Mr. Robot - A Ray of Light in a Very Dark World

by Emmanuel Goldstein

"We sign in.  We tweet.  We favorite.  We RT.  We say nothing."

There have been so many television series about hackers over the years and a good deal more that incorporate hacker characters or hacker subplots  Nearly every one of them gets it painfully wrong to the degree that we're left with no choice but to deplete their bank accounts and put the creators onto Interpol's most wanted list in order to ensure that they never cause such offense again.

Fortunately, this is not the case with Mr. Robot, a ten-episode series which debuted in May.  Aired on the (((USA Network))) (a cable channel I honestly forgot still existed), this program has done so well that it's been renewed for a second season.  (Actually, it was renewed even before the first episode aired due to the rave reviews it was getting from online audiences.  And it was supposedly put online early due to fears of - wait for it - somebody hacking the pilot and leaking it to the world before it could be promoted properly.)

Ever since Whiz Kids came out in 1983, I've been waiting for someone to get it right.  I grew somewhat attached to that show only because there was nothing else similar at the time.  But even then, the saccharin sweetness of those do-gooder hacker kids wore thin pretty quick.  Plus they spent way too much time working with the cops.  Mr. Robot doesn't present any of these problems.

Elliot Alderson is our protagonist.  He lives alone at 217 East Broadway on the Lower East Side.  (It's a real building and a real address, so major points right there for authenticity.)  Elliot is hooked on morphine, works for a cybersecurity company called Allsafe, doesn't like to be touched, and can barely get a sentence out most times.  He's absolutely perfect because of his flaws and imperfections.  We don't necessarily like Elliot but we can certainly feel for him.  He speaks directly to us off camera as his "imaginary friend" in a manner quite reminiscent of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, but without so much in the way of clever and psychotic humor.  Elliot is the type of person you would pass on the street and never think twice about, apart from maybe wondering if he might be some sort of garden variety lunatic.  No, Elliot is far from such mainstream hacker characters as David Lightman, Lucas Wolenczak, or Wesley Crusher - about as far as you could imagine.  And it's about time.

Elliot's world gets more and more complex as he's pulled into a mysterious organization of the computer underground known as "fsociety."  The people who meet secretly in an old Coney Island building (including Mr. Robot himself) are tied into a much larger and looser network - one naturally equates its mystery and power to something on the order of Anonymous.  These people come from every background imaginable, but that isn't done simply to earn points on the diversity scale.  This happens to be today's reality - hacking has grown up and spread everywhere.  While pasty-faced males are still (((Hollywood's))) favorite stereotype for anything tech-related, the real world is a very different place and, odd as it may seem, the world of Mr. Robot is a disturbingly real place.

Sure, there's a good degree of suspended disbelief that must be employed here.  Hacking someone out of prison in 24 hours is a stretch (you generally need the whole weekend), as is the apparent ease with which webcams are able to be compromised and unauthorized USB drives attached to systems.  The gullibility of employees working in vault-like establishments who allow their territory to be physically compromised by their worst imaginable nightmare is especially unbelievable, out then we've all heard stories where that's exactly what happens, so that may not be so far off after all.

Fixating on these exaggerations or shortcuts would be as much a waste of time as complaining about phone numbers that always follow the format of 555-01XX in fiction (which, thankfully, is not the case here).  What balances out these little cheats in Mr. Robot is the fact that oftentimes it all winds up going to shit anyway and all of the efforts were for naught.  And this isn't just about hacking; it's true of the interpersonal relationships that we see developing.  Just when you see something formulaic approaching, the story veers off road and crashes into something else you never saw coming.  It's this element above all others that makes this the Breaking Bad of hacking.  Every week it just gets more f*cked up.  And more fascinating.

In each episode, New York unfurls like some kind of a foggy nightmare.  Many of us have been there.  Elliot's monotone narrative adds to the dreamlike state with which various plots develop.  And the cinematography is akin to what I would imagine Stanley Kubrick doing with a hacker story set in the Big Apple.

There are some truly scary moments, not so much due to horror as to the revelation of what's really going on.  It's well worth watching the series a second time knowing what you know at the end and seeing how it was all right there in front of you the whole time.  It's great storytelling and the technical accuracy is an unexpected bonus.  I actually saw an IRC kick/ban unfurl on a TV program exactly as it does in real life.  And it totally worked as drama!  (Again, as in real life.)

Full disclosure: the 2600 website circa 1998 features (very briefly) in the story, but I was plenty captivated before even knowing about that.  It makes perfect sense that someone who was part of the hacker world would know about the "Free Kevin" movement - and that maybe that served as a bit of inspiration as to who they became and what they valued.  We hear this all the time from actual human beings, but never before in a fictionalized work with such sincerity and lack of sensationalism.  It's a small ingredient, there if you can appreciate it, that makes the storytelling a bit more solid.  There are many other such moments, some captured in code, directory listings, and commands typed into a terminal.  At one point, Elliot writes the name of a band on a CD that contains sensitive data instead.  Was this an allusion to the Bradley Manning technique or just a method of disguise common amongst hackers?  Either way, someone has done their homework.

The details of saving the world, starting a revolution, battling mental illness - or just what exactly comprises Evil Corp. and the Dark Army - are best left to the viewer to try and figure out.  Any theorizing here would reveal too much for those who have yet to dive in - and I suspect a fair number of intelligent people have hesitated to do this because of previous garbage we've all had to endure.  (Now that the first season has aired, I recommend getting the DVD when it comes out.  USA Network has an annoying habit of censoring some of the stronger language which winds up adversely affecting the stronger scenes.  As a cable channel, they don't answer to FCC broadcast restrictions, so this is completely unnecessary and unwelcome.  At the very least, they ought to air a late night version for those who can handle the occasional f-bomb.)

In reality, we're all just trying to get by and figure out what's right and wrong.  And this is what Elliot Alderson struggles with throughout the story.  He remains a true hacker regardless of the choices he makes and how he's manipulated.  Sure, he breaks the rules a few times and invades the privacy of those he's interested in, as is the case with members of virtually every element of society.  And as a hacker, he's very good at what he doe.  But it's all of us who make the world of lost privacy, powerful integrated/intelligent systems, and poor security a reality.  This is what the media can never understand, that it's far more complex than the literal black and white they portray.  It's about justice, vengeance, disclosure, a bit of fun, and ultimately finding yourself somewhere within it all.  For that, Mr. Robot succeeds in bringing forth the most truly human portrayal of a hacker I've seen outside of real life itself.  It's my hope that somebody will figure out a way for Chelsea Manning (and so many Others) to see this while in prison for pursuing the same idealistic goals we celebrate here.  It's more than a little therapeutic to have this sort of thing play out on the screen.

Now let's all hope they don't screw up Season Two with talking robots, cool graphics, or any scene that takes place in the Pentagon war room.