In The Matrix, the technology design of machines and humans are the same, a single life, knowledge, and mechanism system. Without technology, 7 billion people cannot live on Earth—they created each other. Human beings act as "batteries" to the degree that their ignorance of reality enables the machine to drain or regulate their intrinsic life energies. The Matrix reveals secret layers of reality by breaking them out as observable objects, matrix simulation, agents, computers, etc. As colors are used in biology to illustrate the secret structure, The Matrix helps us to peek into our modern world's workings. This means that as systems become smarter and more educated by their knowledge and self-definition. Their unique character will emerge—a synthetic system that is conscious, self-defined, machined, learned, not programmer-designed, but developed from a system, and is indistinguishable from humans. As far as engineering is concerned, we can see that The Matrix could be consumerism (remember those talks about what chicken tastes like?) Bioelectricity representing money and consumption, and the network representing the media, the smoke blocking the sun will be the industrial revolution, and the fact that humans did not embrace a utopia could look at how we need our jobs to keep us happy. Maybe The Matrix is a sci-fi prophecy of things to come, even after the revolution, think of scenes looking at water refinery. We need them, they need us. In this reading, things are very literal, but the technical specifics are metaphorical. The network is our life with robots; if they don't reach our ambitions, they don't have much else to live for the computers are the senseless systems of development that drive us forward, forward, forward, tirelessly improving to do ever faster. In these structures, humans are held captive providing the energy to make them work. Without humans wired into the mindless progress machine matrix, it would starve to death, and everybody would eventually see what it's made of the planet. As it is, being tuned in absorbs so much time that it can be hard to remember what happens with mindless development.