Mr Robot

Now that it is available on Amazon Prime, I've watched the first two episodes of USA's Mr. Robot, and I have to say I'm intrigued.

One of the things I find really interesting about the modern world is that the strange technological landscape predicted by cyberpunk writers in the 1980s is basically here. Consider Anonymous, an anarchic pseudo-collective of hackers that don't seem all that removed from an organization you might see in Ghost in the Shell.

As always with science fiction, some of the more outlandish things have not come to pass and a lot of the biggest technological developments have been subtler than were predicted - writers may have imagined more cybernetic prostheses and fewer social media networks - but the notion that we have shifted culturally to a place where computers are totally ubiquitous is absolutely a reality. When I go to the bathroom I have a highly sophisticated computer that is thinner than a pack of cards that I can use to communicate with people all over the world. This thing has a camera - actually two cameras - and microphones that I have some sense of control over but for all I know, I don't. Indeed, with "Hey Siri" active on my iPhone, the implication is that the microphone is always listening to me so that it can open up this UI element when I give the activation phrase. (Sometimes it will mishear me, or, more humorously, a podcast I'm listening to on the actual phone, and activate by mistake.)

So Cyberpunk is kind of moot in that it's no longer really science fiction. Not only is nearly every business or organization in some way an online entity, but we've also had a steady erosion of regulations to prevent massive corporations from taking over the economy. That move toward deregulation started in the Reagan years, just as the Cyberpunk genre did (ok, technically there seem to be some antecedents in the 70s, but the genre clearly took off in the 80s.) Consider how powerful companies like Google and Facebook are, as they are basically the gatekeepers to information.

I don't know if there's ever really been a famous deconstruction of the Cyberpunk genre - the genre is arguably a deconstruction of the kind of utopian science fiction of the mid 20th century (not that much of that is really utopian if you read it closely) - but Mr. Robot kind of feels like a reconstruction in that it adjusts for the fact that now that most Americans (and people from other developed countries) know a fair amount about computers, so a lot of the mystique and flat-out bullshit we saw in the computer-hacker science fiction of the 80s and 90s has been toned down or eliminated.

What we have instead is a study of our protagonist, Eliot Alderton. Eliot speaks to the audience, justified as part of the diagesis by making the audience the fictional character Eliot has invented to talk to and share his thoughts with. One very clear influence here is David Fincher, particularly Fight Club. Eliot experiences the same corporate disillusionment as that movie's nameless protagonist, but adjusted for a world that has become significantly more troubled than it was in the late 90s.

While I love Fight Club, it is kind of funny in retrospect that it, like many other 1999 films (I'm thinking primarily The Matrix and Office Space - both of which I also like,) is about how horrible it is that we all have jobs.

The subsequent seventeen years have seen a lot of negative changes regarding economic security (and national security,) but also as information has become more readily accessible, we've paradoxically become more aware of how little influence we have in what is theoretically a free and democratic society. As a contemporary example, consider the latest failure to pass gun control measures that a vast majority of Americans support after this latest horrific mass shooting.

So Mr. Robot gives us a protagonist who is suffering tremendously from the state of the world, on top of his own emotional problems that may be either the result of the breakdown of his relationship with his father or mental illness that he is unable to treat effectively.

Eliot is paranoid, but as the old saying goes, that doesn't mean They are not after him.

Eliot makes contact with a group of hackers who are clearly modeled on Anonymous led by a mysterious man who we know only as Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater, is Eliot's Tyler Durden, offering him a new way to strike back at the society that has been constructed in the interest of corporate greed.

But much like Tyler Durden, it becomes clear pretty soon that what Mr. Robot represents might not be a better solution. Outrage and frustration can lead people to act and try to change the world for the better, which is generally something we think of as a good thing. But consider that fascists and fundamentalists are also motivated by outrage and frustration. And with a charismatic leader like Tyler Durden or Mr. Robot, it's very easy for people to lose perspective and become the kind of monsters that they set out to defeat.

I'm only two episodes in, but I'm really intrigued.