From red pills to red, white and blue Brexit: how The Matrix shaped our reality

Twenty years after the release of The Matrix, its prescient vision of a virtual world continues to mirror events in real lifeThe Matrix has barely started when a phone booth is demolished, left as a smashed pancake of glass and metal.

It was a prophetic touch.

Payphones were still everywhere in western cities when the film came out in March 1999.

By the time of the first sequel four years later, they were already half-vanished, replaced by a private army of Nokias and Motorolas.But now The Matrix is a relic too, a quaint slice of 90s nostalgia about to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

“1999”, the recent song from Charli Xcx and Troye Sivan, features wistful lyrics and cover art in which the millennial pop stars wear the black leather costumes made famous by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as they battled the machines enslaving humanity.

Yet for a relic, it

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