According to the Telegraph, the Government is now taking seriously the possibility that Britain’s ever-growing list of mortal enemies might be considering denying our island the sunlight given to us by God himself. “Third-party actors could include countries taking drastic action to lower their carbon emissions,” explains the newspaper. Or worse, experts warn that latter-day Bond villains and “hostile nations such as Russia” might be planning to use “solar geoengineering to orchestrate an environmental disaster against their enemies”. Climate change mitigation, then, could be a pretext for interventions that destroy our food and plunge us into a cold and dark future. That being the same premise as the humans’ strike against the machines in The Matrix is not this story’s only resonance with daft sci-fi plots.
“We don’t know who struck first – us or them,” Morpheus tells Neo in the Desert of the Real. “But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” This was humanity’s strike against the machine world, which (having no need for agriculture) depended on solar power. The “Desert of the Real” is French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s description of a society in which reality (the “real”) is obscured by simulation – a state of “hyperreality”, thus inspiring the Wachowski brothers’ (now sisters) plot. Baudrillard’s hypothesis has leant itself to critiques of war, the violent reality (the “real”) from which most of the populations of Western nations have been protected, their understanding mediated by TV screens and the agendas of TV executives and their masters in turn.
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