(DO NOT) READ THE COMMENTS:
MR. ROBOT AND THE LIMITS OF CRITIQUE IN AN AGE OF NARRATIVE EXCESS
by
Maarten Arnoldus
S1716816 Masters Dissertation Course code: LAX999M20
Supervisor: Dr. T. Jelfs ECTS:20
I’m a bit torn between revolution and finishing the mini-series I’m halfway through on Netflix. There never seems to be a perfect time for revolution.
- comment on a news article on The Guardian website, by user Lastshot, July 25, 2016
An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack.
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: You cannot spell critique without cri(sis) 11
Chapter 2: Mr. Robot’s Critical Potential 25
2.1 A Dystopia Lived 25
2.2 Resistance in the Neoliberal Age 30
2.3 After the Revolution 36
Chapter 3: (How) do audiences engage with Mr. Robot’s critique? 41
3.1 Narrative Excess in Mr. Robot 43
3.2 The Allure of Diversity 51
3.3 The Critical Cynic 56
Conclusion 60
Introduction
After 2008, the collective feeling in the United States was one of distrust, disbelief, and anger. The American dream had been bought with borrowed money. It seemed that the banks were not going to be able to recover from their reckless spending and lending policies. This was the time for the left to intervene, not only preach a more egalitarian approach to finance capitalism but to utilize the uneasiness of society to form a functional opposition against the problems that demonstrably stem from neoliberalism. Alas, bailouts came and went. Banker bonuses, often several times the size of the mortgages that were no longer being paid, were reinstated. The Dodd-Frank Act vowed to enhance transparency and accountability. However, government intervention into the financial sector did little to dissuade the incentives that underpin the greed that is so prevalent in finance.1 Everything remained largely the same except, perhaps, for the collective grievances. The distrust of banks grew and oppositional politics followed close behind. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz explained after the financial crisis, “[R]ather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail but too big to be held accountable.”2
Cue Occupy, the American protest movement that sought to hold politicians and the banking sector in America accountable for the financial crisis. They attempted to do this by occupying physical spaces associated with these institutions. Occupy
1 Long Wang and John Keith Murnighan, "On Greed," The Academy of Management Annals 5 (2011), 283. 2
Joseph S. Stiglitz, "Joe Stiglitz: The People Who Break the Rules Have Raked in Huge Profits and Wealth and It's Sickening Our Politics," Alternet, September 11, 2013, accessed May 24, 2017,
would go on to inspire offshoots of the movement across the world.3 Even though Occupy was not successful in turning the tide, narrative culture was expected to reflect on their presence. The cultural critic Christian Lorentzen predicted, in an article for Bookforum, the rise of the influence of Occupy in narrative culture: “In the fall of 2013 or 2014, if not before, we’ll probably be reading a novel about Occupy Wall Street. What would such a book look like, and what would it tell us about money?”4
Arguably, the most prominent cultural product that dealt with Occupy, its causes, and its meaning for the future, has not, however, been a novel but a TV show called Mr. Robot, a piece of so-called “complex TV,” a new type of narrative culture that, for some, marries the artistic prowess of cinema with the perceived narrative complexity of the novel.5
USA Network’s Mr. Robot presents itself as fiction for the downtrodden masses. It tells a story of a hacker-induced debt cancellation while chronicling a possible revolution. Debt, money, alienation, and exploitation are among the series' driving plot devices; it mixes
Fight Club with American Psycho using the aesthetics and politics of Occupy and the
anti-capitalist hacktivist group Anonymous as well as a reflection on a (then) looming Trump
3 Keith Gessen, Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso, 2012), 126. 4
The rest of the comment accurately predicts the setting and form that Mr. Robot would take on. “You can bet the narrator will be omniscient and the telling panoramic. If half the action takes place in and around Zuccotti Park—where the hardened core of the cast squats, drumming, deliberating, echoing announcements—the rest will be scattered about the newsrooms, boardrooms, barrooms, and bedrooms of Manhattan, with excursions to Williamsburg or Long Island City or Hoboken, maybe even Staten Island, convenient by ferry, and surely suburbs to the north such as Greenwich, cradle of the 1 percent. But beyond journalistic attention to the protests’ throbbing center and the fissures extending up the avenues, how to dramatize it all?” Christian Lorentzen, "Fictitious Values," BookForum, Summer 2012, accessed July 09, 2017,
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_02/9453.
5 Jason Mittell, Complex TV: the poetics of contemporary television storytelling (New York: New York
presidency. Mr. Robot carefully dissects the shape of the human condition as it mutates under duress from the distorting power of neoliberal capitalism. Critics have praised the series for its content as “a thought experiment on the ontology of capitalism, and how to get beyond it.”6
And to be clear, Mr. Robot is not an image of a dystopian future. It is not a fire-breathing hellscape like Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles is in Blade Runner. Rather, it positions the New York inhabited by its protagonist, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), as existing in our actual world. American society, the show seems to suggest, is a capitalist dystopia (in the present) that tries to convince its citizens it is the opposite. Elliot lives in a constant state of anomie and drug-induced happiness, the exemplification of a generation that is not able to illicit pleasure from consumption and harvests psychological stress instead.7 He describes his predicament to us in growing degrees of intimacy, trying to overcome the loneliness that is such an important factor in his life (and in a general sense that of a growing group of young people). Furthermore, Mr. Robot shows how the tactics of protest movements it emulates are compromised by capital. Communicative exchanges, in the age of what Jodi Dean has called “communicative capitalism,” have no “use” value. Their message or content does not matter. Rather, they just rely on their value of exchange, like any other commodity.8 Mr. Robot is not
6 Zero Books, "Capitalist Realism and Mr. Robot," YouTube, November 29, 2016, accessed July 03, 2017,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxWA_jemLY.
7 Seth J Prins et al., "Anxious? Depressed? You might be suffering from capitalism: Contradictory class
locations and the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the United States," Sociology of Health and Illness 37, no. 8 (November 2015):.
8 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics(Durham,
only showing audiences where their grievances stem from, but also how reactions to them are dysfunctional.
Mr. Robot, then, is an example of popular narrative culture that doubts the reality of
capitalism and as such presents itself as a critique of capitalism. That self-presentation prompts the relatively compact question that lies at the core of this dissertation: if Mr. Robot carefully dissects the configuration of the human condition as neoliberal capitalism shapes it, is it a viable way to critique the system of which it is itself a part? Alternatively, and more succinctly: does Mr. Robot offer an effective critique of the present, neoliberal, configuration of capitalism? This question is, in fact, more complex than its compact forms suggests. For one way of assessing the effectiveness of any example of popular culture as cultural critique (from a left perspective) is to consider it in relation to Gramscian counter-hegemonic processes. For the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony described the manner in which dominant rule gets established in a society. Hegemony is ideological; it represents the way in which the dominant ideas of society maintain their dominance. According to Gramsci, hegemony can resist revolutionary initiatives by incorporating and conceding small losses. Counter-hegemonic initiatives such as cultural critique are often eventually (partly) absorbed into the status quo, effectively neutralizing their revolutionary potential.9 Popular culture, according to Stuart Hall's influential interpretation of Gramsci, constitutes a pivotal site for
9 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011),
the establishment and contestation of hegemony itself.10 Counter-hegemony, in this context, refers to “pockets of revolutionary potential,” or confrontations with the existing status quo that can take the form of protests but also expressions of opposition in, for instance, the cultural or academic spheres of society.
For decades, approaches to popular culture more or less consonant with Hall's interpretations of Gramsci's work have enabled academics in the field of cultural studies to tease out the "criticality" of popular culture itself, while occasionally analyzing audience engagement in order to show how consumers of such culture make meaning from it in far more active ways than older critiques associated with the Frankfurt School had previously suggested. And by such lights, a TV show like Mr. Robot may appear an obvious example of counter-hegemonic critique. However, as Hall argued, counter-hegemony is always in danger of being incorporated into the status quo, precisely because of the dominant ideology’s capacity to absorb small losses. Moreover, recent developments in the field of cultural studies have left both critique and ascriptions of criticality to popular culture in something of a crisis themselves. Rita Felski, among others, has noted that the way the humanities utilizes critique is primarily as a way to contemplate the worth of narrative culture. She calls this a legitimation crisis.11 For Felski academics attempt to legitimate their work in a neoliberalized context; by arguing that narrative culture is something worthy of studying, scholars of
10 Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, ed. John Storey,
2nd ed. (London: Prentice Hall), 447.
narrative culture are at the same time arguing that their own work is valuable.12 Critique is thus being adapted in order to be legitimized.
Mark Fisher, meanwhile, has argued that the in the neoliberal age, general public has trouble taking critiques’ tenets seriously because they do not see capitalism as something that society can surpass.13 Alternatively, those critiques that audiences do take seriously, Walter Benn Michaels insists, have to do with questions concerning diversity. Here critique is utilized to diversify the white male hegemony by calling for greater and more visible representation of other races, genders, and identity categories other than class and as such, cannot do anything to change class inequality itself.14 In such critiques of the contemporary limits of critique, critique itself is deemed to be compromised, but the form in which it presents itself to audiences is equally problematic here. TV is currently lauded by a generation of scholars as a complex medium that can engage and educate audiences in novel ways, but the medium is still potentially hampered by the commercial form it comes in, and even if it were not, how can we, for instance, assess if a critical message comes across to its audience? In fact, should such pieces of criticality be considered critical by scholars, if audiences do not receive it as such?
This dissertation takes up these questions, drawing on insights from the fields of American studies, literary theory and cultural studies, and combining these with methodological tools developed in the emergent field of digital ethnography. The chapters
12
Ibid, 16-17.
13 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 4.
14 Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
that follow analyze both Mr. Robot and, in an effort to incorporate some empirical data into the ongoing scholarly and theoretical discussions about the potential limits of critique, its reception in recap blogs, websites that rehash what has happened on a particular TV-show. Here professional auteurs, and for this dissertation, more importantly, the users of the AV-Club website, comment on important aspects of the show. These comments interact with aspects of the recap but primarily function as an online community that articulates users’ ideas, judgments, and theories about Mr. Robot’s episodes. These comments, some 15,000 by approximately 350 users, combined with the location of “criticality” in the analysis of Mr.
Robot’s content, will help support the central argument of this dissertation. Indeed, this
does engage with the critiques in Mr. Robot, they tend to be dismissive because of a pervasive cynical attitude towards the possibility of change, and instead focus on the diversification of the status quo. Hegemony, so it seems, has incorporated so much of critique as to adversely influence its usefulness within this form of narrative culture.
Section one of this dissertation discusses in full the different arguments that exist on the nature of critique. Articulating them primarily under the umbrella of Mark Fisher's argument on capitalist realism, this chapter formulates the various hypotheses that need to be tested empirically. Section two establishes exactly how Mr. Robot might be deemed to function as critique. What aspects of modern society does it critique, and how does this become apparent? I map Mr. Robot's content against its historical context and the actual critiques it emulates, continuing with how Mr. Robot might be complicit with, resistant to, or subversive of capitalism. Section three is an analysis of audience engagement with Mr.
Robot, in which I analyze data harvested from the recap communities. In the conclusion to
Chapter 1: You cannot spell critique without cri(sis)
The complexity of the answer to the question posed in the introduction is influenced by the state of critique and the different disciplines and media in which critique takes place. On a macro level, this dissertation engages with questions surrounding first, the stigmatization of popular culture and after that, the vindication of popular culture as a pedagogical tool. Classically, in cultural studies, popular culture was viewed as something malicious that was distracting societies from their real needs. Popular culture was something that prevented laboring classes from acknowledging their own exploitation. The Frankfurt School, founded in 1923, was a sociological institute which sought to develop a psychological and sociological understanding of the problems thrown up by modern capitalism.15 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s work in particular attempted to articulate how these problems manifested themselves in, and through, culture. Adorno and Horkheimer, after fleeing Nazi Germany, saw the advent of the consumer society in the U.S. during the 1940s. They noticed that the indoctrination of people through propaganda had a subtler form in the U.S. American citizens spent their leisure time consuming products and media that reproduced the dominant hegemony. Adorno argued that individuals needed to focus on expanding their minds through reading non-pop-cultural texts instead, in order to be able to articulate their opposition against the exploitation of the laboring and middle classes.16 From the Frankfurt School onwards,
15 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 45.
popular culture was approached as a highly standardized machine that only expects its audience to consume, and nothing more:
No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer, any individual scene will give him the whole thing.17
Adorno posited that all popular culture was constructed schematically, with interchangeable parts, which created standardized television for audiences. Popular culture constituted a "dreamless art."18 It is because of its schematic nature that Adorno believed that popular culture could never be critical, or aid in the opposition to hegemony, because it subdues critical impulses in audiences. The lack of a mechanism of reply further solidified his perceptions of popular culture as merely a beacon of the whims of dominant ideology. For Adorno products of popular culture were mere "crystallizations of ideology."19 This
theoretical approach, however, does not explain how popular culture or TV might divert attention away from the real problems in society. Moreover, it obstructs initiatives that might use popular culture as something that could sustain opposition because of its view of popular culture’s inherent vices. As such the study of popular culture was demonized along with popular culture itself.
In the 1960s the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture (CSCC) was founded in Birmingham, England, to deal with, among other things, the “blind spot” that was created by the work of the Frankfurt School. The CSCC’s work during this era focused on studying contemporary culture and its influence on society as well as culture’s potential capacity to change the tide.20 The 1960s saw an upheaval in left-wing politics, which seemed to culminate in the 1968 riots in Paris. By the 1980s, the political and economic spheres of society, especially through the efforts of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s administrations, had veered to the right. Much popular culture, however, harbored more of the left-wing agenda then institutionalized politics could at that particular time. Singers could be openly gay and fashion could be openly feminist.21 Indeed, it seemed that popular culture had the capacity to become a de facto site of counter-hegemonic potential. The CSCC’s Stuart Hall saw culture, in this particular historical context, as a potential breeding ground of battles surrounding meaning-making. If TV was indeed the propaganda machine the Frankfurt School had claimed it to be it needed to be studied, especially since popular culture was now more or less present in every household through the introduction of the personal
TV-set.22 It was in the "cultural and ideological domain that social change appeared to be making itself most dramatically visible,” meaning that academics needed to start paying attention to it critically, not just dismissing it.23 Hall tried to circumvent the passiveness that the older critics ascribed to the audience. By imbuing the audience with a more active role in the consumption of popular culture, Hall counteracts the black and white approach that is present in Adorno’s work by arguing for a more nuanced approach to popular culture, beyond manipulative consumerism. Hall explicitly argued that popular culture creates active participants in audiences who read texts critically. In this argument, audiences either share the dominant reading, edit meaning in a negotiated reading, or oppose its content in an oppositional reading.24 Arguably Hall’s and the CSCC’s insistence on the value of studying popular culture has caused its academic study to no longer be controversial at all.
Newer approaches to popular culture take the consumption of content so seriously that they in turn risk legitimizing a less critical approach to the study of popular culture than their predecessors. Ien Ang’s seminal work on audience engagement established, empirically, that audiences participate in the meaning-making process in popular culture.25 The audience, like popular culture, became a serious object of study through Ang’s work. However, imbuing the audience with degrees of agency may have problematized the capacity of some academics to
22 Leslie Smith, John W. Right, II, and David H. Ostroff, Perspectives on Radio and Television: Telecommunication in the United State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 78.
23 Stuart Hall, "The “first” New Left: life and times’," New Left Review 61 (Jan. & feb. 2010):. 24
Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, edited by Dorothy Hobson Andrew Lowe, Paul Willis and Stuart Hall, 128-38. London: Hutchinson, 1979, 130-131.
remain critical of said agency. Online engagement has further enhanced audiences’ capacity to participate in popular culture, making it seemingly more suitable as a site of opposition. The fan, according to Henry Jenkins, is a critical consumer of media who uses media to create their hyper-competent additions to the popular culture.26 They select, review, and co-opt all types of popular culture. One might expect these fans to pick up on the critical aspects of a show whenever they occur. Hall and Jenkins have both worked on legitimizing popular culture and reflective audiences, in doing so positively arguing in favor of their counter-hegemonic potential. Jenkins’ approach to popular culture is perhaps best explained through the following quote, for him “web 2.0” (the dynamic new form of internet use), “is both pleasure and exploitation.”27
Jenkins goes on to say that his focus is on pleasure, leaving exploitation to be analyzed by others.28 It is at this point that Jenkins diverts from Hall. Hall approached popular culture dialectically, Jenkins openly says that he has less of a need for dialectics. In a sense, arguing that the fan interprets and appropriates similarly argues that there is a counter-hegemonic aspect to the consumption of popular culture, the hegemonic purpose of popular culture being more along the lines of The Frankfurt School’s interpretation. However, Hall explained that there are no "pure victories," and he expresses his desire to analyze precisely how arduous the process of intervention into the dominant hegemony might be. The problem with the current state of cultural studies now seems that a
26 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 2013),
23.
27 Henry Jenkins, “Spreadable Media,” Paper presented at the International Communication Association
Conference, Boston, May 2011.
significant part of humanities scholars have adopted this “pleasure” approach, be it the analysis of web 2.0 or other texts.
More recently critiques of this “pleasure approach” have started to surface. Rita Felski, for example, posits that the critic of narrative culture has but two modes of operation, the first being the digging out of hidden meanings, to "know the work as it cannot know itself."29 This functions primarily as a way to undermine the work as it, perhaps unknowingly, complies with political power and reproduces the dominant ideology. The second mode is the mode of redemption. Here the academic attempts to redeem narrative culture by locating criticality as a principal feature of the text. This causes the critic to become uncritical, because, as Felski notes, “we no longer need to aim critique at the text because it is already being enacted by the text.”30
Felski describes this last academic impulse, that of locating criticality in a text, as the “mattering” of literature.31 Arguably it is the neoliberalization of academia that forces the humanities to justify their existence. Why should narrative culture be studied at all? Because, the critic answers, an abundance of the material that is analyzed is critical itself. In a way, the quality and the virtue of narrative culture is now argued by the academic. Vice-versa, locating a subversive quality in popular culture, validates the scholar’s work. The problems with critique are by no means a new phenomenon. Terry Eagleton quipped about the changing nature of critical theory in his book After Theory. Eagleton was concerned that new students of culture focus on the wrong implementation of critique, by
29 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 17. 30 Ibid, 18.
studying just the pleasurable aspects of culture, saying that: “[A]mong students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones.”32
Tessa Ebert similarly argues that “cultural critique has been reduced to the interpretation of representation, thereby translating the social world into culture and equating culture with meaning.”33
She continues by essentially blaming critique (not capital) for obscuring the troubles that face social justice today: “[C]ultural critique, in other words, has made it impossible to understand social injustice, class differences, and the violent rule of capital as objective historical reality. It has turned them into effects of oscillating signs that disrupt the formation of meaningful words and coherent statements.”34
Criticality takes place within the ideological hegemony of capitalism, and as such is not taken seriously or ignored. But what actually is critique? The critical attitude historically refers to a particular way of thinking and speaking about what exists, what is known, and what can exist. The shape of critique is relative to what is being critiqued because, as Foucault put it, “[C]ritique only exists in relation to something other than itself.”35
Critique dreams of a better future, but it does not necessarily know what that will be. Critique, as a set of such ideas, might help us understand the way in which the social issues in contemporary society, namely, growing austerity, the collapse of public health and education, the rise of
32 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 2. 33
Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), iv.
34 Ibid, 8.
35 Michel Foucault, "What is critique?" In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, 41-82, (Los
nationalistic populism, and an epidemic of depression, are all part of the structural economic makeup of society.36 Critique cannot be considered effective when it is not received as supplying realistic answers to the problems that stem from capitalist society
In works such as Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher ascribes the problematic status of critique to the way capitalism has overtaken perceptions of what is deemed real, or realistic. Fisher argued that many of the critiques that think of modes of living beyond capitalism are regarded by the public as unrealistic and useless endeavors.37 In much the same way that the right-wing politics of the 1950s and 1960s attempted to suppress criticality by saying that citizens should be happy with what they had, the current culture climate supports a more fatalistic sentiment. In this age, Fisher describes, capitalism is seen as a necessary evil. In its most simple articulation, capitalist realism determines our feelings about capitalism, in the sense that many people may see that capitalism is not a desirable political-economic system but also that it is the only system that seems viable.38 Critiquing the dominant economic hegemony in this regard has become a more difficult endeavor. This approach to our current way of living demands that our critiques focus themselves on the status quo. It does not, in Foucault’s words, define something else, but rather it redefines itself. Its counter-hegemonic potential is sapped, which causes it to lose its dialectic position opposite hegemony. When Fisher talks about the impossibility of critique, he talks about this. The same problems exist in the way critique deals with diversity of representation or the
36 Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: a Guide to Our Future (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 36. 37 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 22.
"mattering" through the neoliberalization of the humanities. It is in this configuration that capitalist realism directs our understanding of the world, our position in it, cultural production, and our critiques. This causes the distrust of solutions to the problems that plague the world. It is not realistic, or possible to think of anything else.
Part of Fisher's argument surrounding the possibility of critique focuses on the cynical attitude that exists in thinking about alternatives to our current way of living. The oft quoted line "it's easier to imagine the end of the end of the world than the end of capitalism" illustrates this sentiment.39 Even though real problems like the growing wealth gap, mental health, and the decline of the environment demand solutions outside of the status quo, people are unable to grasp critiques that envision a future that is not within capitalism, Fisher suggests. What the overarching cultural prominence of capitalism does create is a cynicism towards critiques of capitalism. It is what Mark Fisher calls “ironic distance” and allows neoliberal capitalism to exist amidst the disparity it creates.40 Here Fisher quotes French philosopher Alain Badiou, which is useful to repeat here. Capitalist realism locates itself in the resignation of the people living under its rule:
To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we
39 Frederic Jameson, "Future City," New Left Review 21 (May & June 2003):, accessed March 01, 2017,
https://newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city.
may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism.41
In that respect, some critics have argued, the critiques that the public now favors are those that articulate ways of thinking about improving life under capitalism. The redefinition that critique is doing takes the form of a critique of the diversity of capitalism.
Walter Benn Michaels postulates that critiques of society and culture function within these same capitalist realist confines and are preoccupied with the politics of diversity and representation. Critiques that are successful in the ideological hegemony are either concerned with the way people of different ethnic and gender backgrounds are represented in narrative culture or are concerned with questions regarding the diversity of the different layers of the workforce. By abstaining from representing class difference, modern cultural products “naturalize the unimaginability of any alternative to neoliberalism and so make it easier for us to accept the inequality neoliberalism has produced.”42
Michaels exemplifies the nature of the state of capitalist realism by explaining how politics and critique have regressed into the fight over diversity. This is a struggle that can -and is allowed to- function within the confines of the hegemony of neoliberalism. In this way it does not damage the overarching power
41
Christoph Cox, Molly Whalen, and Alain Badiou, "On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou," Cabinet, 2001
42 Walter Benn Michaels, “Model Minorities and the Minority Model: The Neoliberal Novel,” Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
structures, which is something an argument surrounding class would do. A fight over identity and representation becomes a struggle for something that seems achievable within a capitalist system. The horizon of social justice and the politics of the left are preoccupied with questions concerning race and gender and individual, only loosely connected political victories. In the age of mass-shared discontent these messages garner the most attention. Thinking of the way that critiques get disseminated nowadays, namely, mainly through popular media and the internet, the presumed democracy of these media often lead discussions regarding their value. Jodi Dean is critical of the communication system that disseminates critique in our current age. The value of a critical message in that system boils down to its exchange value; its content, or use value, is deprioritized.43 In that articulation, it is more important how many people will watch a certain show or how many times a critical article is shared online. The sheer volume of content seems to, on the surface at least, drown out any ideological component or political engagement. According to Dean, this is a factor in the way that neoliberal politics structures the information sphere of society. Dean states that “the circulation of content in the dense, intensive networks of global communications relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and governmental) from the obligation to respond.”44 Moreover, in this network the use value of a message (its content) gets trumped by its
43
Adding to notions of the deprioritization of content, Slavoj Zizek states that a critical message sent through such a system takes away the incentive of audiences to be critical themselves. He sees popular culture as performing this critique for audiences, negating the pedagogical capacities of the medium. Oversharing of information and the passivity of both actors and political institutions touches on Slavoj Zizek’s concept of interpassivity. According to Zizek culture harbors an in-built political activity. He argues that it is the activity in cultural products performs our resistance (or criticality) for us.
exchange value (the amount of times a message is visited, which in turn brings in money through advertising for the websites). Critique as such seems to thrive primarily from within hegemony. Dean’s critiques focus on online culture; however, they can be applied to questions surrounding the sheer amount of narrative content circulating through contemporary popular culture networks. As will become apparent in the third chapter to this dissertation Mr. Robot has both an external as well as an internal problem of “density.” Externally Mr. Robot’s overtly critical message seems to get lost among the endless production of new television series. In 2015 for example there were 409 narrative based TV shows broadcasted in the U.S.45 This made Mr. Robot indeed just another message among hundreds of others, all competing for ratings and attention. Internally Mr. Robot suffers from a similar density problem, that of narrative excess. In the system of “communicative capitalism” Mr. Robot’s critical content has to be surrounded by narrative in order for its critique to be shared, or in this case, viewed. It will not be viewed if there is no mystery or discussion of character-on-character romances. There is a level of sophistication to the critical message of Mr. Robot that has not been seen before in this era of “complex TV.” However, as will become apparent, it is complexity achieved through narrative excess. As
45
John Koblin, "How Many Scripted TV Shows in 2015? A Precise Number, and a Record," The New York
Times, December 16, 2015, , accessed August 17, 2017,
such, “complexity” does not necessarily signify sophistication, but rather influences the popularity of its message.46
Moreover, if we think of Mr. Robot as a critical message that disseminates through television, we can question its function through Jodi Dean's idea of communicative capitalism. Here a message is a commodity to be traded. Moreover, there is an economic incentive to produce drawn-out narratives because of the way that television earns revenue. When a TV series attracts many viewers, the general value of the advertising breaks goes up. Value is calculated by assigning a value to the targeted demographic of a series (a SQAD point index) and multiplying that by the Nielsen ratings (named after the company that calculates viewership in the US). Millennials, Mr. Robot’s target demographic, are among the most valuable groups.47 Moreover, when a show is able to create a stable and mass audience, there is an economic incentive for the network to keep this show on the air for as long as possible, to maintain the value of their commercial time. Although direct ratings for Mr.
Robot series are hard to come by, a market leader in advertising reporting, Ad Age, shows that
intellectual properties that focus on robust and expansive narrative have more valuable advertising time than those that do not (reality series for example).48 Perhaps, Mr. Robot’s critiques then will always have to play second fiddle to the qualms of capital?
46 Matthew Christman, "How TV Became Respectable Without Getting Better," Current Affairs, accessed
August 21, 2017, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-tv-became-respectable-without-getting-better.
47 "Millennials on Millennials: A Look at Viewing Behavior, Distraction and Social Media Stars," Nielsen.com,
accessed July 20, 2017, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/millennials-on-millennials-a-look-at-viewing-behavior-distraction-social-media-stars.html.
48 "Marketing Fact Pack 2016," Advertising Age,
Chapter 2: Mr. Robot’s Critical Potential
Before we examine in detail the fate of Mr. Robot as narrative content, it is important to understand just how openly critical of contemporary capitalism the show appears to be. Critiques of capitalism in popular culture are by no means new. Mr. Robot differs from its predecessors in the sense that it very much directly identifies and addresses the problems that stem from capitalism but also critiques the ways in which we are currently trying to get beyond capitalism. This chapter unpacks different aspects of this approach to critique. First, it will show that Mr. Robot points directly toward the normalization of the desperate state of the world. In this manner, it demands its audience to at least entertain the idea of the abnormality of our current socio-economic situation. Second, Mr. Robot addresses in its own narrative of opposition how current ways of resisting do not work properly anymore. Finally, it explains to its viewers that waiting on an all-encompassing revolution that will reset the world is not a feasible solution. Simply striving for revolution without acknowledging the necessity for a plan that extend beyond revolution is, in Mr. Robot’s narrative, considered futile.
2.1 A Dystopia Lived
Brave New World are famous and sometimes foreboding examples of the genre. It seems,
however, that nowadays it becomes increasingly difficult to take these aspects to the extreme because, as Eliane Glaser says: “[W]hen every person in a train carriage is staring at a small illuminated device, it is an almost tacky vision of dystopia.”49
An unrecognizable, naturalized capitalist dystopia is worth undermining, at least for its critics, and Mr. Robot reminds us that, through the coupling of the real world to the story world, we all live in Elliot's dystopia. In the world of the show, all the characters live on Manhattan or in another borough of New York City. In the second season, the fsociety headquarters was situated in a real 40 million dollar, 12.000 square foot SoHo townhouse.50 The television screens show president Barack Obama reacting to the fsociety hack. E-corp, the mega-corporation and Mr. Robot’s prime antagonist, is an amalgamation of different aspects of Enron and Apple. Aesthetically, E-corp mimics Enrons slanted E logo, but also its prowess as a financial powerhouse is a part of Mr.
Robot's plot. Apple is reflected in the multitude of digital devices that can be seen in the show
that bear the E-corp logo. It reflects the way that gadgetry has absorbed the consumptive energy of the citizens in Mr. Robot's world. Elliot uses real software to perform his hacks. The show mimics different cataclysmic events from the history of capitalism, like the on-air suicide of Pennsylvania treasurer Robert Dwyer. By doing so, it demands that we see Elliot's and our own lives and experiences as connected.
49 Eliane Glaser, Get Real: how to see through the hype, spin, and lies of modern life (London: Fourth Estate,
2013), 25.
50Christine Nguyen, "Fsociety's Latest HQ Is As Insanely Luxurious in Real Life As It Is in Mr. Robot,"
Elliot exemplifies with his life and experiences how capitalism steers the way we are able to live and how we illicit happiness from needs that are not our own. Elliot explains to his audience that most of our wants and needs are mere arbitrary distractions. Much of these explanations are rolled into charismatic monologues that either Elliot or his alter ego, Mr. Robot eloquently perform to different characters on the show. Elliot's quest, in the first season at least, is connected to him regaining his sanity. He reluctantly resists capitalism through his alter ego. It is Elliot's quest for normalcy that drives him to drugs to suppress the anxiety of being a young person in this age. When his loneliness becomes too much to handle he turns to hyper-consumption to feel like he is not alone. Elliot feels that committing to a role of heteronormativity and complacent consumption might save him from anomie when he explains: "maybe Sheila can be my girlfriend. I'll go see those stupid Marvel movies with her. I'll join a gym. I'll heart things on Instagram. I'll drink vanilla lattes."51 Elliot has a need to live in the reality of a capitalist dystopia for him to feel normal. It helps to reevaluate the dread that is behind the trinkets and pleasures of capitalism, as Jodi Dean explains: "[I]t is ultimately a hideous sort of blackmail where we have given up equality and solidarity in exchange for entertainment and communication."52 Mark Fisher, in conversation with Dean, retorts by saying that it is exactly “the drip-feed of digital stimulus” that makes us feel alone, as “entertainment and pleasure have become so easily available, [but] depression is on the rise.”53
It feels like choice and individualism allow us to be different, free and even resist
51 Sam Esmail, writer, "D3bug.mkv," in Mr. Robot, dir. Jim McKay, USA Network, July 8, 2015. 52 Dean and Fisher, Reading Capitalist Realism, 30.
capitalism. However, like in many dystopian novels and films, these options are forced upon us. By not abstracting this oppression into the grotesque like in the fictitious world of 1984 or The Matrix we need to come to terms with the real dystopia around us. It is sameness within a heterogeneous world because we are essentially picking the color economic oppression comes in. Elliot reinforces this idea of meaningless choices in his conversations with his therapist:
How do we know if we’re in control? That we’re not just making the best of what comes at us, and that’s it. Trying to constantly pick between two options. Like your two paintings in the waiting room. Or Coke and Pepsi. McDonald’s or Burger King? Hyundai or Honda? It’s all part of the same blur, right? Just out of focus enough. It’s the illusion of choice. Half of us can’t even pick our own our cable, gas, electric. The water we drink, our health insurance. Even if we did, would it matter? You know, if our only option is Blue Cross or Blue Shield, what the fuck is the difference? In fact, aren’t they the same? No, man, our choices are prepaid for us, long time ago.”54
54 Sam Esmail, writer, "eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg," in Mr. Robot, dir. Sam Esmail, USA Network, July 1,
In a world where the spheres of consumerism and politics are so close together, individual liberty is secured through voting and shopping.Mr. Robot gives us a glimpse into the manner
in which these choices are prepaid for us, and by whom. Starting season one, Elliot explains whom we are dealing with: "[T]here's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. [...] The guys that are invisible. The top one percent of the top one percent. The guys that play God without permission."55
A large part of the narrative is concerned with explaining why it is that Elliot wants to bring down E-corp. We know this is because of the death of his, and Angela's father at the hands of exactly these "guys." The diseases that killed both the childhood friends' parents were knowingly exposed to the toxins that caused it. Angela finds this out when she asks the former E-corp CEO Colby what it was like when they decided to ignore the chemical spill. Colby continues by painting a picture of an ivory tower filled with shrimp cocktails and expensive drinks. In later conversations, he even alludes to the fact that they set up a special fund to cope with the inevitable liability lawsuits that were to come and "[T]he fund itself has already made five times [the amount of the settlements]."56 This is where the realism of the show interjects in the dystopian picture it paints. In a way, it attempts to empower its viewers through the making visible of the reality we live in, where Mr. Robot "doesn't mask the relationship between viewers and politics, it reminds them that this is, in fact, how they
55 Sam Esmail, writer, "Eps1.0_hellofriend.mov," in Mr. Robot, dir. Sam Esmail, USA Network, June 24, 2015. 56 Sam Esmail, writer, "eps1.9_zer0-day.avi," in Mr. Robot, dir. Sam Esmail, USA Network. September 2,
encounter capitalism every day."57 However, these aspects of Mr. Robot’s critique of capitalism pairs with the explicit critique of the way one might make use of this knowledge of our existence to form opposition.
2.2 Resistance in the Neoliberal Age
Mr. Robot chronicles two types of resistance commonly deployed against capitalism. In the
most general terms these are resistance from within, and resistance from outside the dominant hegemony. One has only to think back to the recent presidential campaign and Bernie Sanders’ role in it. Sanders’ mildly socialist message tried to find an ideological home in the Democratic Party. This had, however, also been the same power structures that envisioned Hillary Clinton as their ideal candidate. This became apparent from the email leaks, showing how the leaders of the Democratic Party felt the need to attack Sander's campaign to uphold the status quo.58 Change from within was severely compromised by the structures that were already in place. Sanders' campaign was arguably sabotaged, only to be co-opted by Clinton’s camp. On the other hand, the resistance from outside of the status quo saw its gradual dismantling. The protests that Mr. Robot emulates, Anonymous and Occupy, have been largely absent from the public stage. Occupy has withdrawn from the public eye after the forceful eviction of Zuccotti Park. Anonymous was silent for much of the U.S. presidential
57 Jen Hedler Philips, "Hello, Friend," Jacobin Magazine, September 21, 2016, accessed August 17, 2017,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/mr-robot-sam-esmail-fsociety-rami-malek/.
58 Michael D. Shear and Matthew Rosenberg, "Released Emails Suggest the D.N.C. Derided the Sanders
elections.59 The hacking collective now primarily exists when its signifiers (the Guy Fawkes mask) are abused by pranksters and bullies, simultaneously racking up profits for Warner Bros. on mask sales.60 What Mr. Robot attempts to do in its first season is to illustrate these problematic aspects of civic engagement. It attempts to show its audience the flawed nature of our current ways of resisting. The audience experiences these different types of civil disobedience through the stories of Elliot and Angela.
Elliot’s narrative focuses on the laying out of conventional ways of protesting and what they mean and may be able to achieve in modern day societies. Protest has become increasingly compromised as a viable way of resistance. The cultural presence of fsociety causes their efforts to get susceptible to followers who in turn start displaying their displeasure with neoliberalism in public. Ultimately, it is Elliot's goal to bring down E-corp through the destruction of the servers that house their debt records. However, by doing this, he believes people will become aware of the arbitrary nature of their oppression. The show calls this "becoming awake." Being "woke" is a popular term for describing an individual that seemingly understands his or her place in society as it gets directed by the interests of political and economic forces.61 The term rose to popularity through the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the movement, it addressed the systemic and institutionalized
59
Some argue that it is Anonymous’s cooption of the idea of resistance through Donald Trump’s presidency that led to their downfall. With intergroup strife over the political basis of the group. Exemplifying the problems of a resistance movement that is open to all and more importantly easily adopted. See also:
http://www.businessinsider.com/anonymous-war-donald-trump-fail-2016-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T
60
Leo Benedictus, "The irony of the Anonymous mask," The Guardian, August 30, 2011, accessed April 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/30/irony-of-anonymous-mask.
61 Amanda Hess, "Earning the 'Woke' Badge," The New York Times, April 19, 2016, accessed August 17, 2017,
racism towards African-Americans. Being "woke" in that respect meant acknowledging that the reactions of the American police force, for example, get directed by issues of race.62 In response to the death of Trayvon Martin, the hashtag #StayWoke became popular on Twitter. This helped to remind users that Martin's death was not accidental and directly dependent on dominant structures of oppression. In the first season of Mr. Robot, the increased visibility of fsociety leads to an exponential growth in followers. fsociety attempts to appeal to "the people." fsociety claims that the people are becoming aware of their oppression, that they are becoming "awake." When the hack, that is supposed to set the people free, finally happens, it is these people that flood the streets in their Anonymous-esque masks. They are carrying signs that brandish the slogans they heard on the fsociety broadcasts. The people have become part of fsociety’s efforts to dismantle financial power structures and they are doing so in the form of protest.
Angela’s narrative, on the other hand, attempts to show the audience how interventions from within the status quo happen nowadays, and to what degree they can be deemed useful strategies. Angela gets her hands on information through a data dump. The story mirrors that of the early days of WikiLeaks. When Angela appeals to the judicial system through a lawyer, her pleas to reopen the case against E-corp get mocked. The lawyer that handles her request deems it virtually impossible to attack a global conglomerate. When Angela is finally capable of getting a conviction, a former CTO for E-corp comes to her
62 Charles Pulliam-Moore, "How 'woke' went from black activist watchword to teen internet slang," Splinter,
house to offer her a job. It is especially the tenacity that she displayed that convinced E-corp to hire her. Angela takes the job, in the beginning, to be able to infiltrate. She gradually gets co-opted into the ranks of E-corp in the first season. We learn, however, in the second season, that Angela is now an essential member of fsociety because of her capacity to infiltrate different departments of E-corp. Her resistance from the inside out comes to fruition although the cause of resetting the debts in the world fails. Mr. Robot, with the narratives of Angela and Elliot’s resistance, attempts to problematize the nature of protest in the neoliberal landscape. The show does this by chronicling the individual opposition of fsociety member and the eventual outcome for the society as a whole. Right after the attack on E-corp’s servers, the streets are flooded with citizens supporting fsociety's cause. In the age of capitalist realism, protest is, from the perspective of the capitalist hegemony, an unproblematic part of the structural makeup of society. When we encounter the protests in the second season, they have become literal background noise for the scenes that take place in the boardrooms of E-corp. The protests are never anything but a minor inconvenience.
Mr. Robot presents audiences with two versions of this neutered version of resistance.
holding an fsociety mask: "[C]heck it, Jessica Alba says she wants to join fsociety."63 Mr.
Robot regularly offers us a view of the function of protest in internet culture. We see people
taking pictures with all kinds of fsociety related artifacts. These range from the sawed off testicles of the Wall Street bull to murals that declare the death of the economy. Here protest becomes a source of identity building and the “self-presentation of moral purity.”64 New York's citizens have appropriated the aesthetics and the vocabulary of the group but seem unsure of their role in the movement. It is protesting for the sake of protest. Moreover, the mask and the slogans are often hijacked as a way to be provocative or as a way to anonymously cause acts of mayhem. This is similar to what happened to the Anonymous masks.65 Throughout the series, the audience can spot young people wreaking havoc by scaring people or by performing acts of vandalism.
The type of political engagement that Mr. Robot critiques is dominant but unhelpful tactic against the overarching problems caused by neoliberalism. This type of protest is unsuccessful against any long time goals and therefore deemed innocent by the dominant classes in society. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams call this “folk politics.”66
According to them it has become the norm to articulate discontent with the world, without pushing for or achieving actual change.67 Mr. Robot displays different types of unsuccessful protest to critique the way that society mobilizes and how these mobilizations do not foster change
63 David Iserson, writer, "eps1.4_3xpl0its.wmv," in Mr. Robot, dir. Jim McKay, USA Network, July 22, 2015. 64
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (London: Verso, 2015), 8.
because of their configurations. Srnicek and Williams explain that protests these days are folk political, referring to the intuition of response and the scale of the protests.68 This means that protests these days are reactive and temporal, small and unscalable, and individualized and particular.69 This is exemplified by the show in the protest that gathers in the streets of Time Square during the final episode of Mr. Robot’s first season. The individuals in the street have donned their masks and are holding signs with vague outcries: “[M]oney is dead,” “[W]e are finally awake,” and “[D]own with debt slavery.”70
The critique of vagueness and temporal protest can be uttered regarding recent protest in the real world in a similar way. The biggest movement of this past year, the Women's March on Washington describes their goal as such: "[W]omen's March is committed to dismantling systems of oppression through nonviolent resistance and building inclusive structures guided by self-determination, dignity, and respect."71 The “dismantling of oppression" was primarily pointed towards president Donald Trump and his threat to equality. The signs used in the March on Washington show varying degrees of creativity with slogans such as “grab ‘em by the patriarchy" or "[W]e are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn."72 There is no real message but general discontent to be read in these messages. Moreover, in this age of communicative capitalism, the signs get shared on the internet where they become memes that relocate traffic to sites
68 Ibid, 10. 69 Ibid, 11.
70 Sam Esmail, writer, "eps1.9_zer0-day.avi," in Mr. Robot, dir. Sam Esmail, USA Network, September 2, 2015. 71
"Welcome," Women's March, accessed July 04, 2017, https://www.womensmarch.com/.
72 Julia Reinstein, "61 Of The Greatest Signs From Women's Marches Around The Country," BuzzFeed, January
like BuzzFeed or HuffintingPost.73 Protest is not only insufficiently catered to attack the scale of the problems that exist; it is also being captured as exchange value.74
2.3 After the Revolution
The temporality of protest is caused by society's quest for the instant gratification of outrage. Revolution dies down when there is no idea about what happens after the protest. Perspectives on solutions, brought on by the inaugural intensity of protesting only shortly creates new avenues of resistance. After the fervor initiated by the energy of mass protest fades so also do the new initiatives. It seems that there will be a point in the history of critical engagement with capitalism in which the famous words of Slavoj Zizek will become a cliché. Attributed to both him and Frederic Jameson the line, “it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world,” seems to resonate so much that it is in danger of becoming stale. However, the line illustrates society’s connection to thinking a viable alternative to capitalism quite eloquently. Our cultural sphere is filled with articulations of worlds that have ended. Think of the zombie procedural The Walking Dead or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. These types of scenarios never present an alternative to capitalism. If anything, they present a dystopian and hyper-patriarchal throwback to the days of the yeomen farmer where every man and “tribe” has its plot of land to defend. It is essential to articulate
73 Alanna Vagianos and Damon Dahlen, "89 Badass Feminist Signs From The Women's March On
Washington," The Huffington Post, January 21, 2017, accessed July 04, 2017,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/89-badass-feminist-signs-from-the-womens-march-on-washington_us_5883ea28e4b070d8cad310cd.
alternatives to be able to think of a viable and new future beyond capitalism, or, at least, a way to formulate an alternative.
By only attacking the root of the problem, money, fsociety has failed to articulate a suitable alternative to neoliberalism; it remains only reactive. To Mr. Robot’s credit, unlike films like Fight Club and The Matrix, the audience is shown what happens after the revolution and after the protests. A general theme that runs through both season one and two is Mr. Robot is the uncertainty that comes with saving the world from debt. It immediately becomes apparent that erasing debt is not the end-all that some of fsociety deemed it to be. Debt, in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis, had become the quintessential evil with which American society needed to deal. It was no longer seen as a reliable economic resource but rather as a “system of dispossession” that threatened the basic fabric of social life.75
When Elliot wakes up after two days of slumber, finding out the hack worked, he is confronted with a big line in front of an ATM. The economy is still dependent on money. Much of the second season is aimed at showing what would happen if society would become debt free overnight.
Mr. Robot problematizes the way that revolution is approached primarily on small scale and
reactive basis. It becomes especially clear in season two but season one foreshadows it as well. When fsociety gets rid of all the drives containing information of the hack they do so in an incineration oven for a dog shelter. This oven is used to burn the remains of stray dogs that are not picked up for adoption. After burning the compromising material, the members of
75 Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford
fsociety let the dogs out of their cages. The audience is not told what happens to the dogs, but one can extrapolate that dogs that run loose on the streets will eventually just be captured again. This is an analog for fsociety's own plans. They have released society from their “illegitimate prisons of debt” but are not too sure what should happen next. In fact, in season two we meet the owner of the incinerator who reveals that he had “been busy for days catching all those dogs again.” This illustrates once again that the temporal and intuitive resistance will not necessarily produce freedom for the parties involved.
Resistance in Mr. Robot first takes the form of debt abdication and the show frames it as an event that will produce freedom, when it ultimately does not. The premise of Mr. Robot suggests that an elimination of debt would automatically set a society free. At least that is the idea that fsociety has when they start to roll out the hack: "[W]e hope, as a new society rises from [E-corp’s] ashes, that you will forge a better world. A world that values a free people.”76 Arguably, it is a direct representation of a simple formulation of how to acquire a post-capitalist world. In the "real" world, however, there is some doubt about what this manner of redistributing wealth would do and if it were accomplishable. Starting with the latter, in a column for Bloomberg, libertarian blogger Megan McArdle takes a pragmatic approach towards the elimination of debt. She targets what she deems the only real sci-fi component of
Mr. Robot’s dystopia. Debt records are not saved in one place, and because of the immense
variety of different types of debt, they are not handled by one company. These records also include the payments of the ones that take out a loan. These will disappear as well, leaving
76 Sam Esmail, writer, "eps1.9_zer0-day.avi," in Mr. Robot, dir. Sam Esmail, USA Network. September 2,
(partial) ownership hard to prove. McArdle, who works for a company that provides financial service, could be deemed blind to the actual meaning of the elimination of debt in the show. It is primarily the delegitimization of debt that is Esmail’s main focus, much like campaigns by Occupy’s subsidiary Strike Debt. Strike Debt buys debt for pennies on the dollar but never attempt to claim the funds. No scenario would allow them to scale up to such an extent as to eliminate all debt. Rather, they see it as a way to show the cruel and arbitrary nature of debt.77
The critiques that are deployed against Mr. Robot’s first season are essentially negated in the second. The producers of the series seem to be well aware of the ineffectiveness of the premise of their show. The second season focuses on the board rooms and executives that have to deal with the aftermath of the fsociety hack, and they do not seem bothered at all. The chaos that hacks create only strengthens E-corp’s power. In fact, it becomes clear that E-corp had anticipated resistance on such a scale. It is in a conversation with the Minister of Finance that E-corp’s CEO mentions that “this was always going to be the future. The 5/9 attacks just accelerated it.”78 "It" meaning the total capitalist takeover of the government. To counteract the lack of money in circulation E-corp makes their E-coin, becoming the sole owner and distributor of currency. fsociety has not succeeded and needs to undertake another hack to disrupt the analog data that is still left. The second season thus concludes the same way the first had, another attempt to take down capitalism. Imagining something new, an alternative to capitalism, is always harder than imagining the end of
77 "Rolling Jubilee," Rolling Jubilee, accessed July 04, 2017, http://rollingjubilee.org/.
something.79 Elliot and his fellow hackers are stuck in a capitalist realism. Their stories show us what is like to live in a capitalist dystopia, where we are all residing in an eternal present that cannot change without a severe shift in the dominant ideology.
Chapter 3: (How) do audiences engage with Mr. Robot’s critique?
The narrative culture website AV Club hosts digital reviews for the Mr. Robot series. Under these reviews, the website allows its users to comment on the review but, more often than not, users post their own, smaller, reviews. These micro-reviews address the different aspects of an episode. Similar online comment sections have been approached as an "online knowledge community."80 On this view, such communities are "transnational networks" and "dominant social formations of our age."81 Pink and others have used a "non-digital-centric” approach that “takes as its starting point the idea that digital media and technology are part of the everyday and more spectacular world that people inhabit” to analyze these communities.82 For such scholars online communities are social worlds in their own right, in the sense that they are “relatively bounded -but never airtight- domains of social life.”83
As Andrea Hemetsberger and Christian Reinhardt articulate, online communities utilize coding, transactive group memory, instructive content, discourse and reflective discourse to make sense of all manner of cultural and technical products, constituting a "virtual re-experiencing."84 This re-experiencing takes place in so called recap blogs. By harvesting the data from the different comment sections, they can be compounded into Excel sheets where
80
Sarah Pink, Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Los Angles: Sage, 2016), 7.
81 Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography: redefined (Los Angeles (Calif.): Sage, 2015), 22. 82 Pink, Digital Ethnograpgy, 8.
83 Ibid, 9. 84
