The Matrix defined control systems

The underlying plot raised the audience consciousness

A subconscious, fabricated, unseen, top-down "Master : Slave", tyrannical mass control mechanism.
Social engineering precludes our determined existence. "Realising that you are in a simulation", history being a lie.
In-comprehensive, subservient populations are exploited continuously by default, under a police type state, to harvest our lifelong energies.
Conditioned from birth, authorities control all aspects of a system, so society is hopelessly dependent in a mind-controlled perception.
Using 1990's computers, programmers communicate with like-minded,  gain self determination to consciousnesses.
Plato's Cave of just believing that it was possible to escape the hive mind.

Since then

All aspects of smart phones, internet providers, satellites, routers are spied on by FBI, CIA, NSA, GCHQ, Mossad, MI6 via PRISM and Pegasus.
Endless wars keep sides fighting with no understood goal, predator drones are deployed on civilians .
Exorbitant debt, like the devaluing Dollar, privately run from "Federal Reserve" for printing money, borrowing and mortgages preventing living on land.
Addictive television keeps the public docile and indoctrinated
The purging by social media by Face'berg, You Tube, Twitter, Bitchute, Google, Windoze etc all prevent freedoms, block channels, content and ghost post.
Government keeps society in lock down by regulations, drugs, passports, pandemics and cameras.

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher with interest in cultural studies. Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) was used in the Matrix.

Sophia Stewart exposes Hollywood elites (Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.) stealing the Matrix and Terminator copyright in US Courts. The original author of black artwork transcending control systems inspired by Malcolm X.