The Matrix Trilogy: A Technocultural Approach

Introduction

Technology has emerged as a combination of the words “tekhne”, which means craft, and “logos”, which means knowledge. As it can be understood by the terms of craft and knowledge, which means technical knowledge of the craft, the technology is accepted as the dominant force on the basis of social and cultural changes. To survive in difficult living conditions and making life easier, instruments have been developed and used since the first years of humanity. The tools developed by the people for reasons such as ensuring their safety, feeding the community and making the life easier in daily life are mainly rely on the processing of natural resources to create beneficial tools. The dependency on the knowledge of the craft has gradually increased as a result of the human need to cope with nature, developing it as needed and gaining the power to control it as it develops. With the control of fire, the mental capacity of the person who cooks the food has expanded and the use of language improved day by day. With the invention of the wheel, they started to interact with foreign groups by going out of small living spaces and exploring larger areas. In other words, every technology developed by man throughout history has played a leading role in both individual and social transformation and created a new structure. According to Philip Kottak (2002), who opposes to a linear and natural progression, argues that man's relationship with nature, develops by reacting to the environment. He states that, when man “faced with environmental change, people resort to trying some new coping mechanisms” (p. 263) and the more difficult a situation a person has to cope with, the more he will develop. Eventually, the development will be fed by the hostility coming from the environment. Technology and culture are two concepts that transform and form each other in based on scientific knowledge and cannot be considered separately. The human, who started to dominate the nature, “canchange the reality by bending and twisting in order to maintain its existence, and as a result, it transforms” (İnam, 1999, p. 19) it into new cultural climates.

It is known that people who can control the fire have the power to dominate, such as the discovery of bows and arrows provide superiority to a primitive tribe by improving their hunting and attacking ability over other tribes. Those who have the power to dominate, which means those who control the technology, have turned into an apparatus of domination over time and have started to work as a pressure mechanism.

Technology has hosted culture for centuries. This concept, which is not alienated from nature, has existed intertwined with the daily life of the individual. The technical mind subtly aims a predictable, calculable and controllable society. And its goal is a rapid transformation of the culture in order to realize its ideology (Akşit & Favaro, 2021). The ideology of the technical mind, which has the power of the technology that nested with daily life, is also shaped around the conditions of the life at the timebeing. Individuals who had concerns about accessing the food and water resources for many years started to act with ideals such as spreading religion or expanding lands after becoming settled. However today, technical mind shapes its ideals through the capitalism. The person who transforms the cultural climate and mobilizes a material world by making tools and equipment in an unlimited cycle must also have limitations on speech, tools and materials over time. Human, who makes tools, called “Homo Faber” (Arendt, 1994) by philosophers/thinkers such as Henry Bergson, Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler, perceives the world with the motivation of using the device that will provide maximum efficiency for his action. Although human has been making tools for thousands of years, after the Enlightenment, he left aside moral concerns and started to use the technique with a pragmatist approach.