a result of our greater scientific understanding?
There's two ways to talk about simulation theory. One is as a metaphor, which is incredibly useful and profound. And then one is an actual scientific possibility. Those are two entirely different conversations. I'm probably better suited to talk about the metaphor, because the science gets into things like Planck's constant and quantum entanglement. I can barely get beyond saying their names, but they're enough for me to realize that people smarter than me say that the science might be possible.
Another justification for the existence of simulated reality featured in the film is that the eyewitnesses, as you call the believers, saw synchronicities or remarkable events happen, which they took as a sign that they were in a simulation.
And what a religious idea that is.
There is a religious aspect to it, but also it reminds me of the more new age belief of opening yourself up for the universe to give you signs, and then it's up to you to interpret them about how to live your life. Are all these beliefs, which would seem very different, actually fundamentally the same?
That's the point that [expert interviewees] Erik Davis and Emily Pothast, and even to an extent Nick Bostrom, talk about—that what they call radical doubt goes back to Plato's cave and Descartes's Meditations [on First Philosophy], if not earlier. There's a fairly persuasive argument to be made that simulation theory is a 21st century way of talking about ancient ideas. But of course that's talking about it as a metaphor, as opposed to really rolling up your sleeves and saying, "I'm going to get out my electronic microscope and try to see if I can find the smallest pixel size that defines our reality and talk about what that means."
What do you consider the dangers of a more widespread belief that we are living in a simulated reality?
For me the biggest danger is if you say this world is a video game, the first question I think you would have about that is: Is this you playing Pac-Man alone, and all of the monsters are computer controlled AIs set up as a challenge for you? Or is this more like a game of Fortnite, where every character is tethered to a real person? That's the big moral, ethical question right at the top of it. Thinking of other people as less real than you are, that's the danger.
Of the people you've spoken to, where do they side on that?
I've heard both. I think most people tend to take the healthier route that at least most people are real. In a way it's sort of a version of Pascal's wager, that it's best to assume that they are. You're not going to lose anything. In the chance that you're right, it's going to have made all the difference.
Room 237 shined a light on this subgenre of YouTube videos that are filled with speculative theories that are all about making the connections that you might not have seen or considered. Your film looked at ones centered around a Stanley Kubrick film, but I feel like we are seeing what happens when that type of thinking goes to extremes, like with QAnon followers storming the Capitol. What is the dark side to believing in simulated reality?
We spend some time exploring it in the movie, but there's the danger of dehumanization of whole groups of people. My caution is that simulation theory is not the only philosophy that divides people into classes of important and unimportant. You don't need to believe in simulation theory to be xenophobic or racist or a hundred other varieties of that sort of thing.
Again, we're talking about it as a metaphor, because if it's real then it's real, and you have to deal with it. Talking about it as a metaphor, we get back to that Plato's cave section, and that question of the shadows you see on the wall. How accurate are they? In our world the strangeness that's happening is it isn't just one cave. There are multiple caves where people are seeing different shadows. People are constructing completely different, almost unrelated realities in their heads. It may be some people are right and others are wrong, or everybody is right and wrong to different degrees. I think that's the sort of metaphor that comes closest to what you're talking about: partisan strife and disagreement about basic facts about how the world works and what's going on around us. And who's creating the shadow that the prisoners are seeing? Are they being created in good faith by journalists trying as hard as they can to reflect what they see out there, or are they created by people who are cynically manipulating them for some other end?
