"It Used To Be Cool, Now It's Just Junk Fiction, Dude"
Live long enough, you get outmoded. It doesn't actually take all that long - more like "long enough". The music, the styles, the movies, the what's-so-cool of anything becomes obsolete so quickly. When I was a teenager working in the local music shop, there was this guy Neville who did repairs. He was a lovely old fella, but alas, you just couldn't talk to him about how cool Eddie Van Halen was. Neville, an old jazzer had played in some great stage bands in the 1940s and 1950s, looked at popular music in 1981 like it was musical junk. This aesthetic obsolescence on his part was just something that happened to him some time in the 1960s. One minute he was a really switched on sax player and then the whole musical world had changed on him. The radical aesthetic shift had dealt him out of the musical mainstream he once inhabited.
And it's not just music where this kind of thing happens. There are whole tracts of popular culture that are here-today-gone-tomorrow. Even in the internet age you have things like MySpace which was all the rage once-upon-a-time and now it's a punch line about how we were in the mid-2000s. There are kids today, - totally into Tik-Tok - who will look upon this moment in history as that moment when they had the cultural cool or mojo or whatever going for them. Arguably, this stuff happens even faster than it used to.
For instance, Cyberpunk was not a sub-genre as such way back when. It was more like an aesthetic about technological civilisation and urbanity. After William Gibson won some awards with Neuromancer it became recognised as a sub-genre of science fiction and other people jumped to the fore with ever edgier bits of fiction about how urban spaces would devolve into the future. The beautiful capitalist/consumerist dystopia of the near future was suddenly the darling. Then came the Matrix movie and other bits of appropriation by other science fiction branches and franchises until the aesthetic itself became so old hat a young kid told me "that stuff's so lame!"
Heh, kids, right?
And that was well over 13 years ago. Today that same kid has grown up and he still tells me that the worst fad in science fiction was the whole cyberpunk thing. I keep telling him he just had to be there; but were we ever really there? Today, - after 2019 when the original Blade Runner was set - we're living in an alternate reality to all that. That stuff is all in a parallel universe of imagination, tucked away into a bubble of memories and nostalgia and fascination with pretty lights. As for the things the kid likes, it all looks like junk to me. It's frustrating to be so old your entire aesthetic outlook and framework has been consigned to the dustbin of history. You become obsolete, like an older model human.
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.
