Red pill and blue pill

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The first appearance of the concept of the "red pill" in the 1999 film The Matrix. A hacker named Morpheus offers a choice to the film's protagonist, Neo, to take the blue pill, where "the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe", or to take the red pill, where "you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbithole goes."

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 truth of reality (red).

Background

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.

The Matrix makes many references to past films and literature, and the idea of the red pill is no exception, having appeared in the 1990 film Total Recall with the same premise – to wake the protagonist Arnold Schwarzenegger from his "dream". In the scene in question, the character Dr. Edgemar tells Schwarzenegger that he is dreaming, and offers him a red pill with the words:

It's a symbol. Of your desire to return to reality. Inside your dream, you'll fall asleep.

While this scene appears to be taking place in reality (Schwarzenegger notices a bead of sweat trickle down Edgemar's face, convincing him of this) the crucial point is that according to Edgemar's argument Schwarzenegger is currently dreaming and therefore needs the red pill to take him out of his dream and back to reality.

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 physical reality over a digital simulation is not clear-cut. Both Neo and another character, Cypher, 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." While Blackford argues that while The Matrix trilogy sets things up so that even if Neo failed, the taking of 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. 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. The argument of truth versus happiness dates back to Greek times, having been written about by both Plato and Aristotle. It has also been featured in earlier films such as Total Recall and Dark City.

"Matrix Warrior: Being the One" author Jake Horsley compared the red pill to LSD, citing a scene where Neo forms his own world outside of the Matrix. When he asks Morpheus if he could return, Morpheus responds by asking him if he would want to. He also describes the blue pill as an addictive, calling The Matrix series a continuous series of choices between taking the blue pill and not taking it. He adds that the habits and routines of people inside the Matrix are merely the people dosing themselves with the blue pill. While he describes the blue pill as a common thing, he states that the red pill is one-of-a-kind, and something someone may not even find.

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.

• Until they were removed from the Maemo operating system application installer in January 2010, certain advanced features were unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" easter egg to prevent accidental use by novice users but make them readily available to experienced users. This was activated by starting to add a catalog whose URL was "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box would appear asking "Which pill?" with the choices "Red" or "Blue", allowing the user to enter red pill mode. In "Red Pill" mode the installer allows the user to view and reconfigure system packages whose existence it normally does not acknowledge. In Blue Pill mode the installer displays only software installed by a user, creating the illusion that system software does not exist on the system.