© 2001 by Daniel du Prie Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996) You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world, as it exists today: Welcome to the desert – of the real. (from Morpheus to Neo in the Matrix) From Plato's "Charmides" to "The Matrix" (1999) by the Wachowski brothers, there is a tradition of writing in Western literature, which thinks and imagines the city as a utopia or a dystopia or both. I believe that what such imagination allows us is to place ourselves within a sort of dialectic of the best or worst possible outcomes to which our historical conditions can lead us. By imagining utopian and dystopian cities we are attentive to the ethical and moral implications that constantly changing social structures, always under the continuous influence of technological developments, entail for communities in cities. Visions of dystopia and utopia function as allegories of contemporary society – of the particular historical moment of society in which a particular utopian or dystopian vision is produced. They historicize certain moments by warning us and imagining the possible implications caused by technological change. Above all, they historicize by reminding us that ours is only a given moment: things do not remain the same. Jameson (1992: 11) observes that: “If everything means something else, then so does technology.” Especially in an age where technological change is so rapid and where traditionally accepted notions of the position and function of the subject in a community or society have come under constant attack, visions of dystopia and utopia ask just what technology could mean for us, in an era in which living in diverse city communities challenges the dominance of any single meaning. "The Matrix", like many contemporary science fiction films (e.g. "Bladerunner", "Terminator") deals with themes of conspiracy, paranoia, loss of privacy and the dissolution of human society in favor of a technology that has become supreme in its own right. Their space of action is within the city. In both "Terminator" and "The Matrix" humans have lost ground to artificial intelligence, which, soon after being invented, quickly becomes malevolent and takes control of itself to the detriment of human society. The implication seems to be that two different types of sentient, intelligent beings cannot possibly share this world together: one has to go, and it is inevitably the carbon-based humans who end up becoming the lower life form..