Mr. Robot

Reality is just a state of mind

Rami Malek and Chistian Slater in Mr. Robot

One of the series I belatedly caught up on is “Mr. Robot” (2015–2019).

I watched all four seasons back-to-back, and it was a truly emotional journey.

The main character is a hacker, Elliot Alderson, played by the very talented Rami Malek, who wants to destroy the “System” and rebuild it from scratch.

It may seem trivial when put like this, but in reality this series offers an extreme representation of the current world that is scary, precisely because we realise how much we really could be moving in that direction, and perhaps we already are.

This “System” is initially represented by E-Corp (renamed by the protagonist Evil Corp, which in reality corresponds to large corporations like Amazon or Google, but which in the story is so deeply embedded in every area of people’s lives (hardware, software, banking, electronic money … everything is managed or sold by this company) that it leaves no room for anything else. Added to this is the Dark Army, a group of “bad” hackers led by a certain Whiterose, but who in fact depend on another financial group that controls the entire world, E-Corp included.

Fighting against all this is our Elliot and his Fsociety.