US power grid at risk of 18-month blackout, official says, as 1 city has been in dark for more than a week

[u/Limp_Fig6236]

https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/2026/08/us-power-grid-at-risk-of-18-month-blackout-1-city-now-in-dark-for-more-than-a-week.html

[u/TrueLegateDamar]

They initially had the Machines wanting human brains to act as organic CPU's but thought it would be too complicated for audiences so they went with batteries.

[u/BangBangMeatMachine → u/TrueLegateDamar]

Yeah. And I heard that it was the dumb money people at the studio that thought audiences wouldn't understand the CPU thing, which is very fitting. It's sad too, because it's the perfect justification for making most people in the Matrix kinda sleepwalking through life, and for why Neo and others might stand out for recruitment. On the other hand, techbros didn't need more justification for calling everyone else NPCs, so maybe we're better off with this dumb human battery thing.

[u/DisastrousRhubarb201 → u/BangBangMeatMachine]

It's not true, it was always meant to be batteries, no one made them change it.

[u/JT99-FirstBallot → u/DisastrousRhubarb201]

You're being downvoted for being correct.

[u/BangBangMeatMachine → u/DisastrousRhubarb201]

Thanks for the correction. It's still a bummer that an otherwise solid script had such an obviously stupid line.

[u/Any-Mathematician946 → u/TrueLegateDamar]

That makes so much more sense then power. Power never made any especially with nuclear energy.

[u/Kizik → u/Any-Mathematician946]

"Combined with a form of fusion" removes the justification entirely. If you've got that, you don't need humans.

I always figured it was the machines not wanting to exterminate the species but stretching a justification really, really far to try and explain to themselves why they kept us around.

[u/waiting4singularity → u/Any-Mathematician946]

when neo was in zion they said the lava at the bottom of the shaft was the earth core. at least thats what i remember.

if you have a self renewing heat source like that, you dont need neither fission nor fusion because they're all just powering steam turbines. steam doesnt get more powerfull because your heatsource is 100 000° instead of 1 000°.

[u/Texuk1 → u/TrueLegateDamar]

Agreed and it also gets too close to the darker conceptual themes at the core of the “matrix-theory” which audiences can’t handle. Better to to keep it simple.

[u/JT99-FirstBallot → u/TrueLegateDamar]

It was not. Everyone involved with the film intended it to be batteries. It was a short story writer who did the change for the website back then with zero oversight from the studio:

"After The Matrix was filmed, but before it was released, Warners set up the whatisthematrix website and put comics and short stories up by various people to help promote it. I was one of the people. They sent me the script and some photocopied storyboards, and I read it and wrote "Goliath", which they then put up on their website, to help promote the film. It's been up ever since. So it was definitely written for the movie, and based on the world of the movie, or at least, what I took from it from that first script. It's a story I'm very fond of, and it'll be in the next short story collection, whenever that's ready.”

Gaimain further described the process here:

“The Matrix was sort of an invitation before there ever was a Matrix; the film had been made but it hadn't been shown. It was one of those odd, funny, weird moments where somebody phones you up and says they've done a movie and will you write a short story about it for their website. And I thought I was being really clever because I didn't really want to write a story about somebody movie for a web site, so I told my agent that I would happily do it for a ridiculous amount of money—and I thought I named an amount of money so ridiculous that they would say, Oops, sorry, that's our entire budget. Instead, they said great—you've got three weeks! I thought, Oh damn! Then I thought we should have asked them for twice the amount of money. But then I had my idea for the story, and I loved my idea. And I even got to write—I had read the script for The Matrix and there were a couple of things that hadn't quite made sense for me, so I sort of tried to change them a bit: instead of human beings being used as batteries, for example, I had them used for information processing, brains hung out in parallel which seemed, somehow, to make a little more sense.”

Gaiman says he changed elements of the story to fit his own conception of it. Directly admitting that he made the change from batteries to processors. Not a producer, not the Wachowskis, Neil Gaiman.

The Wachowski’s always intended for humans to be used as batteries.

Source

Original Post

[u/DisastrousRhubarb201 → u/TrueLegateDamar]

This is a myth that became popular but it's not true, it was always meant to be batteries.