Basically, that the remaining "real world" humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity's own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple "one" persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.

Narrative differences aside, this is what happens to Morpheus in the Matrix movies though. In The Matrix Reloaded Morpheus comes to realize that finding Neo doesn't end the war with the machines and that the prophecy he believed in was just another system of control. Morpheus says, "I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me."

I hope this is taken up in a fourth movie.

Short answer: WiFi

Longer answer: For reasons (probably involving systems of control, because, hey, it's the Matrix), in addition to the high-bandwidth wired connections, the implants in humans attached to the matrix also include lower-bandwidth wireless units, and the machines (obviously) have wireless network connections to coordinate mobile units. Neo can hack machines (or formerly Matrix-connected humans) via his (and their) wireless interfaces, giving him “superpowers” in the physical world.

This isn't likely general knowledge here on HN, but currently here in Phoenix, we've recently (within the past couple of years) had a major uptick in the number of people who are getting on the freeway in the wrong direction and driving into on-coming traffic (usually resulting in the inevitable death of one or more people).

Most of these have been attributed to either confusion at night and older drivers, or driving while under the influence of a substance. A minor few have been found to have been caused by bad road design (leading people unfamiliar with our freeway system to enter the freeway wrongly).

However, some of these happen in broad daylight, without the person seemingly being confused or under the influence of anything. My wife has seen this happen personally. People honk and try to get the person's attention; sometimes they realize their error. Sometimes they don't. She has typically seen this happen most often when there is a lot of traffic backed up around freeway entrances.

Her theory is that people are "blindly" following the turn-by-turn directions of a GPS, and not paying attention, or becoming harried by the amount of traffic, or hearing something like "turn left in 100 feet" - but only following the "turn left" part.

I don't know what the validity of this theory is, but it's an interesting explanation for something that is happening all too common on our freeways (at one point, it was almost as if once a week you would hear about a "wrong way driver" accident - and it is known that this is an increase over the past rates - so much so that I've read that some form of warning system is going to be installed in an effort to prevent this from happening).

This is commonly known as "Death by GPS":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

Are there driverless cars there at all?

Got reminded of Erich Fromm's - Automaton Conformity:

"The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self." [1]

Extract from “Fear of Freedom” (1941)

[1] http://www.heathwoodpress.com/automaton-conformity-erich-fro...

In the meantime, I'll cast my lot with creating a pleasant inner world.

Just because it may sound like hipster "blah" doesn't mean that's not exactly right, IMHO.

> Our own vitality as well as that of others frightens us, if it still manages to surface, we respond with rage and turn against our own freedom. It is vitality itself that we are opposing.

-- Arno Gruen in "The Betrayal of the Self - The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women" (1986)

The older I get, the more I really feel that a lot of conflicts that are confusing or complicated boil down to psychopathology. People with wings they never use for some reason will rarely say "oh that's interesting, why is this person flying, and why is my back suddenly itching". They will instead try to clip your wings, and they can become blind and stupid "on command" in ways that really don't make sense when looked at without that.

It's like a bunch of squiggles that seem random until you notice the areas they always avoid, because anything is better than facing oneself. If you live a life with a too fake emotions and too much sophistry, then really deep empathy, real love or hate, as well as critical thought cannot be accepted in earnest even in small quantities. That is, one might accept a correction stemming from critical thought, or an action coming from genuine empathy, but they cannot acknowledge that these were the "internal reasons". They don't know internal reason as anything but nuisances and sources of shame, their own reasons are external punishment and reward, so they always cook up sick schemes of why someone who is not (as) sick (as them) is doing what they are doing, while they themselves do the opposite. It's like when someone has a cellar full of salt and calls it sugar, they will never eat even a piece of your pie, and when they do, they will call it salty and spit it out.

Yeah, it seems way too simple and self-righteous even to me whenever I'm formulating it, no matter how often I experience things that lead me back to these thoughts; and it still would if I bloated it with all the missing qualifiers I left as exercises to the reader, or added that I don't totally exclude myself from those I'm kind of othering here. But still. every day I see and meet and work with people who out of their comfort zones, dragged out from under their blankets, they're like a robot that got water in them for a second -- they just fucking blank, it's like I can physically see the Homer Simpson monkey in their head playing for time until the moment passes, and they come up with a fake memory for it -- then waddle back safe land immediately. And if this sounds cold, it's because I sometimes despair... I don't observe and struggle with people because I don't like them.

But too often they force on me the decision to comfort them at the expense of all the "birds who are still flying", by entertaining their twisted reality, or to be offend them. That at the latest is when I prefer parting ways. I need to protect myself, and those who want my best, instead of fighting my every step of the way. I know that nobody in the world, ever, wanted anything but receive love and empathy as a baby. Nobody in the world, ever, was at fault for not receiving it. I'm not saying that explains the whole human life, but that this is true as a categorical statement. But I cannot turn back time, I can't be peers and families and friends and lover to a single person as a single person, I can't take them hiking for a year or whatever might "make a dent". When me stopping them from abusing me or others, or just saying what I see or think, hurts and scares them a bit more than they are every day already, then I prefer that to the constant layer of untruth and pettiness they weave people and situations into otherwise. What always clinches it for me is even if I was 100% blind and obedient, they would still be unhappy and hungry and scared. I'm not the hole in their soul, after all.

  We

Conversation is a lost art nowadays, but when it was still a thing, a part of it was making general statements, and extrapolating general trends -- even if a statement was only factually correct for just a large (or small but increasing) number the people and not absolutely everybody down to the last person

In those days, counter-arguments involved argumentation on why something is not the case in general, as opposed to just saying something analogous to "speak for yourself".

Heck, in those days, the "that's according to my opinion" part didn't have to be declared either, as it was implicitly obvious to everybody.

Yes. They expect people to be able to freely share their opinions and observations without others knee-jerk calling them "biases" and without demanding citations for things people can judge for themselves, as if every talk has to be mediated through some (often crappy, but just formal) statistic.

I didn't say anything about being "polite enough to be silenced" (heck, I'm not that polite myself) -- just to engage with counter-arguments and that "You've made a general observation but it doesn't hold for me specifically or my friend Jack thus it is invalid" is not really an argument.