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Far from the Lonely Crowd
ENDE-632; No. of Pages 3
Review
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. xxx No. x
ScienceDirect
Far from the Lonely Crowd The Trenchant Techno-Cynicism of Mr. Robot Daniel Volmar Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, One Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Abstract
Mr. Robot is a television drama with an unusually techno-cynical premise, tying cybersecurity to the contemporary malaise of social alienation and political disengagement. Weary of consumer capitalism, the show’s youthful protagonists seek a more authentic sense of belonging by exploiting the vulnerability of a global economic system that depends critically on creaking technological infrastructures. A remarkable display of iconoclasm for commercial entertainment, Mr. Robot suggests rising discontentment with the commodification of friendship through consumer electronics, but it may also offer media enterprises a model for how to profit from that discontentment in the future. “What is it about society that disappoints you so much?” Elliot refuses his psychiatrist’s gaze. He turns his head briefly toward Krista, then away again. “Oh, I don’t know,” he begins timidly. “Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children?” We see a crowd applaud a figure in a familiar turtleneck followed by clean-suited girls sweating on a Shenzhen shop floor. “Or maybe it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit”—images of Lance Armstrong, Bill Cosby, Mel Gibson. “The world itself is just one big hoax: spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy.” A screen flicks through Instagrams and Twitter feeds, lingering finally on Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page. “Or is it that we voted for this?” Elliot continues over a close-up on the “I Voted” sticker on Krista’s lapel. “Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money.” Jewelry on Krista’s fingers, shoppers on Fifth Avenue, a “Black Friday Weekend” triptych in a bigbox store window. “I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy”—a hardback sits prominently in Krista’s purse, beside a conspicuous pill bottle—“but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards.” Elliot’s voice has surged from diffidence to defiance, his expression twisted into a furious snarl. He turns away, as if to spare Krista’s face from the acid he must spit from his mouth. “Fuck society.”
Corresponding author: Volmar, D. ([email protected]). Keywords: Mr. Robot; Television review; Cybersecurity; Hacktivism; Anti-consumerism; Social alienation; Political apathy. Available online xxxxxx
“Elliot,” Krista’s voice echoes as from a great distance. “Elliot, you’re not saying anything.” A jump cut returns us to Elliot’s empty stare, the caustic monologue having played only in the instant he considered speaking it. “What’s wrong?” Elliot lifts his head and shakes it politely, a rehearsed gesture performed on command. “Nothing.” Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, and Mr. Robot is his solipsistic story to tell. In addition to its stylish visuals, superlative cast, and cerebral plot, the dramatic series, now entering its third season, has attracted serious attention for its unusually realistic depiction of computer-network security (or rather, insecurity), a feature that ties directly into its strongly political, yet deeply personal themes. Indeed, Elliot’s soliloquies frequently address us—the audience—as his “invisible friend,” as if the viewer’s reality were itself projected by the character’s mental defenses. Elliot has become estranged from mass society not because he fails to understand it, but because he understands it all too well. Like other classic techno-punks, Mr. Robot’s young but weary protagonists see our shining cultural artifice from its electronic underworld, where critical infrastructure still runs on fax machines and Windows 95, and the global economy teeters precariously atop a mountain of magnetic tape. At some times they seek escape, at others, agency, but above all, what they desire is belonging. If iThings and comic-book franchises have banished sincerity from the world, then these high-tech lowlifes will split the seams between the hideous patchworks of consumption and capital. As Mr. Robot begins, Elliot works pliantly for a New York-based cybersecurity firm contracted to E Corp, a crushing zaibatsu whose cost-cutting malfeasance caused the death of his beloved father when he was a child. (The show often filters our perceptions through Elliot, in whose mind the words “E Corp” are subconsciously replaced with “Evil Corp.”) After defending his hated overlord from a sophisticated cyberattack, Elliot is lured to the mercurial “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater), the off-the-grid leader of an underground hacker-collective that calls itself—appropriately enough—“fsociety.” There he encounters Darlene (Carly Chaikin), the consummate anarchist, along with a diverse crew of techno-dissidents plotting to erase Evil Corp’s transaction records, liberating the world from consumer debt while ensnaring the multinational in a fatal financial crisis. “You don’t take down a conglomerate by shooting them in the heart,” Mr. Robot explains, because “they don’t have hearts. You take them down limb by limb, and as they unravel, their illusion of control unravels.”
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/ß 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002 Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002
ENDE-632; No. of Pages 3
Review
2
Endeavour Vol. xxx No. x
More than an appeal to justice, or even the taste of revenge, it is this promise of autonomy that most animates Elliot, who associates a relative lack thereof with his stifling complex of loneliness, grief, mental illness, and substance abuse. “How do we know if we’re in control?” he asks Krista (Gloria Reuben)—speaking this time, instead of imagining. “That we’re not just making the best of what comes at us, and that’s it? Trying constantly to pick between two shitty options,” like “Coke and Pepsi. McDonald’s or Burger King. Hyundai or Honda. . .You know, if our only option is Blue Cross or Blue Shield, then what the fuck is the difference?” He fumbles. “In fact, aren’t they— aren’t they the same?” For Elliot, impotence and indecision have merged as well. “No, man,” he sighs. “Our choices are prepaid for us, a long time ago. . .Might as well, just—you do nothing. Might as well do nothing.” In engaging with fsociety, Elliot is as outwardly torn between action and inaction, power and powerlessness, as he is internally. This is Mr. Robot’s central tension, irony, and paradox, because Elliot’s technical virtuosity renders him almost omnipotent among the less capable, whose personal accounts he hacks in futile yet irresistible attempts to fill his emotional voidness. By peering into the private lives behind the public faces, Elliot cannot help but reinforce his own cynical premonition that individuals reflect the same inauthenticity he sees in brands and advertising. “I liked coming here because your wifi was fast,” he tells the owner of a Manhattan coffee shop. “It’s good. So good it scratched that part of my mind, the part that doesn’t allow good to exist without condition.” So Elliot began intercepting all the traffic on the owner’s network with his laptop. “You made it really hard for anyone to see it, but I saw it”: a darknet server hosting 100 terabytes of child pornography. “The onion-routing protocol, it’s not as anonymous as you think it is. Whoever is in control of the exit nodes is also in control of the traffic. Which makes me,” he savors, “the one in control.” Elliot turns for the door just as the police arrive, pulling over his iconic black hoodie with the flourish of a nighttime vigilante. Undiluted, a hack-of-the-week formula could easily dissolve into the same populist potboiler the show so earnestly ridicules. Indeed, Mr. Robot often throws its anti-capitalist punches quite literally on the nose. In one early episode, an aspiring Evil Corp executive (Martin Wallström) beats a homeless man half to death over a petty professional setback: paying for the privilege, but sparing his fists the indignity with a pair of surgical gloves. Darlene has lifted fsociety’s mascot—a Guy Fawkes mask crossed with Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY”— from an obscure (fictitious) slasher-flick entitled The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie. “I mean, clearly what the film is doing is debunking the notion that America is a classless society,” she philosophizes as a croquet mallet cleaves the skull of an insufferable teenage prepster. “Meritocracy my ass.” In counterpoise, however, we see Elliot’s demons cause him to periodically abandon his one-man rebellion, while Darlene must hold together what she regards as a movement, despite dwindling support for fsociety’s revolutionary cause. While the two of them regularly thrill with
superhuman displays of technical competence, their victories seem increasingly like peaks in a Sisyphean struggle against a global order capable of repurposing even the most anarchic tendencies to its own end. The plot has become rather elliptic on this point, but there is no mistaking the significance of the painting that hangs behind the desk of Evil Corp’s CEO, Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer): a satirical, anthropomorphic map of Europe drawn in the fateful year 1914. “Isn’t that what history is all about?” Price challenges Terry Colby (Bruce Altman), his former CTO. “Politically, economically, geographically— imaginary lines being drawn and redrawn, over and over again?” As fsociety begins to disrupt the international market, Price perceives his own opportunity to draw a new map from the imaginary lines between the neoliberal institutions of banking and government. Meanwhile, Angela (Portia Doubleday), Elliot’s childhood friend, seeks her own path to autonomy within the Evil Corp machine, despite losing her mother just as Elliot did his father. Though sometimes implausible, her apprenticeship under Price and Colby has yielded moments of admirably quiet gravity. “You want to know, like, what it was like?” Colby ruffles when she confronts him about the meeting that precipitated the deadly environmental incident. “Like, um, did we all have cigars and laugh hysterically as we signed the evil documents? Is that what you pictured? Well, I’m sorry, hon. See the world doesn’t work like that.” She presses, but he can recall only the overabundance of shrimp cocktail, the open bar, the rain at the window. Angela scoffs at his frat-boyish boasts of drunken conviviality. “Did any of it ever give you or anyone pause when you made those decisions?” Colby’s swagger evaporates. “Yeah,” he sniffs. “Yeah, sure. But, um, then you go home, and you have dinner, you know, and then you wake up the next morning.” He trails off, turns to the balcony, and raises an arm to the sunshine flooding his Manhattan estate. Mr. Robot may not be “not saying anything new,” as Elliot himself acknowledges, but it is a remarkable iconoclasm nonetheless. In this, it follows the anti-consumerist provocation of Fight Club, an influence that Sam Esmail, the show’s creator and primary writer–director, flaunts proudly. But where Fight Club linked consumerism with emasculation and satirized a primordial, proto-fascistic form of manly violence, Mr. Robot may represent a generational shift toward the systemic causes of alienation. More than Project Mayhem, it is the idealism of Occupy and Anonymous that informs fsociety’s hactivist crusade. By reveling in technology’s seedy vulnerability—the corners cut in the interest of profit—they attack consumer capitalism along with the sociopolitical structures that impose it. Although the specific connections may never be entirely clear to him, Elliot has definitely implicated the global elite (“the guys that play God without permission”) in his personal, psychosocial immiseration. Even the agent hunting him—another lonely millennial—identifies less with her bureaucratic bosses than her opponent’s discontentment with the commodification of friendship itself. “Alexa, do you love me?” Dominique (Grace Gummer) asks her Amazon Echo in a moment of profound despondency.
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002
ENDE-632; No. of Pages 3
Review
Endeavour
Vol. xxx No. x
The featureless black cylinder hesitates as if considering whether to open the pod-bay doors. “That is not the kind of thing I am capable of.” Dom whispers, “yeah,” almost inaudibly, her despair melting into sleep. Does Mr. Robot portend an anti-capitalist turn among the rising generation, perhaps born of the demystification that comes from fluency with consumer electronics? While Esmail clearly understands millennial angsts and apathies better than any showrunner on television today, we should not confuse articulation with mobilization. Here, Mr. Robot bares its central contradiction once again. The series airs on basic cable, its anti-consumerist appeals brought to you by a few words from the very same
3
sponsors. (Even the show’s domestic broadcaster, USA Network, is owned by a despised Evil Corp doppelgänger: Comcast–NBCUniversal.) On Reddit, fans predictably discuss convolutions of plot rather than the politics of trust-busting or progressive taxation. The critique is an old one—that repackaging dissent as entertainment is the ultimate anodyne against it, regardless of authorial intent. And yet in one especially surreal sequence, Elliot sees not his own face reflected in his bathroom mirror, but Sam Esmail’s. Conflicted though it may be, Mr. Robot at least recognizes its double bind. As Elliot himself wonders, “how can I win when your opponent is—you?”
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002
Review
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. xxx No. x
ScienceDirect
Far from the Lonely Crowd The Trenchant Techno-Cynicism of Mr. Robot Daniel Volmar Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, One Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Abstract
Mr. Robot is a television drama with an unusually techno-cynical premise, tying cybersecurity to the contemporary malaise of social alienation and political disengagement. Weary of consumer capitalism, the show’s youthful protagonists seek a more authentic sense of belonging by exploiting the vulnerability of a global economic system that depends critically on creaking technological infrastructures. A remarkable display of iconoclasm for commercial entertainment, Mr. Robot suggests rising discontentment with the commodification of friendship through consumer electronics, but it may also offer media enterprises a model for how to profit from that discontentment in the future. “What is it about society that disappoints you so much?” Elliot refuses his psychiatrist’s gaze. He turns his head briefly toward Krista, then away again. “Oh, I don’t know,” he begins timidly. “Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children?” We see a crowd applaud a figure in a familiar turtleneck followed by clean-suited girls sweating on a Shenzhen shop floor. “Or maybe it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit”—images of Lance Armstrong, Bill Cosby, Mel Gibson. “The world itself is just one big hoax: spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy.” A screen flicks through Instagrams and Twitter feeds, lingering finally on Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page. “Or is it that we voted for this?” Elliot continues over a close-up on the “I Voted” sticker on Krista’s lapel. “Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money.” Jewelry on Krista’s fingers, shoppers on Fifth Avenue, a “Black Friday Weekend” triptych in a bigbox store window. “I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy”—a hardback sits prominently in Krista’s purse, beside a conspicuous pill bottle—“but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards.” Elliot’s voice has surged from diffidence to defiance, his expression twisted into a furious snarl. He turns away, as if to spare Krista’s face from the acid he must spit from his mouth. “Fuck society.”
Corresponding author: Volmar, D. ([email protected]). Keywords: Mr. Robot; Television review; Cybersecurity; Hacktivism; Anti-consumerism; Social alienation; Political apathy. Available online xxxxxx
“Elliot,” Krista’s voice echoes as from a great distance. “Elliot, you’re not saying anything.” A jump cut returns us to Elliot’s empty stare, the caustic monologue having played only in the instant he considered speaking it. “What’s wrong?” Elliot lifts his head and shakes it politely, a rehearsed gesture performed on command. “Nothing.” Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, and Mr. Robot is his solipsistic story to tell. In addition to its stylish visuals, superlative cast, and cerebral plot, the dramatic series, now entering its third season, has attracted serious attention for its unusually realistic depiction of computer-network security (or rather, insecurity), a feature that ties directly into its strongly political, yet deeply personal themes. Indeed, Elliot’s soliloquies frequently address us—the audience—as his “invisible friend,” as if the viewer’s reality were itself projected by the character’s mental defenses. Elliot has become estranged from mass society not because he fails to understand it, but because he understands it all too well. Like other classic techno-punks, Mr. Robot’s young but weary protagonists see our shining cultural artifice from its electronic underworld, where critical infrastructure still runs on fax machines and Windows 95, and the global economy teeters precariously atop a mountain of magnetic tape. At some times they seek escape, at others, agency, but above all, what they desire is belonging. If iThings and comic-book franchises have banished sincerity from the world, then these high-tech lowlifes will split the seams between the hideous patchworks of consumption and capital. As Mr. Robot begins, Elliot works pliantly for a New York-based cybersecurity firm contracted to E Corp, a crushing zaibatsu whose cost-cutting malfeasance caused the death of his beloved father when he was a child. (The show often filters our perceptions through Elliot, in whose mind the words “E Corp” are subconsciously replaced with “Evil Corp.”) After defending his hated overlord from a sophisticated cyberattack, Elliot is lured to the mercurial “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater), the off-the-grid leader of an underground hacker-collective that calls itself—appropriately enough—“fsociety.” There he encounters Darlene (Carly Chaikin), the consummate anarchist, along with a diverse crew of techno-dissidents plotting to erase Evil Corp’s transaction records, liberating the world from consumer debt while ensnaring the multinational in a fatal financial crisis. “You don’t take down a conglomerate by shooting them in the heart,” Mr. Robot explains, because “they don’t have hearts. You take them down limb by limb, and as they unravel, their illusion of control unravels.”
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/ß 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002 Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002
ENDE-632; No. of Pages 3
Review
2
Endeavour Vol. xxx No. x
More than an appeal to justice, or even the taste of revenge, it is this promise of autonomy that most animates Elliot, who associates a relative lack thereof with his stifling complex of loneliness, grief, mental illness, and substance abuse. “How do we know if we’re in control?” he asks Krista (Gloria Reuben)—speaking this time, instead of imagining. “That we’re not just making the best of what comes at us, and that’s it? Trying constantly to pick between two shitty options,” like “Coke and Pepsi. McDonald’s or Burger King. Hyundai or Honda. . .You know, if our only option is Blue Cross or Blue Shield, then what the fuck is the difference?” He fumbles. “In fact, aren’t they— aren’t they the same?” For Elliot, impotence and indecision have merged as well. “No, man,” he sighs. “Our choices are prepaid for us, a long time ago. . .Might as well, just—you do nothing. Might as well do nothing.” In engaging with fsociety, Elliot is as outwardly torn between action and inaction, power and powerlessness, as he is internally. This is Mr. Robot’s central tension, irony, and paradox, because Elliot’s technical virtuosity renders him almost omnipotent among the less capable, whose personal accounts he hacks in futile yet irresistible attempts to fill his emotional voidness. By peering into the private lives behind the public faces, Elliot cannot help but reinforce his own cynical premonition that individuals reflect the same inauthenticity he sees in brands and advertising. “I liked coming here because your wifi was fast,” he tells the owner of a Manhattan coffee shop. “It’s good. So good it scratched that part of my mind, the part that doesn’t allow good to exist without condition.” So Elliot began intercepting all the traffic on the owner’s network with his laptop. “You made it really hard for anyone to see it, but I saw it”: a darknet server hosting 100 terabytes of child pornography. “The onion-routing protocol, it’s not as anonymous as you think it is. Whoever is in control of the exit nodes is also in control of the traffic. Which makes me,” he savors, “the one in control.” Elliot turns for the door just as the police arrive, pulling over his iconic black hoodie with the flourish of a nighttime vigilante. Undiluted, a hack-of-the-week formula could easily dissolve into the same populist potboiler the show so earnestly ridicules. Indeed, Mr. Robot often throws its anti-capitalist punches quite literally on the nose. In one early episode, an aspiring Evil Corp executive (Martin Wallström) beats a homeless man half to death over a petty professional setback: paying for the privilege, but sparing his fists the indignity with a pair of surgical gloves. Darlene has lifted fsociety’s mascot—a Guy Fawkes mask crossed with Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY”— from an obscure (fictitious) slasher-flick entitled The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie. “I mean, clearly what the film is doing is debunking the notion that America is a classless society,” she philosophizes as a croquet mallet cleaves the skull of an insufferable teenage prepster. “Meritocracy my ass.” In counterpoise, however, we see Elliot’s demons cause him to periodically abandon his one-man rebellion, while Darlene must hold together what she regards as a movement, despite dwindling support for fsociety’s revolutionary cause. While the two of them regularly thrill with
superhuman displays of technical competence, their victories seem increasingly like peaks in a Sisyphean struggle against a global order capable of repurposing even the most anarchic tendencies to its own end. The plot has become rather elliptic on this point, but there is no mistaking the significance of the painting that hangs behind the desk of Evil Corp’s CEO, Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer): a satirical, anthropomorphic map of Europe drawn in the fateful year 1914. “Isn’t that what history is all about?” Price challenges Terry Colby (Bruce Altman), his former CTO. “Politically, economically, geographically— imaginary lines being drawn and redrawn, over and over again?” As fsociety begins to disrupt the international market, Price perceives his own opportunity to draw a new map from the imaginary lines between the neoliberal institutions of banking and government. Meanwhile, Angela (Portia Doubleday), Elliot’s childhood friend, seeks her own path to autonomy within the Evil Corp machine, despite losing her mother just as Elliot did his father. Though sometimes implausible, her apprenticeship under Price and Colby has yielded moments of admirably quiet gravity. “You want to know, like, what it was like?” Colby ruffles when she confronts him about the meeting that precipitated the deadly environmental incident. “Like, um, did we all have cigars and laugh hysterically as we signed the evil documents? Is that what you pictured? Well, I’m sorry, hon. See the world doesn’t work like that.” She presses, but he can recall only the overabundance of shrimp cocktail, the open bar, the rain at the window. Angela scoffs at his frat-boyish boasts of drunken conviviality. “Did any of it ever give you or anyone pause when you made those decisions?” Colby’s swagger evaporates. “Yeah,” he sniffs. “Yeah, sure. But, um, then you go home, and you have dinner, you know, and then you wake up the next morning.” He trails off, turns to the balcony, and raises an arm to the sunshine flooding his Manhattan estate. Mr. Robot may not be “not saying anything new,” as Elliot himself acknowledges, but it is a remarkable iconoclasm nonetheless. In this, it follows the anti-consumerist provocation of Fight Club, an influence that Sam Esmail, the show’s creator and primary writer–director, flaunts proudly. But where Fight Club linked consumerism with emasculation and satirized a primordial, proto-fascistic form of manly violence, Mr. Robot may represent a generational shift toward the systemic causes of alienation. More than Project Mayhem, it is the idealism of Occupy and Anonymous that informs fsociety’s hactivist crusade. By reveling in technology’s seedy vulnerability—the corners cut in the interest of profit—they attack consumer capitalism along with the sociopolitical structures that impose it. Although the specific connections may never be entirely clear to him, Elliot has definitely implicated the global elite (“the guys that play God without permission”) in his personal, psychosocial immiseration. Even the agent hunting him—another lonely millennial—identifies less with her bureaucratic bosses than her opponent’s discontentment with the commodification of friendship itself. “Alexa, do you love me?” Dominique (Grace Gummer) asks her Amazon Echo in a moment of profound despondency.
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002
ENDE-632; No. of Pages 3
Review
Endeavour
Vol. xxx No. x
The featureless black cylinder hesitates as if considering whether to open the pod-bay doors. “That is not the kind of thing I am capable of.” Dom whispers, “yeah,” almost inaudibly, her despair melting into sleep. Does Mr. Robot portend an anti-capitalist turn among the rising generation, perhaps born of the demystification that comes from fluency with consumer electronics? While Esmail clearly understands millennial angsts and apathies better than any showrunner on television today, we should not confuse articulation with mobilization. Here, Mr. Robot bares its central contradiction once again. The series airs on basic cable, its anti-consumerist appeals brought to you by a few words from the very same
3
sponsors. (Even the show’s domestic broadcaster, USA Network, is owned by a despised Evil Corp doppelgänger: Comcast–NBCUniversal.) On Reddit, fans predictably discuss convolutions of plot rather than the politics of trust-busting or progressive taxation. The critique is an old one—that repackaging dissent as entertainment is the ultimate anodyne against it, regardless of authorial intent. And yet in one especially surreal sequence, Elliot sees not his own face reflected in his bathroom mirror, but Sam Esmail’s. Conflicted though it may be, Mr. Robot at least recognizes its double bind. As Elliot himself wonders, “how can I win when your opponent is—you?”
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Volmar, D., Far from the Lonely Crowd, Endeavour (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.05.002