If you haven’t seen Mr Robot I’d suggest you stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s up there with TD:1’s pessimism, The Leftovers’s post-traumatism, and Rectify’s contemplation as one of the great show of recent years. I don’t get all the hacker humour but the show works brilliantly even without that insight. Madness, paranoia, revolutionary desire/impotence, addiction, the inability to cope, machinic warfare, and the lurking sense that we are all the puppets of various determinant forces- the invisible hand of markets; biological programming and its machinic hacking; the formations of the past that limit the plasticity of the present. I’m not writing a review or critical essay or whatever. I just wanted to say you should watch it. Then you should get drunk. Below are some clips that may contain spoilers. But seriously, if spoilers actually spoil anything for you its time you grew up. It may be that Mr Robot is the TV show of the post-nihilist age.
These are a few tastes of the show’s protagonists explicit philosophy:
Fuck Society- on immersion into simulation as anaesthesia
Lonliness- intimacy among dividuals in the age of hyperconnection
The Illusion of Choice- just, yeh…