Back In 1999, when I first saw The Matrix, I was bowled over.

The Matrix is the movie set in a post-apocalyptic near future in which Keanu Reeve's character discovers that reality is in fact entirely virtual reality. People, buildings, sidewalks, everything on earth is an absolutely convincing simulation created by the evil computers that rule the world. The simualtion makes humans believe they're still in charge, still leading normal flesh and blood lives.

The Matrix was beautifully made. But the reason it was such a huge hit, I think, is because we sense that our culture really is moving in that direction. These days, the premise of The Matrix is not such a paranoid fantasy. More and more, we are being fed virtual reality as if it's the real thing.

Are you aware, for instance, that in lots of smaller cities, the local deejays aren't local at all? I didn't know it, until I read articles in the Wall Street Journal and on Wired.com recently about Clear Channel.

The company owns more than 1200 radio stations all over the country, and most of the biggest stations. Their second place competitor owns a total of 200 stations..

Clear Channel employs a single deejay, who works out of San Diego, to pretend he's the local deejay on the Clear Channel station in Boise, Idaho. And on the station in Medford, Oregon. And the one in Santa Barbara, California. Other deejays enact different pseudo-local personalities.

For each pseudo-local show, the deejay mentions local hot spots he's never been to and local events that he didn't attend. He interviews musicians who play along with the big lie, and talk about how much they love visiting the place they are not, in fact, visiting.

And then I read a New York Times article about another kind of illusion being perpetrated by local TV stations. Dozens of stations are using computer-generated virtual sets for their local news programs.

That vast studio from which your local anchors deliver the news may in fact be a tiny naked blue cubicle. And when you see that very, very serious-looking news personality stride portentously across the studio, he or she may in fact be walking on a treadmill in order to reinforce the computer-generated illusion of space.

These are the people we're supposed to rely on, all day long, to tell us what happened in the world, what's true and what's not.

"The evil intentions attributed to Clear Channel are not true at all," the company's CEO insisted in a speech at a radio convention earlier this summer. I'd say that when CEOs stand up to specifically deny "evil intentions," it's probably a safe bet to impute evil intentions.

These are not crimes against humanity. They are small horrors. But bit by bit, the little subversions of truth do add up.

And by the time the two sequels to the Matrix come out next year, I'm betting we'll have some awesome new set of bright, shiny lies beaming into our real-life brains.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.