Red pill and blue pill

The term redpill is a pop culture term that was popularised in science fiction culture via the 1999 film The Matrix. The movie relies on the premise that an artificial reality that is advanced enough will be indistinguishable from reality and that no test exists that can conclusively prove that reality is not a simulation. This ties in closely with the skeptical idea that the everyday world is illusory. In the movie, a Redpill is the term used to describe a human who has been freed from the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world set in 1999. Bluepill refers to a human still connected to the Matrix.

Borrowing from the movie, the terms blue pill and red pill have become a popular metaphor for the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, truth of reality (red).

Background

In the Matrix Universe, an authorized member of a Zion ship crew offers a prospective human in the Matrix a choice of ingesting a red or blue pill. The red pill activates a trace program that allows the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant.

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

Once the person is found, commands are sent to the pod to awake him or her, and the freed individual is rescued by the respective ship crew.

Redpills appear to have either seen "glitches" within the Matrix (e.g. a book continuously respawning on a shelf, regardless of attempts to remove the book), or question their lives within the Matrix, refusing to dismiss strange events. These are the people most likely to recognize the Matrix as an illusion.

According to Morpheus, leaving the Matrix can be traumatic, particularly to those who have lived in it too long. As a rule, crews only offer the red pill to those younger than 18. After that, the risk of denial and psychotic episodes from the reality of separation is much higher. The exception to this rule (as seen in the movies) is Neo, whose age is around 30 when he is released by Morpheus.

Analysis

An essay written by Russell Blackford discusses the red and blue pills, questioning whether if a person were fully informed they would take the red pill, opting for the real world, believing that choosing physically reality over a digital simulation is not clear-cut. BOth Neo and another character, Cypher, both take the red pill over the blue pill, with the latter showing regret for having made such a choice, having stated that if Morpheus fully informed them of the situation, Cypher would have told Morpheus to shove the red pill up his ass. He argues that while The Matrix trilogy sets up that even if Neo failed, him taking the red pill was worthwhile due to him living and dying authentically, he and science-fiction writer James Patrick Kelly feel that The Matrix stacks the deck against machines and their simulated world. In the book "The art of the start: the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone", author Guy Kawasaki uses the red pill as an analogue to leaders of new organizations, in that they face the same choice to either live in reality or fantasy. He adds that if they want to be successful, they have take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. "The matrix and philosophy: welcome to the desert of the real" author William Irwin described the red pill as the new symbol of bold choice, adding that most people stated they would pick the red pill if given the choice. After he concludes an introduction to philosophy course, he invites his students to inhale fumes from either a red marker or a blue marker, using the same rules of the red and blue pills but stating that the red marker would allow them to major in philosophy, while the blue marker would make them forget they thought anything about the mysteries of the universe. His students were amusingly annoyed, due to them thinking there really isn't such a choice, as no one can major in philosophy. Another author, David Mitsuo Nixon suggests that there may be no Matrix, and that the red pill was merely a hallucinogenic drug that he was tricked into taking. Jason Holt called the red pill versus the blue pill a cool idea, but commented that it was "old hat" to philosophers, having been done hundreds of years ago as Descartes' demon hypothesis.

Other uses

• The reference to the pills is also implemented in a special type of malware that utilizes the virtualization 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 itself to be running directly on physical hardware, creating a parallel to the illusory 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 whose URL is "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 "Red Pill" mode the installer allows user to view all packages including packages which are parts of operating system and perform actions without restrictions, somewhat resembling effect of Red Pill. In Blue Pill mode the installer displays only installed software without dependencies (like libraries) and exposes fewer options, making the casual user see only software installed by user, hence creating the illusion that only software installed by user exists on the system. This makes it harder to harm the operating system because most casual users are not aware of the "matrix" trick.