I'm confused by this essay. I'm a few years older than the author so I theoretically have a similar lived experience. I need to point out that the movie came out in 1999, near the peak of the dotcom bubble. At the time, "everything is awesome" was the vibe in tech.
And yet, the author says:
"The timing was uncanny. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11. For those of us just entering adulthood in the United States, these concurrent disruptions to technological, political, and social stability congealed into a generational dysphoria"
All those things (except for Y2K anxiety, which again, in the tech world led to a lot of spending on the fix for it), happened 1 to 2 years after The Matrix came out. The timing was uncanny in that the movie picked the late 1990s as "Peak Civilization" and everything did indeed start falling apart afterwards, but that was 1 to 2 years later. Watching The Matrix in 1999 didn't trigger generational dysphoria. It was just an awesome movie, just like other dystopian nightmare movies like Terminator or Aliens. Feels like they're stretching for a narrative that isn't quite there.
And yet, the author says:
"The timing was uncanny. The Matrix arrived amid a perfect storm of millennial anxiety: Y2K fears about computers failing catastrophically, a disputed presidential election that would be decided by the Supreme Court, and then the shocking events of 9/11. For those of us just entering adulthood in the United States, these concurrent disruptions to technological, political, and social stability congealed into a generational dysphoria"
All those things (except for Y2K anxiety, which again, in the tech world led to a lot of spending on the fix for it), happened 1 to 2 years after The Matrix came out. The timing was uncanny in that the movie picked the late 1990s as "Peak Civilization" and everything did indeed start falling apart afterwards, but that was 1 to 2 years later. Watching The Matrix in 1999 didn't trigger generational dysphoria. It was just an awesome movie, just like other dystopian nightmare movies like Terminator or Aliens. Feels like they're stretching for a narrative that isn't quite there.