USA Network’s Mr. Robot: I Hack, Therefore I Am – or Am I?

By Mario Rader

Picture found here

American fiction is replete with signature openings. “All this happened, more or less” from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a case in point; “I am an invisible man” jump-starting Ralph Ellison’s eponymous novel is another. And what about that most iconic of introductions “Call me Ishmael,” as featured in Moby Dick? All three lines attract our attention since they break with the aesthetic illusion and the conventional semantics generally associated with storytelling. It is in this line of tradition that we are introduced to what is arguably the biggest televisual happening of the year:

"Hello, friend. Hello, friend? That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head. We have to remember that."

The clinical voice interpellating viewers as invisible friend is that of Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek). Suffering from acute social anxiety, Elliot is a twenty-something techie virtuoso who works for a cyber-security firm (Allsafe) while being quite the hacker by night. What he may lack in emotional responsivity is somewhat compensated by his vigilante hacktivism. Not only does he unveil the head of a child pornography ring but he also exposes as unfaithful the lover of his therapist. Aside from his childhood friend Angela, though, Elliot leads an alienated life, whose utter irrelevance becomes barely tolerable thanks to regular doses of morphine. Not exactly the makings of a quintessential American hero, right?

But then, in the dead of night, Elliot receives a phone call. E Corp, Allsafe’s key client, has fallen prey to a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). Elliot comes to save the day, but when he tries to secure the evidence of the culprit, a mysterious text file pops up: ‘Leave me here’ – signed by fsociety.

 

Christian Slater and Rami Malek. Picture found here.

Enter  Mr. Robot (Christian Slater): A full-blown anarchist with an agenda. Guised as a bum, Mr. Robot rallied America’s cream of the crop hackers and bore a collective whose acquaintance Elliot just made in the form of a text file. DDoS-ing E Corp, as he learns, was not just a recruiting ploy – it was part of fsociety’s master plan. Codified as the Nixon shock, money was decoupled from the gold standard and turned into a virtual entity. In other words, it became software – the operating system of the world. As E Corp deals in 70 % of the global consumer credit, hacking and formatting the company’s servers would wipe clean the record of every credit card, loan and mortage, unleashing, as Mr. Robot puts it, “the single biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history.” Humanity would be clear of debt, so the rationale. Earlier, Elliot confided that at times he dreams of saving the world. Hence, the conundrum: Should he return to his near-invisible existence – or join Mr. Robot and partake in the revolution? Yes – or no? One – or zero? Zero – or Hero?

Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit!

USA Network’s launch of Mr. Robot could not have been more timely. The US debt is at a record-high of 18 trillion dollars. The American middle class is vanishing before our very eyes while more and more people work two or more jobs just to make ends meet. The American grad student is burdened with an average of $ 35,000 in student loan debt. Worse still, a staggering 47 million people in the US are presently living in poverty. Rather than cynical, Mr. Robot is crushingly realistic, setting its story against the backdrop of debt slavery as the New American Dream.

Yet its appeal derives from the circumstance that the issues it presents are anything but singular to the American experience. In fact, its allure is universal, as it caters to a distinct ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams): that of the global Discontents. Specifically, it dramatizes their pursuit of the anarchist invariant that ‘Another world is possible’ by rendering a virtual pendant to the international cycle of struggle: a continuum of self-organized rebellion encompassing the 16^th and 17^th century peasant uprisings in Europe and the French Revolution, the worker rebellions of the 19^th and 20^th century and the uprising of 1968 as well as more recent grassroots phenomena such as the Battle in Seattle and Occupy Wall Street. Inscribed in this transhistorical grand narrative of the capital-R-evolution, the cyber-jacqueries of fsociety represent the revolutionary subject 2.0.15 – a vis vita which seeks to free humankind from the “kingdom of bullshit” perfected under the aegis of neoliberalism.

Unsurprisingly, said supremacy is concretized in the upper echelons of the American Corporatocracy – the 1 % who, alongside the high-finance sector, regulate the flows of transnational capital and “play God without permission,” as Elliot claims. In what is a questionable response to the subprime crisis of 2008, however, Mr. Robot demonizes the Suits, the CTOs and other top-tier executives. E Corp is received as ‘Evil Corp’ – a self-contained universe inhabited by ice-blue-eyed maniacs who sit in their high-rise offices towering over the ignorant masses. “Power belongs to the people that take it,” is how one specimen rationalizes the ever-widening inequality gap before basking in hoffart: “The actual will to take is often the only thing that’s necessary.”

And taken it was, as the myriad pseudo-utilitarian smokescreens of past and present amply demonstrate. From the expropriation of the common via deregulation as well as privatization to austerity swindles and Too-Big-to-Fail-isms, the neoliberal regime has indeed reversed the trickle-down effect. Such is its perversion that it trompets its reallocations from the bottom up as expanding our freedoms while entire economies and subjectivities have been ‘structurally adjusted’ (remember Thatcher’s “Economics are the method, but the object is to change the soul”?). Mr. Robot’s representation of the economic elite may be tendentious, yet it responds in ways unthinkable a decade or so ago to what David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007) calls the genius of neoliberal orthodoxy: the provision of

"a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the […] reconstitution of naked class power.”

But make no mistake, Mr. Robot’s criticism goes both ways. Other than the corporate will-to-power, its critique is leveled against a progressively depoliticized demos and what Elliot refers to as the “reality of the naïve”: A world where people just make the best of what comes at them while the illusion of choice and autonomy prevails – a delusion whose elements, so Mr. Robot, are varied: 

“Synthetic emotions in the form of pills, psychological warfare in the form of advertising, mind-altering chemicals in the form of food, brainwashing seminars in the form of media [and] controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks.”

Crucially, though, the show does not just laser in on the 99 % as mere micro-managed subjectivities. On the contrary, Mr. Robot’s polemic suggests complicity with the very dynamics that alter the human soul. People are not so naïve, after all; many may even intuit that things are fundamentally wrong. Still, so the show’s portrayal, the majority prefers sedation over restoration, apathy over repoliticization – or what Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk and others crystallize under the rubric of ‘cynical reason’:

“What’s wrong?” – “Nothing.”

Hacking Fight Club

But Elliot’s response is not always so straightforward, least of all when it comes to the show’s principal query: Who is Mr. Robot? Are the events in regard to Mr. Robot real – or does it all happen ‘just more or less’ what with Elliot’s morphine addiction? Or does Sam Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot, set viewers up by deliberately playing the Fight Club card only to throw them a curve ball?

– or is it? Picture found here.

The parallels are abundant. Beset with existential ennui, a guy finds companionship, becomes involved in something bigger than himself – et voilà, his hitherto plain life acquires meaning. ‘Project Mayem,’ anyone? More eloquent and altogether stout, this new buddy is the polar opposite of our unimposing hero. Where he fails, his alter ego gets things done. Tyler Durden, hel-looo? Not to mention Elliot’s voice-overs and the show’s subcultural mythology, which take the same trenchant line as Fight Club. The similarities also show in fscociety’s second-in-command, whose heroin chic and blunt vernacular render her a patent replica of Marla Singer. To leave absolutely no doubt about the kind of template Esmail uses, one episode ends on a piano version of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” – a song noted for concluding Fight Club.

Granted, hacking a classic movie makes perfect sense for a TV show whose leitmotif is hacking – of identities, democracies, heck, even time, as one character suggests. Then again, Mr. Robot would not have received overwhelming critical acclaim were it but a redux of past accomplishments.

Through the Looking Glass

Lauded by critics as “a modern classic”, Mr. Robot features some of the traits usually associated with cable TV. Meticulous in writing and cinematic in mise-en-scène, it is bound to wow even the least tech-savvy viewer. It moreover reconfigures the confines of network TV by thematizing what is otherwise relegated to such platforms of fear-mongering and agitation as Alex Jones’s infowars or Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist trilogy. Mr. Robot does employ tropes from the realm of conspiracy theories; it does tap into the vast pool of Anonymous iconography and make good use of Occupy rhetoric; in the final analysis, however, it re-appropriates these traits to queer conceptualizations of heroism. Watching notions of masculinity falter, in other words, has never been so much fun and liberating at the same time.

Interestingly enough, the disintegration of identitarian structures in the show seemed to dovetail with the disruption of real-life structures. During the show’s development, large amounts of data owned by Sony were leaked on the internet and dealt a massive blow to its corporate identity. Mr. Robot was already airing when Ashley Madison (a popular dating site) saw its data likewise hacked. The first season as such had a way of predicting the headlines; most eerily so when the finale had to be postponed due to content verisimilar to the recent killings on live-TV in Virginia.

Esmail originally conceived of Mr. Robot as a feature-length film. The first season, so he teases, is a “setup for the real story which begins next season.” In view of the fact that this is by far and away the best ‘exposition’ since the start-up season of Breaking Bad, chances are that the story of Elliot and fsociety will dominate the American TV-scape for years to come. Who knows? If Mr. Robot keeps attracting ever more legions of fans eager to step through the looking glass, its prefigurative acumen might unfold yet again – in the sense that fictional and real revolutions converge. But even if such concourse fails to materialize, one thing is certain: Neoliberalism’s regulatory fictions are severely challenged by such powerful alterna(rra)tives as Mr. Robot. Watching it may sting at first and then sting some more, but rest assured, my invisible friend:

There is life after cognitive dissonance!