TRON: An Essay

TRON: A legacy of digital landscape and information

Introduction

TRON: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to the original 1982 film TRON, follows Sam Flynn as he searches for his father, Kevin Flynn, who disappeared when he was a child. He finds himself digitized into the Tron System, arriving on The Grid, where he, his father, and the isomorphic algorithm (ISO) Quorra must go against the corrupt doppelganger of Kevin Flynn, CLU 2.0, who will stop at nothing to invade the human world and prevent them from escaping the system. In this essay, I will be referring to Kevin Flynn as Flynn and CLU 2.0 as CLU due to the fact these are the names used most often in the movie. The Grid itself is a landscape created through the movement of information. It is an information landscape. Through an analysis of Flynn and his grid, I will show that the movie is calling attention to the importance of the concepts of landscape and information and compels us think about the information landscape we find ourselves in.

The Grid: A Digital Frontier

The concept of landscape is a vantage point that we can use to work through questions and problems of modernity (Sebastian Wedler 2025). In TRON: Legacy, the Tron System is Flynn's digital landscape. He cultivated a digital environment to form a "Newtonian playground" where all thought and experimentation can proceed at a vastly accelerated rate over what people can achieve in the real world, thus allowing anyone immersed in the computer environment to perform the system functions in a fraction of the time. Glowing data transmissions beam through the sky in the outer reaches of the Tron system, connecting The Grid to the outer servers. Flynn was obsessed with finding a digital frontier to reshape the human condition. There is a certain elasticity to the term frontier. While the word frontier has multiple definitions, such as a territorial limit or the limits of knowledge of a particular field, the term is also intertwined with a long history of colonialism and imperialism. Tron: Legacy’s digital landscape harkens back to these real-world themes, calling attention to ideas such as digital imperialism. The Grid evokes the romantic idea of landscape which “calls attention to the means, conditions, and the operations of its being” (Grimley 2020, 347). The surroundings are defined by the digitization of information.

Themes of imperialism appear throughout the movie, especially in the differences from before and after CLU takes over The Grid. In the beginning of the film, we see Flynn in the human world talking about the Tron System, where he states: “In there is a new world, in there is our future, in there is our destiny” (Joseph Kosinski 2010). Near the end of the film, we see CLU, talking to his invasion army, stating a remarkably similar thing: “Out there is a new world! Out there is our victory! Out there is our destiny” (Joseph Kosinski 2010). While one of these statements seems more inherently “good” and the other more inherently “bad,” they both pull from the idea of manifest destiny, which was the imperial belief that American settlers were destined to expand to the new frontier in North America. This idea was rooted in nationalism and imperialism and emphasized a cultural superiority. But how did things go so wrong for Flynn, whose idea in creating the TRON system was to help humanity, not to spread a kind of digital imperialism?

Flynn used landscape as a medium. His system is embedded in a tradition of communication that is host to symbolic forms that are capable of being invoked and reshaped to express meanings and values (W.J.T. Mitchell 2002, 14). Instead of coding his system from the outside, he coded it from the inside, immersing himself in the landscape itself, believing his goal to be ideologically neutral and understandable without communicating after the first step. However, notions of immersion and the subject viewing a landscape are never ideologically or politically neutral (Grimley 2020, 349). All contents of meaning were absorbed by the form of the medium, i.e. The Grid, and while Flynn hoped he could manipulate the medium to transform the real world by utilizing the impact of the medium as form, his inability to communicate the meaning of why he was building this system caused the destruction of everything he built and found (Jean Baudrillard 2007, 103). Flynn immersed himself so deeply into The Grid that the communication between human and non-human was an active staging, not an actual connection with meaning.

CLU and the Entropy of Information

CLU is the embodiment of the dissemination of information through an imperialist landscape, and his actions display an entropy through those themes. In the beginning of the film, Flynn describes the creation of the TRON system:

We built a new grid for programs and users.
Now, I couldn't be in there all the time,
so I created a program in my own image
that could think.
Like you, and me.
And I called him CLU.
Codified Likeness Utility (Joseph Kosinski 2010).

CLU is essentially an algorithmic clone of Flynn, but they only briefly have the same goal before the information Flynn gives CLU atrophies. Flynn explains: “CLU was my creation. A program designed to create a perfect world. We were jamming, man, building utopia” (Joseph Kosinski 2010). Flynn gave CLU the order, “you will create the perfect system,” and CLU held on to that information as the pure and only truth. He was given raw information that a system should have no bugs and that it needs to be perfect. With that information, he created his own imperialist ideology. Flynn believed he could convey the message and the medium and his desires in a single sentence, with an efficacy connected with immediacy, simultaneously generating the message, the medium, and the real (Jean Baudrillard 2007, 104). The information CLU received dissolved meaning into a nebulous state where the two of them were innovating together, but it was leading to a catastrophe, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes, an annihilation only in a linear vision of accumulation and productive finality that the system imposes on us (Jean Baudrillard 2007, 105). The more Flynn fought back against CLU, the more powerful CLU became. He fed on Flynn’s resistance. His resistance was just the piling on of information into a source that carried no meaning

Flynn was so immersed in his landscape and his idea of utopia that he did not comprehend that the meaning he had tried to transfer to CLU entropized the moment the words left his mouth. While CLU runs on information, Flynn runs on knowledge. The communication of information can be seen here as an ontological process of individualization. When the two discover programs, the Isomorphic Algorithms (ISOs), emerging naturally from the landscape, Flynn takes steps to reflect and contemplate these novel changes, inviting the ISOs to stay. CLU, however, only saw them as a corruption of his utopian landscape and committed genocide to remove them from the frame. CLU, here, represents the darker side of romantic landscape ideas, which actively proclaimed a naturalness of imperial hierarchical social order (W.J.T. Mitchell 2002, 27). Flynn himself came into the system to use it as a form of escape and to build his utopia, a system of control, order, and perfection. When the ISOs appeared, he himself said he realized none of his original ideas meant a thing and that he had been living in a hall of mirrors (Joseph Kosinski 2010). Where Flynn could change, Clu could not. A program based on years-old information and a singular directive working not only with the information he received but also with the ideology he had built around that information and an unwillingness to learn from his surroundings. With CLU’s instructions to make the perfect system, he was given the power to decide what perfect was, and he was also given a sense of superiority as he was tasked to create the perfect system. Therefore, to him everything he does is perfect. Therefore, when he sees the ISOs for the first time, he sees the difference between him and them and therefore decides that they are a threat to his perfect order. When seen from the perspective of processes of individuation, philosopher Gilbert Simondon argues that the concept of information problematizes our understanding of the adaptive relation between individual and environment (Terranova 2006, 287).

With the communication entropy creating a catastrophic disconnect and a dissonance between Flynn’s goal for the system and CLU’s, he takes actions into his own hands, betraying Flynn and taking control of The Grid. CLU believes that Flynn betrayed him and he disseminates this information to the masses, creating the social function as a closed circuit. CLU’s grid is a simulacrum of Flynn’s. A simulacrum is an imitation or representation of something, usually with an unreal or vague semblance to the original. In this case, CLU changes The Grid from a system, where all information was free and open to a system that preaches a landscape of free information but oppresses its subjects. Immense energies are deployed to keep the simulacrum standing, i.e., CLU corrupting programs as he cannot program his own, the brutal reality that a loss of the original goal and a loss of communication will quickly collapse the system.

As CLU gained power and authority, he began to wish to explore his own frontier, a way to the human world. He disseminates the information in a constant bombardment to the programs corrupting them to his side or creating non-resistance. His system runs on the dream of a utopian fantasy of the perfect imperial prospect. Empires move outward into space as a way of moving forward in time; the prospect that opens is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of development and exploitation (W.J.T. Mitchell 2002, 17). Flynn wanted humanity to expand into a digital realm, but instead the digital realm was attempting to expand into humanity. His visions and the information needed to create them were unable to be communicated in a meaningful way across this digital landscape, which led to a catastrophic breakdown between Flynn and CLU and a near destruction of The Grid.

The Final Confrontation

The illusion of an information system is that the meaning is communicated automatically. In Flynn and CLU’s final confrontation, the communication breakdown between the two is made very clear.

CLU - I took this system to its maximum potential.
I created the perfect system!
Flynn - The thing about perfection is that it's unknowable.
It's impossible but it's also right in front of us all the time.
You wouldn't know that because I didn’t when I created you (Joseph Kosinski 2010).

By analysing these lines, we can see that the words Flynn spoke to CLU were vague and taken in a way not intended. Meaning in information and creation is always going to be received differently by the receiver than the person writing, creating, or sharing information wanted. Everybody comes from a different position in life with different experiences, which will affect how meaning is perceived. CLU is a twisted embodiment of Flynn's youth, naivety, and passion. Flynn’s ideas grew throughout the years, and his idea of the perfect system became far removed from a statistical idea of perfection and into a more profound deployment of the concept. His failure to designate this information to CLU not because of a pure lack of communication but because he misguidedly believed that through the landscape of information they had created together, CLU was able to notice the meaning of his words naturally. Unfortunately for Flynn, he could not do so, and CLU became the representation of the entropy of meaning in an information landscape.

Conclusion

TRON: Legacy plays with concepts of landscape and information. These themes often echo issues and discussions in our world, allowing us to think about questions of digitization differently. Analysing TRON: Legacy through the lenses of landscape and information helps us to reexamine imperialist frameworks that appear in information landscapes and the processes of digitization around the world. This movie holds a warning for us to be aware of the landscape we are cultivating and to be intentional about the information shared through digital means. The confrontation between Flynn and CLU is manufactured by two people hoping to create something to better the world and getting sucked down a path of misinformation, miscommunication, and entropy leading to an imperialist landscape.

Bibliography

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Jean Baudrillard. 2007. “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media.” In In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Semiotext(e).

Joseph Kosinski, dir. 2010. Tron: Legacy. Performed by Jeff Bridges. TRON. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 02:05:08.

Sebastian Wedler. 2025. “Landscape.” Lecture. Humanities Today, Utrecht University, October 16.

Terranova, Tiziana. 2006. “The Concept of Information.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2–3): 286–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406023002115.

W.J.T. Mitchell. 2002. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press.