The Matrix's real-world legacy - from red pill incels to conspiracies and deepfakes

"I don't know the future... I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end, I came here to tell you how it's going to begin."

The closing monologue of 1999's The Matrix saw Keanu Reeves' heroic character Neo deliver a stark warning to the world's controlling machines, having discovered that humanity was trapped in a simulated reality.

Released as society lay on the cusp of the internet revolution and fretted over the millennium bug, the film not only tapped into technological developments of the time, but posed far-flung questions about the internet, consciousness and social control that have since come to shape society.

As a fourth instalment, Matrix Resurrections, hits cinemas - 18 years on from the original trilogy drawing to a close - we look at the saga's enduring and often prophetic legacy.

The Matrix's co-creator siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski loosely based their dystopian vision on the work of French academic philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

Long before Reeves donned Neo's trench coat and shades, they asked that he read Baudrillard's 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation to prepare for the role.

It pondered a "desert of the real" - a world where true reality had been replaced by the illusions of capitalism.

The film took the concept, with rebel leader Morpheus using the exact phrase when introducing Neo to the ruins of the outside world, and rewired it.

Where for Baudrillard there was no escape from the simulation, the Wachowskis offered hope in the "promise of a true natural world 'unplugged' and separate from the Matrix", explains Prof Richard Smith, editor of The Baudrillard Dictionary.

Baudrillard was not a fan of the change. "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce," he said.

Either way, the rabbit hole had been opened. Here are four main ways it has hacked our reality.

One of the most iconic scenes in The Matrix sees Morpheus offer Neo (then still living as curious hacker Thomas Anderson) a central choice of blue pill or red pill.

Pop the blue pill and return to life as Mr Anderson blissfully unaware of the matrix, the simulated world created to covertly enslave humanity. Or swallow the red pill and become enlightened to reality and the tyranny of the machines.

For Prof Smith, the film's Marxist narrative evokes Plato's allegory of chained prisoners in a cave "who mistake the shadows on the wall for reality".

As Morpheus puts it: "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." The pill scene "urges human beings to free themselves from the world of appearances", says Prof Smith.

But over time the film's cultural prominence has seen the red pill metaphor rebranded online for causes far removed from its original meaning.

This includes its adoption by misogynistic online groups, notably the incel movement - young men describing themselves as "involuntarily celibate" - part of a "manosphere" closely tied to a hatred of women.

Reddit forum TheRedPill (TRP) was launched in 2012 with the aim of providing men with a "sexual strategy" to defeat what it described as a manipulative "feminist culture" that solely empowers women.

By the time it was "quarantined" by Reddit in 2018 (given a content warning and only made accessible via direct links), in a community clean-up drive that eventually saw incel forum r/braincels shut completely, it had more than 400,000 followers.

Research on the measure from the Australian National University suggested that rather than limit hate speech, it had simply pushed many s off-site on to self-moderated platforms.

In some cases the philosophy has moved offline with deadly consequences. Plymouth gunman Jake Davison spoke of "consuming the black pill overdose" in YouTube videos before his August killing spree - the incel community's own term for nihilistic red pill extremism.

Journalist, author and social media creator Sophia Smith Galer says the offline transition reflects how at its most basic, red pill theory appeals as a readily accessible answer and misguided outlet for life's frustrations.

"The epicentre of their problems often becomes women, rather than real, systemic failings or stereotypes in society that hurt all of us - and then many share misogynist, violent or self-harming ideas about how to improve their lives," she told the BBC.

The "free your mind" ethos exploited by red pill theory has also fed into politics - a byword for the modern age of far-right populism that positions itself as anti-establishment.

As a product of the alt-right, whose are generally outspoken in their attacks on multiculturalism, globalisation and immigration, the red pill becomes "a verb", wrote broadcaster Danny Leigh.

It opened "the eyes of new recruits to their hated oppressors - feminists, people of colour and progressives", he said. "Morpheus became the face of memes that asked: 'What If I Told You Hitler Was A Socialist":[]}