Page - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

What all this points to in the case of Mr Robot is a belief that it can, and should, be subject to an analysis that reflects its intellectual sophistication, visual and phil- osophical density, and operationalizing of an active and reflective audience. As a work of imagination and cultural critique it provides engaging and useful insights into the process of attempting to challenge the technological systems that have infiltrated all personal and social relations today and does so by drawing upon a range of key religious ideas and concepts. The analysis offered here will work with the philosophical disposition of the series protagonist and those questions of transcendence, truth, and existence, he raises, to interrogate something of the ontological disruptions initiated by digital media technologies and the theologi- cal questions formulated within this process. Within the drama itself, we follow the perspective of the central character Elliot Alderson, a cyber-security engineer who moonlights as a computer hacker and leader of an Anonymous-type collec- tive operating under the name of fsociety.6 Their target is a global tech corpora- tion, E Corp, which is responsible for maintaining the vast majority of personal debt records across the globe. Hacking this system and erasing E Corp’s electronic archives is the motivation across Season One; Season Two deals with the conse- quences of this attack, and Season Three sees the attempt to reverse it.7 The char- acter of Elliot has a problematic relationship with another character named Mr Robot,8 with whom he engages in an ongoing dialogue over the ethics of the in- tended hack and who is revealed by the end of Season One to be an hallucinatory manifestation of his deceased father. His father died of leukemia when Elliot was a child, an event attributed to the calculated negligence of an E Corp subsidiary. Given this issue’s theme of apocalypse and authenticity, the article will, first- ly, locate the series within a frame defined by the concepts of habit and hope, as a way of engaging with its form and content. Secondly, it will consider the apoc- alyptic event around which the drama revolves as an intended system re-set and new beginning, that is revealing of a certain kind of truth alongside the subject who speaks to this truth. Thirdly, Elliot’s extraordinary ability for computer cod- ing and encryption links to certain ideas about secrets and their role in a notion of authority as that which is sustained by the possession of a key that can unlock and, by extension, also lock the sanctified data. Finally, the article addresses perhaps the most powerful aspect of the drama: Elliot’s paranoia and psychical fragmentation as he occupies this place on the edge of the system, where his mental and perceptual breakdown is the cost of his commitment to this act of erasure. The voice-of-the-Father that forcefully interjects into his stream of con- sciousness demanding that he “act” is understood here as a manifestation of 6 Anonymous is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. 7 Season one was broadcast first in June 2015, season two in July 2016 and season three in October-November 2017. 8 When referring to the character, standard type is used, when the series, italics. Mr Robot: Hacking the Apocalypse | 17www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30