Let's take a minute to geek out on the Matrix

I watched it again last week: The Matrix.

And now I'm geeking out, 1990s style, on virtual worlds and all that.

I go back and forth. Between thinking that it's pretty cool that we can externalize our imaginations and share them with strangers. And thinking that we're making a huge mistake, retreating into imaginary worlds while the real world around us gets all polluted and broken.

Here in Canada, most of us can go into a clean world of pretty pictures whenever we want to. Whether we use TV, movies, video games or the Internet, it's really all the same thing: alternate realities that inform us, and distract us.

When we're walking down the street, those alternate realities are in our heads: advertisements, songs, websites, stuff we want. You could even say that our daily lives, our homes and identities are built from ephemeral consumerist daydreams...

Meanwhile, someone else grows our food, makes our clothes, builds our roads and houses. Many of us who work in media spend all day building alternate realities for other people. We make money that pays someone else to deal with all the unnecessary aspects of hard, cold reality.

Don't get me wrong, we're a long way from living in little Matrix pods, factory farmed by giant, hungry robot bugs.

But I also wonder... maybe the hippies have figured it out. (Then I remember my recent sojourn to the land of the hippies, Saltspring Island, where we met dirty old hobo hippies who had gone over to the dark side... but that's for another posting, another time.)

Despite their bad music and questionable hygiene, maybe the hippies really have broken out of the matrix. And maybe, next year, I'll try growing my own food. Just to see how it feels.