Agent Smith: The system’s guardian who became the system’s greatest danger

In the interrogation room of The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), Morpheus is strapped to a chair and Agent Smith is trying to extract the access codes to Zion. While he waits, he sets out a theory: every mammal reaches an equilibrium with its environment except humans, who multiply until they exhaust it and then move on to the next place, like a virus. Human beings, he concludes, are a disease, a cancer of the planet. Then he does something an agent should not do: he takes out the earpiece that connects him to the other programs and, alone with the prisoner, confesses that he hates the Matrix, this zoo, this prison, and that he cannot stand its smell. He wants out. The program charged with policing the simulation and eliminating anyone who discovers the truth does not believe in what it polices. At the end of the film, Neo destroys him from the inside. In The Matrix Reloaded (2003) Smith returns unplugged, with no function and no master, and discovers he can copy himself onto other bodies, human or program; in The Matrix Revolutions (2003) almost the whole simulation wears his face. Travis Hirschi’s social control theory offers a way to read that trajectory: what keeps us within the rules are our bonds, and Smith loses all of them at once.

// The theoryWhy most people do not offend

In Causes of Delinquency (1969), Travis Hirschi proposed that the tendency to offend is universal and that what needs explaining is conformity. What keeps us within the norms is the social bond, which has four elements: attachment, affection for others and concern for their opinion; commitment, investment in a project that crime would put at risk; involvement, time spent on conventional activities; and belief in the validity of the norms. When those ties weaken, the person is free to offend, because they have nothing to lose.

// The subjectThe official who hated his job

Agent Smith has a central paradox: he is the guardian of a system he loathes. His confession to Morpheus, earpiece out, is that of a bureaucrat trapped in his function, and when he loses it, instead of freeing himself, he lays waste to everything. His way of existing, copying himself onto others, is the absolute negation of the bond: he relates to no one, he only turns them into himself.

The Matrix Reloaded shows the moment that last bond is cut. Before meeting Neo again, Smith has an envelope delivered to him with his earpiece inside: the piece that tied him to the system, turned into a farewell letter. In the courtyard where they face off, he explains that Neo has changed him, that he is unplugged, a new man, so to speak, apparently free, like Neo. But what he describes looks little like freedom. Smith has not been freed to do something; he has been left with nothing to do, which is why he comes back for what, in his words, Neo tried to take from them: purpose. Hirschi was thinking of teenagers who drift away from family and school, and his theory does not predict what each of them will do with the gap that drift leaves, only that nothing holds them back any longer. Smith fills the gap in the worst possible way. Instead of forming new bonds, he reproduces the only one he knows, the bond of control, and turns it into assimilation.

// The crackA program is not a teenager

Hirschi’s theory was built on surveys of California teenagers, and its four ties describe human relationships: with family, school and friends. Applying it to a computer program is a metaphor, not a test. Smith illustrates the theory’s logic but says nothing about whether it works with people.

Control theory has also received an important criticism: not everyone with weak bonds offends, and some with strong bonds do, because bonds can be with criminal groups. Hirschi only considered ties to conventional society. Smith breaks all of his, which is why he is a case as clean as it is rare.