We stand at a precipice. On one side is "reality": the original, authentic, lived human experience. And on the other side is the metaverse: the world of constantly mediated experience. In the middle is hyperreality, that blurry space between the real world and the mediated world. And, living as we do on this side of the electronic media revolution, it is the only place we have ever known.

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TRANSCRIPT

VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn't always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.

PART 3: INTO THE METAVERSE

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, if you saw anything, read anything, listened to anything, it was, more likely than not, placed in front of you by one of the handful of corporations that controlled the major television and radio networks, newspaper syndicates, film studios and music companies. These companies didn't control what people thought; it was more subtle than that. These companies controlled what people thought about.

We all knew the daily news from the newspapers. We all heard the latest Billboard chart topper. We all saw the latest episode of Must See TV and we all knew about the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Even if we managed to avoid these media ourselves, we knew them anyway from cultural osmosis.

Yes, by the year 2000 we had arrived at the pinnacle of mediated reality. The media oligopoly's control of society was complete, and nothing could ever come along to change it.

And then something did.