About

Matrix Morpheus is an advice animal image macro series featuring a screen capture of the fictional character Morpheus^[1] (played by Lawrence Fishburne) from The Matrix franchise.^[2] The captions typically follow a two line format with the first line reading "What if I Told You," followed by a revelation that often belittles futile or petty behavior, in a similar vein to the advice animal characters Conspiracy Keanu and Sudden Clarity Clarence.

Origin

While the line “What if I told you” was never heard in any of the Matrix films, it thought to be a paraphrased interpretation of a scene from The Matrix in which Morpheus informs the protagonist Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) that he lives in is a computer simulation (shown below, left). A different screen capture used in many of the image macros comes from a scene in which Morpheus warns Neo about the artificial intelligence programs known as "Agents" (shown below, right).

On February 11th, 2012, Redditor haveacigaro submitted a post titled "Morpheus Uses a Mac" to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[4] subreddit, which featured a screenshot of Morpheus sitting in a chair with a caption informing Macintosh computer users how to take a screenshot using a keyboard shortcut (shown below).

Spread

On March 27th, 2012, Redditor matthewkol186 submitted a Matrix Morpheus image macro with the caption "What if I told you / the side with the USB symbol will always be the top side" (shown below, left),^[5] which received over 620 up votes and 35 comments prior to being archived. On the following day, Redditor lindyhop411 submitted an image macro titled "Why I could never take Morpheus seriously" to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[6] subreddit, which featured a screen capture of Lawrence Fishburn as the character Cowboy Curtis in the children's television show Pee Wee's Playhouse (shown below, right). Prior to being archived, the post received over 8,000 up votes and 200 comments. As of December 28th, 2012, the Quickmeme^[3] page for "Matrix Morpheus" has received over 33,000 submissions.

Malware

On December 14th, 2018, the security news blog Trend Micro^[9] published an article titled "Criminals Use Malicious Memes That Communicate With Malware," which reported that a type of remote access trojan (RAT) malware was using Matrix Morpheus memes posted to Twitter in order to hide "/print" commands (shown below).

According to the malware analysis site Virus Total,^[10] the malware began circulating in October 2018. On December 17th, a post about the discovery was submitted to /r/netsec.^[11]

Notable Examples

Cat Morpheus

On March 25th, 2012, Redditor ZeLittleMan submitted an image macro titled "Cat Morpheus" to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[7] subreddit, which featured a black-and-white photograph of a cat wearing sunglasses with the caption "What if I told you / you can't catch the red dot" (shown below, left). Prior to being archived, the post received over 7,700 up votes and 70 comments. As of December 28th, 2012, the "Cat Morpheus" Quickmeme^[8] page has received over 100 submissions.

Search Interest

External References