Mr Robot and Philosophy, page 5
Thomas More, the Non-Sense Peddler, and Elliot
Don’t worry, friend. I’ll return to my point about privacy, but we have a long way to go before that.
In 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote a book entitled Utopia (actually, its official name is much, much longer). More wrote it as a fictitious thought experiment, exemplified by the very title of the book Utopia, meaning “No place.” In the book, More recounts a conversation with a traveler he met named Raphael Hythloday, whose last name means something like “Non-sense Peddler.” This nonsense peddler tells More about the laws and customs of the people on the island of “No Place.”
Like Elliot, More himself seems to have been of two minds in this book. As you know, friend, Elliot suffers from delusions, and his psyche contains more than one personality: his own and that of his dead father, Mr. Robot. We’re even tempted to add in ourselves as personalities inside Elliot’s mind since we see events as they unfold from Elliot’s unreliable perspective, all while he communicates with us, the viewers, and carries us with him through the events of the show. There is a fractured perspective within one mind.
Likewise, More and Hythloday seem to represent a split in More’s own perspective, with Hythloday representing More’s idealistic side and More’s representation of himself in Utopia representing a pragmatic side that is willing to compromise.
While it’s unlikely that More believed that Utopia represented the best commonwealth possible, it provided him with an opportunity to critique the social norms of his own day, including the injustice and greed in his own society, and to imagine a more just society. Hythloday is a part of More’s personality that is unleashed and allowed to offer a scathing critique of English upper-class society that More’s own character in the book refrains from doing. Hythloday makes it clear to More that he would never have left Utopia and come back to England if not for wanting to spread news of this island to others. In his own way, this could be his way of saying, “F&%$ society!”
A Conspiracy of the Rich and the Legality of Hacktivism
In the opening episode of Mr. Robot, Elliot tells us about a group of super-rich people, “the top one percent of the top one percent,” who are “secretly running the world” (Hello, Friend). Elliot is referring to Evil Corp. They run the world and set the rules by which ordinary citizens have to live, and they hold a huge proportion of the population in what amounts to debt slavery.
The upper classes live in an abundance acquired on the backs of the labor and debt of others, like fsociety member Trenton’s parents about whom he comments, “They’re going to die in debt doing things they never wanted to do” (“eps1.6v1ew-s0urce.flv”). fsociety’s plan is to take matters into its own hands by wiping Evil Corp’s servers and freeing people from their debts.
We might question the illegal nature of hacktivism. We are a society governed by the “rule of law” after all. But what happens when those laws themselves do not further the cause of justice?
Hythloday takes this up in a discussion concerning the use of the death penalty for punishing theft in sixteenth-century England. Hythloday recounts a dinner at which a man noted his surprise at how thieves kept springing up despite the powerful deterrent of death by hanging. To this man, Hythloday notes the excessiveness of the punishment of death for theft while also making known the plight of the poor who have no work and no other way to survive. The man’s response is equivalent to that of an older relative commenting about people on government welfare: “They could get a job if they wanted to.”
Hythloday responds by pointing out the vulnerability of many workers, including those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by war, those who may be too old to learn a new trade, and those who are overlooked for someone who has been less weathered by life. Meanwhile, Hythloday points out, there are plenty of rich people who contribute nothing to society but simply live “off the labor of others,” while raising the rent on these same laborers and bleeding them dry.
It is the laborers who cause society to function and without whom it “would simply cease to exist.” However, Hythloday observes that working men (and women in our day) “sweat without reward or gain in the present but also agonise over the prospect of a penniless old age.” At this point, we can think of Angela’s father and the massive debt he found himself in at the end of his working years.
Not only does society take “the labor of their best years,” but “when they are worn out by age” and sick, it forgets “all their sleepless nights and services” and cares little about whether they “die a miserable death.”
To make matters worse, the rich attempt to “grind out of the poor part of their daily wages,” not in secret meetings behind closed doors but “by public laws.” The law, which should protect those who have the least, has been perverted to protect those who have the most. (Friend, pay attention now.) Hythloday then calls this “a conspiracy of the rich.” Hythloday’s words resonate with Elliot’s comments about a secret group of super rich people controlling the world.
We see an actual conspiracy of the rich take place in Mr. Robot, one part of which specifically affects Elliot’s life in a dramatic fashion. I am, of course, referring to the case of the 1993 Washington Township chemical leak. As you know, friend, this leak was responsible for the deaths of Elliot’s father and Angela’s mother, as well as twenty-four other employees of Evil Corp. The law was on the side of Evil Corp, which had indeed conspired to cover up their complicity in the incident. In a world where the rich hold the real power, even “the clearest matter in the world can be made cloudy and truth itself brought into question” through a legal loophole.
In this kind of world where the truth is buried so deeply and protected by the law, what can one do but break the law in order to bring the truth into the light of day? It was only by breaking the law that fsociety was able to make public the cover up of the Washington Township case, yet society is more likely to prosecute the hackers than the corporation that created the unjust conditions that led to the illegal hack. Likewise, Hythloday believes that the greed of a few ruins a society and creates the conditions whereby stealing to survive becomes necessary. England makes people thieves “and then punishes them for it.” He also imagines a scenario in which famine kills many thousands of people and supposes that if afterward “the barns of the rich were searched,” then one would find enough food to have saved the many poor who died so much that they never would have known that there was a food shortage.
Something is wrong with a world where blatant injustice can be covered up and the poor suffer and die while others around them live in luxury.
Money, Property, and Greed
Perhaps a conversation between Elliot and his psychiatrist Krista can shed some light on what is wrong with our world:
KRISTA: What is it about society that disappoints so much?
ELLIOT: [in an internal monologue] Oh, I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bull#$%& masquerading as insight. Our social media faking intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this, not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend. Because we’re cowards. F@#$ society! (“eps1.0_hellofriend.mov,” emphasis mine).
Elliot holds society responsible for its own ills, citing the power of private property and money for determining the type of society we live in.
Hythloday echoes Elliot’s critique of his own society, believing that “wherever you have private property, and money is the measure of all things, it is hardly ever possible for a commonwealth to be just or prosperous.” While people scramble to designate and protect their own private property, the endless numbers of lawsuits regarding property show how unnatural private ownership really is. Hythloday believes that a truly just society requires goods to be shared equally. Otherwise, no matter how plentiful goods are and how much people try to acquire as much as they can, “a handful of men end up sharing the whole pile, and the rest are left in poverty.” To make matters worse, those who own this pile are “the worst citizens.”
With this last description, it’s hard not to think about Evil Corp and some of its executives: Phillip Price, Tyrell Wellick, and Terry Colby. Evil Corp owns seventy percent of credit worldwide, keeping many people in debt slavery. Price, Wellick, and Colby show themselves to be terrible human beings throughout the series. Price, the power hungry CEO of Evil Corp, implies that he was responsible for murdering his predecessor and also mocks the weakness of Evil Corp EVP of Technology James Plouffe when he commits suicide on live television. Tyrell Wellick, aside from the creepy BDSM relationship he has with his wife (also a major creep), is willing to do whatever it takes to increase his own power and influence, attempting to seduce and then murdering the wife of his competitor for the CTO position at Evil Corp. Finally, Terry Colby, when initially confronted by Angela about the cover-up of the Washington Township incident, invites her to perform a degrading sex act before meeting with her a second time and telling her, “At the end of the day, money will always be better than what you’re looking for.”
This is akin to the world that Hythloday sees in sixteenth-century England, and he doubts that any real justice is possible “as long as private property remains.” To show that such a world is possible, he turns to the example of the Utopians, who have done away not only with private property, but privacy itself.
Privacy and Hacking Our Way to Utopia
See, friend, I told you I’d circle back to the issue of privacy. Were you worried? Were you concerned that I was leading you down a rabbit role that would take us far afield of where I started out? Don’t be worried. It will all make sense now.
Hythloday appeals to the made-up island of Utopia to address the problem of private property and the accumulation of money. Regarding Utopia, he says, “There is nothing private anywhere.”
In Utopia, even the entrances to people’s houses are easily accessible, not keeping anybody out, and houses are exchanged every ten years. Everyone eats in common mess halls because enough is provided for everyone so that there is no reason for anyone to eat in private at home. In religious services, “everyone’s public behavior is supervised.” Before traveling, you must obtain permission, and people usually travel in groups. There are “no hiding places; no spots for secret meetings . . . they live in the full view of all.”
A lack of such clandestine places can prevent those in power “from conspiring together to alter the government and enslave the people.” A conspiracy of the rich can’t take place when the rich are unable to hide behind the veil of privacy. This veil is what fsociety seeks to break through with their hacks.
You could argue that it is this veil of privacy that allows the very corruption we all disdain to grow and fester away from where any of us can see it, not just in corporate boardrooms and the halls of government power, but even in our own lives. The very right to privacy we think keeps us safe also allows multiple injustices in the world to be covered over.
In some ways, we’re all like Elliot. We want the corruption in the world to be exposed, but we ourselves also feel alone and fragmented by the private worlds that separate us from each other. In Utopia, however, everyone is “at home everywhere.” Hythloday says, “The whole island is like a single family.” No one is doing meaningless work (like working at Allsafe to protect Evil Corp’s records) to protect the luxury and privacy of the rich and corrupt, but there are plenty of goods for everybody.
When fsociety finally succeeds in their plan to destroy all of Evil Corp’s records, they do so while promising the inauguration of a new world, as Mr. Robot, wearing a mask, declares:
Evil Corp, we have delivered on our promise as expected. The people of the world who have been enslaved by you have been freed. Your financial data has been destroyed. Any attempts to salvage it will be utterly futile. Face it: you have been owned. We at fsociety will smile as we watch you and your dark souls die. That means any money you owe these pigs has been forgiven by us, your friends at fsociety. The market’s opening bell this morning will be the final death knell of Evil Corp. We hope as a new society rises from the ashes that you will forge a better world. A world that values the free people, a world where greed is not encouraged, a world that belongs to us again, a world changed forever. And while you do that, remember to repeat these words: “We are fsociety, we are finally free, we are finally awake!”
So maybe we should thank Elliot, Mr. Robot, and fsociety. And Anonymous. And Julian Assange. And Edward Snowden. Maybe they are helping to tear down the veil of privacy that allows injustice to be perpetuated in the world.
5/9 and Unintended Consequences
But wait, friend, before you start calling me a traitor. Or a communist. Not that I mind. You can think what you want. You’re just a made-up reader in my mind anyway.
I want to remind you that Utopia is a work of fiction, and More has written it in a way that the moral superiority of Utopia isn’t quite airtight. As I said earlier, More seems to divide his own opinion between two different characters, a version of himself and Hythloday. This divide represents More’s practical and idealistic sides, but more importantly, it represents the reality that in any society there may be conflicting moral claims that require people to make difficult choices, the practical implementation of which may lead to unintended consequences.
After the 5/9 hack, the consequences of fsociety’s actions weren’t quite what they expected. The freedom they thought they would achieve quickly gave way to hardship for those they sought to help and a different form of social disruption than they intended. Meanwhile, the rich still conspired to further their own agenda, while the crumbling society negatively affected the very people fsociety sought to help.
So, friend, what can we say?
Perhaps only that any idealist dream should be cautiously implemented, for the practical effects of our good intentions may not produce the results that we intend.
It isn’t that we shouldn’t dream of a better world, and maybe the elimination of privacy would indeed lead to a more just world.
But here, More’s voice is quite valuable, as he notes that some of the customs of Utopians are “really absurd” although there are “many features in our own societies that I would wish rather than expect to see.”
In trying to create a more just society, we ought to be mindful of our inability to control the outcomes of our actions.
To my hacker friends who try to lift the veil of privacy in order to expose corruption, be careful that your Utopian dreams don’t become a nightmare.
5
We Become the Grid
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
What do you know about Leviathan? Nothing? Good. You’re not supposed to know. Does fsociety worry you? It worries me. Yet, they’re just amateurs when put up against Leviathan. C’mon, stupid Guy Fawkes masks? Before we get to Leviathan there is the burning question we must all be asking.
Have we become the grid?
The military gave birth to packet switching technologies in the 1960s in the form of ARPANET. The idea was to continue the flow of information should the Russians kill various facilities with nuclear strikes. In other words, the military octopus could continue to communicate even if a few of its limbs were cut off. Duplicate data, split it up, send it on different journeys. Put it back together at the right node. Nothing is lost because it’s replicated.
Well, the octopus has become a world-wide slime mold, gigantic, ubiquitous, duplicitous, interconnected, necessary, and for the most part free . . . sure. How do you define free?
What theoretical limit can anyone see for the grid as long as there are humans to feed it? It’s sustenance of choice: information. Free information. The world has become honeycombed with server farms that produce and store like fat cells the edible nourishment for the internet . . . information. If the grid is everywhere, how much control does it have? All your appliances. Like Darlene’s house that goes haywire at the beginning of Season 2.0.
Information
Soon there will be nothing important that is not connected to or feeding, feeding the Leviathan.
—Anonymous
Thomas Hobbes saw war as the state of nature, everyone out for themselves. The grid was born in cold war where mutual assured destruction kept both Russia and the US from slitting each other’s throats in a zero-sum game. Then, with the internet everything devolved further into anarchy, even deeper into the state of nature. No one has control; everyone can be out for themselves. However, that is changing.
Hobbes’s Leviathan is the absolute ruler, the one for whom you have awe which is why you obey Leviathan and conform to the state of laws. The 1% × 1%, those who will control the hackverse, will become the Leviathan. fsociety is the feeble first step on the path to Leviathan.
You today hold the power of the grid in awe—thinking that it is yours, but it’s not. It won’t be free, because the absolute ruler, Leviathan will become your ruler. You see, fsociety will learn as it has with Elliot, that the blunt tactics of releasing debt by blowing up data storage facilities won’t fly. They think they control Elliot, but do they?
So, will Leviathan be more like the five families of the New York mob? You think Russians and Ukrainians won’t want to backdoor each other? Chaos! Brings nothing but heat. Dark Army? No. No. No. The Leviathan will be smarter than all of these. They aren’t hackers for hire, vendetta coders; they have no desire for petty squabbles over who controls the sex sites. These tactics will not be their modus operendi. Zombie master of the botnet? No, it isn’t denial of service . . . it’s the control of the service.
