Mr Robot & My Love for it

I have thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons of the thriller series Mr. Robot and I am enjoying the occasional leaks of the third season.  

By day, the alienated junkie nerd Elliott works as a corporate cyber-security expert; by night, he became part of a radical hacker group called FSociety. He’d been recruited by the mysterious Mr. Robot.  Later, it was exposed that Mr. Robot was Elliott’s dead father. Elliott’s colleague Darlene was in fact his sister. 

By the finale, FSociety had accomplished its goal: it had hacked Wall Street and dissolved global debt, erasing student loans, hospital bills, and exploitative mortgages. 

Conformist bad guys, cheaters, porn hounds and bankers were hacked and blackmailed; a Wall Street shill shot himself in the head on live TV; and, at the end, the screen swarmed with protesters in Mr. Monopoly masks, holding signs that read “We Do Not Compromise.”

I would say that series made me feel vulnerable from the very beginning.  We live in a society where every last detail of people’s lives is catalogued and shared online, our data has become a commodity. Governments pore over our phone records, corporations sell our hobbies and health records to the highest bidder, and in the depths of the internet a dark army of phishers, spammers and general villains lies in wait, ready to pilfer our credit card details or leak our darkest secrets to the wider web.

Mr.Robot is a show that holds up a mirror to society’s uneasy relationship with its own information. The show takes place in an increasingly paranoid New York City.  Elliot, is an expert coder with a social anxiety disorder and a major morphine habit, and he attempts to balance this double life.

Mr.Robot is so damning about consumerist culture.  If at any point in the show products and individuals are namechecked, it’s usually as the recipient of a barbed criticism. 

Mr Robot has built a very dedicated and obsessed fanbase and it has regularly topped GOT to many top spots.  Even Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower watches it if we believe the tabloid press.

It so easy to see that the show is so meticulously put together and you really start to believe that these characters live on the edge. They are people on the fringes of society, ostracised. 

Fsociety’s corporation-crushing aims, I believe make us wake up to the large donations made by businesses to Syrian refugee camps as evidence of the more benevolent side of corporatism, these large businesses can help even faster than governments can, they have better access and they don’t have to deal with all the politics.

WhiteRose is my favourite character.  Whiterose is a hacker affiliated with the Dark Army.  She is a Chinese transgender woman with an obsession for managing her time. Whiterose meets Eliott for the first time and gives Elliot three minutes to discuss the attack on E Corp.

Whiterose's public identity is as a man, Minister Zheng, the Chinese Minister of State Security. In this capacity, she hosts an FBI investigative team looking into the hacking of E Corp's Chinese back-ups.

My favourite episode being 2.3 logic bomb when Agent DiPierro finds WhiteRose room of clocks.  WhiteRose appears and explains that she keeps so many clocks around as a constant reminder of her own mortality.