The red pill became such a popular right-wing meme during the Trump years that people started to hear about it even offline.” 4 Also online the red pill meme continued spreading. As Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for The Atlantic: “Taking a red pill still meant opting in to a new worldview, but the worldview in question was now less clearly defined: QAnon believers took red pills, and so did garden-variety misogynists, MAGA diehards who simply loathed and distrusted the media. In subsequent years, redpilling spread more widely. 3 Redpilling thus became a meme of the “Manosphere”: a collection of websites and Internet fora (4chan, 8chan) on which men’s rights activists, incels (involuntary celibates), and pick-up coaches (who train men to conquer women) found each other in their misogyny.

In 2012 Reddit saw the birth of a misogynist community called The Red Pill, whose members had awoken to an apparent feminist threat. “Or you take the red pill” ( The Matrix, Warner Bros, 1999)įollowing the Matrix trilogy, Neo’s choice has inspired quite a few people, mostly white men, to “take the red pill.” The red pill meme was coined by Silicon Valley developer and anti-liberal blogger Curtis Yarvin, who in 2007 under the pen name Mencius Moldbug posted “The Case against Democracy: Ten Red Pills.” 2 In the 2010s the trope became a point of reference for the neo-fascist alt right subculture. Against Matrix ideology-according to which human and artificially intelligent sentients may live together in harmony-I propose a more grounded posthuman outlook on our control society, in which datafication slices people into animate things. In this article I embrace such progressive gender and sexuality politics, but at the same time I am critical of the film’s and the franchise’s overall ethereal transhumanist outlook on digitization. Now, in an explicitly feminist and queer narrative Matrix Resurrections reclaims the red pill. Lana and Lily Wachowski) the neo-fascist alt right movement hijacked this trope, turning it into an anti-feminist meme. Following the original Matrix trilogy (1999/2003/2003, dir. The fourth Matrix film is worth seeing, because it steals back the franchise’s famous red pill trope. But I disagree with Zizek that the film is “not worth seeing” (which is why Zizek-so he claims-wrote his review without having seen the film). Lana Wachowski) is “boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy.” 1 Ultimately, the film’s longing for synergy between humans and machines resonates just too much with the transhumanist fantasy that also drives Big Tech: an accelerationist new American Dream that burns out people and the planet. Slavoj Zizek is right: Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir.

(2022) “Forget the Red Pill: Queer Politics but also Transhumanist Ideology in The Matrix”, Keywords: Feminism, Ideology, Matrix, Posthumanism, Queer Studies, Transhumanism, Zizek Propelled by this transhuman delusion, The Matrix ultimately has little to say about life in the era of climate catastrophe and control capitalism. But the fourth Matrix film also is an ideological fantasy: Resurrections resonates just too much with a transhumanist belief in a human-machine synergy that also fuels Silicon Valley’s new American Dream. This essay analyzes how Matrix Resurrections (2021) reclaims the red pill in an explicitly feminist and queer narrative.

Niessen | Forget the Red Pill: Queer Politics but also Transhumanist Ideology in The Matrixįeature Article Forget the Red Pill: Queer Politics but also Transhumanist Ideology in The MatrixĪuthor: Niels Niessen (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Abstractįollowing the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003) the franchise’s iconic red pill trope became an anti-feminist meme in neo-fascist circles.

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