'Mr. Robot' - Season 1

The First Rule Of Hacker Club Is...

Maybe the world is changing after all. Way back when 'Fight Club' was made, it caused such a stir with Twentieth Century Fox who funded it, that Rupert Murdoch made his execs promise never make such an outright anti-corporate film ever again. Judging from the tenor of films and shows being made after the GFC, perhaps those shackles have come off across the American industry as a whole. 'Mr. Robot' seems to be a more contemporary re-telling of the 'Fight Club' story, albeit without the fighting.

Anyway, here's the spoiler alert and a shout out to FetchTV where I caught the whole series.



What's Good About It

If one wanted to know how the Millennials yearn for a just society that was promised to them but never existed, then this show might be the primer. The very technological world that enables our hero Elliott is also the reason the corporations screw over the general populace is screwed over so badly. The crippling student debt on Gen-Y has replaced the terrible burden of Mutually Assured Destruction which hung over the Baby Boomers and Gen-X. This startling break in history is finally manifesting itself as this sharp socially motivated series.

The politics of it aside, 'Mr. Robot' also goes deeper in to the very schizoid nature of this problem, as it delves with a sense fractured self that arises from the multiple persona people sustain to interact in the world, both real and on-line. The gap between the real person and their persona becomes the great "exploit hole" over and over again in this show - and in instances we recognise how our strengths are our weaknesses as well as our weaknesses being a hidden strength. For a very active guy, the main character Elliot appears to be passive and pensive because he asks us to consider things with him.

This results in a wholly cerebral psycho-thriller that goes somewhere interesting, imagines something different and lands on the doorstep of the unknown. It is - in an old way of saying - very cool.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes the show gets very ahead of itself and we're forced to catch up to ideas in piecemeal. The great abstraction of the great debt that hangs over people is not actually explained - it's assumed we share inits burden. This leads to a sense of there being less moral or ethical certainty about how the characters behave. Anarchism is fine, but the sloganeering becomes hollowed out. The series also staggers into the realm of high end corporate politics and is a little less nimble with its grasp of how these things go. As such, it's hard to share in Angela's moral indignation when she should have been able to put it together herself.

The insight into the mechanism of money is shallower than it should be, considering how much importance is place don te topic. There isn't enough of the abstract exploration in this area, and way too much time is spent on the relationship between cash and criminality. I know it's a cyberpunk sort of vision that dates back to William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' ("Hello Wintermute!"), but it's also been a generation since 'Neuromancer'. It needs to be newer than it is in this series. The Future was Now back then, so it follows the Future Today has to be much newer.

What's Interesting About It

This show is Cyberpunk in the present tense. It is as if we've finally arrived at the future envisaged back in the mid-80s. There's a lot less Virtual Reality and 3D CGI whiz-bangery, but we've seen all that and it is in most part a parlour trick. The nitty gritty has gone back to hacking and in this series we can see that hacking is indeed the new language, new mode of thought. If we don't write code and manipulate networks of computers like a magician, we are effectively illiterate.

We've moved into a new era for espionage and encryption. The language and number games of the past are now wielded by a new literati and they are the technologists with code and structural access to computing. That, is the vision presented by this show, and it is startlingly refreshing. Hackers are the heroes in a world of technology, necessarily because in every human preoccupation, there is somebody who masters the field as an art.

Just as the climax of the event Bond movie 'Spectre' converged on hacking as a solution to the problem, the technological world demands that future denizens be hackers of some description. The best ones will rise like magic users. The Green Arrow in the Arrowverse and The Flash need somebody to hack for themes they can physically intrude upon a particular space. They need somebody to countermand the existing surveillance or work surveillance in such a way as to offer up intelligence. It is increasingly the modus operandi of the agent at large to have this support.

Naturally the logical next step is to make one of these hackers the main character - which was what Henry Dorsett Case was in 'Neuromancer', but it has taken until this show to really make that formulation work.

Operation Mayhem By Any Other Means

The challenge that exists for Elliot and his team are the same as 'Fight Club'. If you want to strike at the heart of capitalism as we know it, then the biggest way to do it is to erase debt. The good news is that modern world debt is all none virtual location, in the cyberspace of computers. So if you can physically destroy the computers, you can destroy the debt and therefore offer up the debt jubilee. Back in the 1990s, this computer apparatus was concentrated in a cluster of buildings, so the end of 'Fight Club' shows us those buildings being demolished by the Space Monkeys.

Mr. Robot takes that same premise but parses it out for how it would look today, and the way it looks is a lot more complicated than in 'Fight Club'. The degree to which our technological society has evolved around and incorporated computer technology is so vast and still expanding, it presents a greater deal of complexity in trying to achieve the debt forgiveness project.

Just as an aside, the ancient Babylonians and Phoenicians and Greeks practiced debt forgiveness. Through this, they were able to revitalise their empires. Rome did no such thing, but its refusal to forgive any debts resulted in the Dark Ages, according to the Monetarists. It's worth contemplating this notion. I wouldn't really benefit directly from such a debt forgiveness action because I hardly owe anything on my credit card and I have no mortgage. But you can imagine how big a deal erasing everybody's debt would be. It's no wonder the idea keeps coming back.

Secrets Are A Girl's Worst Enemy

I've been watching a good chunk of American TV lately, and there seems to be a repeating pattern. The main character has a special talent, but with it comes a secret. Sometimes it is that they are masked heroes like Arrow, The Flash, and Daredevil. In other shows like 'Suits' and 'Bloodlines', it is that the character in question has a peculiar secret that needs to be protected.

What inevitably happens is a scene where the girlfriend/love interest/wife gets mightily upset because they're not being told the whole truth. They demand to know the truth because there should bene secrets in a relationship, they reason and plead and nag. Of course, it happens in this show as well. Having seen a great bunch of these, I'm inclined think there must be some screenwriting guru who is advocating this trope.