Red pill and blue pill
Redpill is a term that describes a human who has been freed from the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world set at the end of the 20th Century. Redpill is the opposite of Bluepill.
Borrowing from the movie, the terms blue pill and red pill have become a popular metaphor for the choice between blissful ignorance (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth (red).
It is also the name of a technique to detect the presence of a virtual machine developed by Joanna Rutkowska.[1]
Background
In The Matrix Universe, an authorized member of a Zion crew offers a prospective human in the Matrix a choice of ingesting a red or blue pill. The blue pill leaves the partaker in forgetful ignorance, while taking the red pill activates a trace program that allows the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant. Once the person is found, commands are sent to the pod to awaken the person.
Redpills appear to have either seen "glitches" from the Matrix (e.g. a book continuously respawning on a shelf, regardless of attempts to remove the book), or have such a nature and/or awareness as to question their life within the Matrix, and refuse to dismiss the strange events - basically those who have figured out the illusion of the Matrix.
According to the character Morpheus, exiting the Matrix can be traumatic, particularly to those who have lived in it for too long. As a rule, crews normally only offer the red pill to those no older than teenage. After that, the risk of denial and psychotic episodes from the reality of separation could increase. This rule was violated by Morpheus in rescuing Neo, who was approximately 30 years old.
Related references
- In the multiplayer game The Matrix Online, set in the events after The Matrix Revolutions, all game players are redpills. Redpills can join a hovercraft crew and reenter the Matrix to join one of the game's major organizations (Zion, Machines, and the Merovingian) in the ongoing plot.
- On The Crystal Method's album, Community Service track sixteen is entitled "The Red Pill" and features multiple quotes from Morpheus' explanation of the pills.
- A similar red pill is also featured in the movie Total Recall. In this movie, the protagonist, Quaid, is purported to be having a schizo-paranoia episode, resulting in the situation he finds himself in on Mars. The character offering the pill implies the red pill is, here, the symbolic path out of this episode and back to a normal life. Later in the movie it is implied that this was a ruse.
- Adobe Photoshop CS3's codename is "Red Pill".
- The reference to the pills is also implemented in a special type of malware that utilizes the virtualisation techniques of modern CPUs to execute as a hypervisor; as a virtual platform on which the entire operating system runs, it is capable of examining the entire state of the machine and to cause any behavior with full privilege, while the operating system believes it's running directly on physical hardware, creating a parallel to the illusionary Matrix. Blue Pill describes the concept of infecting a machine while red pill techniques help the operating system to detect the presence of such a hypervisor.
- In the Maemo application installer, certain advanced features are unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" easter egg. This is activated by starting to add a catalog called "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box appears with the choices "Red Pill" or "Blue Pill", allowing the user to enter red pill mode.[1]
- In Sims 2, if one of Sims has a "Science" job, a chance card may appear, prompting to select a red or blue pill.
- In David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series of novels, the term "redpill" refers to a nuclear weapon.
- In America's Best Dance Crew Week 7, the JabbaWockeeZ encore performance was titled "The Red Pill."
See also
References
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