“Have you ever stood and stared at it?  Marveled at its beauty, it’s genius?  Billions of people just living out their lives — oblivious.”  So begins a pivotal scene in The Matrix: when Agent Smith is interrogating Morpheus.  During the course of the scene, many very important ideas our laid out, including views about the human condition in general, humanity’s role in nature, and civilization’s various effects on the psyche of individuals.  American Identity, in particular, can be thought of as a specific agent for many of these ideas, mainly because Americans are responsible for many of the technological advancements on the planet (especially the internet).  This first quote that Agent Smith says to Morpheus highlights the most important point, realized in a variety of ways, which claims that postmodern human consciousness has become generic, stagnant, and “oblivious”.  The people in The Matrix, or rather, continuing from the metaphor, the people in the postmodern hyperreal society of the present day industrialized world (which The Matrix can be seen as representing), are entirely removed from reality.  Humans (and, perhaps, specifically Americans) have forever altered civilization by creating this postmodern situation where their is now a technological “reality”; an abstract digital and simulated existence.
Agent Smith continues with the following:  “…but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.  In the perfect world you dream, your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up, which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peek of your civilization.”  Here, the Wachowski’s are ironically showing that we have surrounded ourselves with this digital world, and submerged our psyches in a world where many things are only representative of real things, and where there is a disconnect between our everyday experiences and what would actually constitute reality.  In this ay, our identities are being lost, and our individuality is disseminated into the whole, the “matrix”.  According to this view, human consciousness has changed so drastically that our conceptions of what human “identity” even is anymore.  Agent Smith continues:  “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium which its natural environment, but you humans do not.  You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed.  The only way you can survive is to spread to another area … human beings are a disease.”  Following from this, humans have not only destroyed the idea of identity, but also our place in the environment.  By creating these industrialized and technological systems and frameworks, we are also endangering our notions of civilization, equilibrium, and a “natural order”.
In this scene there are many issues that are being raised by the Wachowski brothers regarding identity in the postmodern world.  Ultimately, it seems they are arguing that the postmodern systems which we are all born into, and which are in the process of taking over the world and forever altering the future, might have a negative effect on humanity’s understanding of reality.  In the future, will be able to discern between the real and the synthetic?  How will we know that the world around us is authentic?  Humans have created and replaced previous societal frameworks with, as Mr. Smith puts it, “…a perfect human world where everyone is happy.”