“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure”. Agent Smith’s words to Morpheus echo in the Matrix-inspired, Danny Boyle-directed play, Free Your Mind, which claims to depict a world where humans are enslaved by algorithms. Yet, the play refrains from accusing those behind these technological systems as the perpetrators of the consumerist nightmare.
The play blames ‘Big Tech,’ social media, and AI for our enslavement, although this is not immediately evident. Free Your Mind’s first act begins with Alan Turing delivering a lecture that culminates in a frightening realisation of the events he has set in motion. The performance ensues, drawing on The Matrix (1999) as the audience is asked to free their mind, wake up, and rebel. But what should they rebel against?
The intermission comes and the audience leaves the theatre as the second half takes place “somewhere else”. With the film in mind, you have half an hour in the gift shop and bar before entering the warehouse for the standing second half. In this section, Morpheus shows Neo the personified epitome of the robot uprising, and it is… the audience. It is us. Performers no longer dance, but wander mindlessly, glued to their phones. Reified marketing directives and personified conglomerates impact upon them. Performers catch parcels thrown by a humanoid amalgam of Amazon boxes and are tempted by a 1950s woman advertising Coca Cola. They consume, they have no choice. You have just spent thirty minutes in the gift shop purchasing tote bags and vinyl and drinks and now you are watching yourself on stage being enslaved by the machine.
Free Your Mind has outed you as a consumer, and thus a part of the system it wants you to break free from. Despite this call to resistance, there’s a sense that the portrayal of entrapment within the consumerist culture lays the blame on individuals. Exploitative corporations are dramatised and feminised as cliché temptation, which creates a divide between the people behind these entities and their representations. However, the representation of the consumer, you, is just a person with a phone. Neo stares at them in wonder as drones fly above him and security cameras patrol the stage, almost waving his hand in front of their faces to break the hypnosis. His confusion is representative of the performance’s inability to direct its resistance tagline onto a tech billionaire. That aspect must remain in the science fiction villain of the machines.
Corporations are offered safety behind caricatures and buzzwords like “AI”, but the consumer, epitomising exploitation, is just the audience. You stand, the camera-performers move through the audience; they watch you. You can see the other half of the audience on the other side of the stage facing you. You have no choice but to perceive those guilty of consumerism as yourself. Especially if you bought a magazine during the intermission. This attack from the performance implies your act of rebellion should involve abandoning platforms like Amazon and Facebook, even though the message should be that people, not machines, have engineered algorithms to do this specific task. They have not broken free from their masters to enslave you. People have designed these systems to exploit others, and they are operating as intended. It is imperative to remember that the Sentinels have not taken over yet, and the ‘world where humans are enslaved by algorithms’ that is depicted is human controlled. Of course, an algorithm can run independently, but the hegemony belongs to a human.
Turing’s character reappears at the end when it seems that the machines are upon us. His life, much like the version of The Matrix depicted in Free Your Mind, is one heavily involved with machines. However, those responsible for his torment and persecution are human. When his sexuality is ‘brushed off’ with a passing comment about his lack of marriage, it becomes more important than ever to remember that Turing was arrested and castrated for his sexuality, and that he even ended his own life. This is an aspect of Turing inseparable from him. Similarly, The Matrix has been interpreted as a trans allegory where expression and suppression are depicted through machines. It is the machines’ façade, the agents, that present the true face of the oppression of LGBTQIA+ people. They are the suits, the governing bodies, and the men with the power to suppress and destroy lives over bigotry. In my mind, Turing’s life and that reading of The Matrix bear poetic semblance in the mechanical backdrop-turned-forefront of an image built to suppress queerness to satisfy mass markets, a suppression not unlike that in Free Your Mind.
Free Your Mind wants audiences to resist, but the context of rebellion within the source material should not be ignored in favour of a piece critical of the consumer. It is not the consumer who needs to be held accountable. While Free Your Mind is focused on the dangers of technology, in Alan Turing’s life and The Matrix technology and sexuality are intertwined. The culprits for the exploitation of both were, and always will be, man. That is what we must resist.
By Sam Gallacher