The strike took place following months of protest from Indian farmers, a response to three farm acts passed by the Parliament of India in September 2020. According to protesters, the farm acts would leave small farmers, the vast majority, at the mercy of large corporations. Poor farmers were already desperate before the laws were passed - in 2019 alone, 10,281 agricultural workers committed suicide.
Dozens of farm unions began organizing protests demanding the repeal of these laws. After failing to get the support of their respective state governments, the farmers decided to pressure the Central Government by marching to Delhi en masse.
The farmers arrived at Delhi on November 25th, 2020 and were met by police, who employed the use of tear gas and water cannons, dug up roads, and used layers of barricades and sand barriers to try and stop their march.
On November 26th, 250 million workers from all over the country initiated a general strike in solidarity with the farmer's struggle. According to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, trade unions issued a twelve-point charter of demands which included "the reversal of the anti-worker, anti-farmer laws pushed by the government in September, the reversal of the privatisation of major government enterprises, and immediate [Covid] relief for the population".
Farmer protests continued for more than a year, featuring mass marches, clashes with police, and many failed negotiations between farmers' unions and the government. Rakesh Tikait, a leader with Bharatiya Kisan Union (English: Indian Farmers' Union) stated in October 2021 that approximately 750 participants have died in the protest.
Among the dead was a Senior Superintendent of Police in the city of Sonepat, who committed suicide, saying he could not bear the pain of the farmers. His suicide note read "Bullets fired from the guns kill only those whom they strike. The bullet of injustice, however, kills many with a single stroke... It is humiliating to suffer injustice."
In a televised address on November 19th, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that his government would repeal the three acts in the upcoming winter parliamentary session in December. The national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, Rakesh Tikait, stated the protests would only cease once the laws were repealed.
The film actor Deep Sidhu also joined the protests, and was quoted as having told a police officer the following: "Ye inquilab hai. This is a revolution. If you take away farmers' land, then what do they have left? Only debt."
We Are Grass. We Grow on Everything: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2020).
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In the movie they say post scarcity was too good to be believed and people broke out. But yeah, it doesn't make sense, the machines would logically create a world where all their batteries had the same conditions or you'd have unreliable power supplies.
That's kind of reinforced in the stories; More self-aware people sort of know something isn't quite right, and I guess the idea is that big-city life in the mid 90s was loud and mind-numbing enough to drown that thought out. Whereas apparently a saccarchine pollyanna utopia made it too easy for people to see the cracks and start pulling off the wallpaper to reveal the bars of the prison.
I get that, but does that mean every 'real' person is in New York and everyone else is a computer illusion or is some starving child in the 3rd world also supposed to be a battery for the machines? If so why did they simulate that reality for some people and not others?
It's been a long time since i've seen The Matrix but I don't recall anything that suggests there is a world outside the city. The sequels open things up on that front, but as far as I can recall in the first movie the city is all we ever see, and I took it as not being any particular real world city, just an abstract, archetypal city - Every big late 90s city mashed up together.
Idk if that was a stylistic choice, or if it's intended to be understood that the people in the story all live in this one giant city and never think about what's outside it.
I think we might be running in to this very 21st century phenom of "The Lore", where every story is assumed to take place in a tolkienesque fully fleshed out "real" universe with a self-consistent history and past and so forth. I think at least for the first movie The Matrix was very much a self contained story and you weren't supposed to worry too much about certain details - The story takes place in one giant rainy corporate beige city because that's where you set cyberpunk stories. The city isn't a real place - It doesn't really have any defined locations, landmarks, or structures. It's a backdrop to set the mood and provide a place for the action to happen. How the rest of the world, if there is a rest of the world, functions is outside the scope of the story.
The Matrix is actually self-aware about this - It explicitly references Alice and Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass, to the extent that Neo follows a white rabbit and quite literally falls through a looking glass. This would fit with the world not being intended to be a "real" world, but instead a storybook world that stops at the edge of the page.
idk if I mentioned it up the thread but you might check out Moxyland. It's a post-Cyberpunk story set in Cape Town and is a good representation of where the genre went after 1999. Also, I just looked at the wiki for Moxyland and the writing is... uh... strange. And now I'm wondering if it was written by an LLM or something. Hopefully not. : |