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in an effort to secure final closure. Here (fig. 1), he rages at attempts to naively ap- peal to a transcendent power, expressed in a sort of Karamozovian moment,26 in a group therapy session, as they are sat underneath a figure of Jesus on the cross: Is that what God does? He helps? Tell me, why didn’t God help my innocent friend who died for no reason while the guilty roam free? Okay. Fine. Forget the one-offs. How about the countless wars declared in His name? Okay. Fine. Let’s skip the random, meaningless murder for a second, shall we? How about the racist, sexist, phobia soup we’ve all been drowning in because of Him? And I’m not just talking about Jesus. I’m talking about all organized religion. Exclu- sive groups created to manage control. A dealer getting people hooked on the drug of hope. His followers, nothing but addicts who want their hit of bullshit to keep their dopamine of ignorance. Addicts. Afraid to believe the truth. That there’s no order. There’s no power. That all religions are just metastasizing mind worms, meant to divide us so it’s easier to rule us by the charlatans that wanna run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly written sci-fi franchise. If I don’t listen to my imaginary friend, why the fuck should I listen to yours? People think their worship is some key to happiness. That’s just how He owns you. Even I’m not crazy enough to believe that distortion of reality. So fuck God! He’s not a good enough scapegoat for me.27 Elliot can rail against the absurdity of a caring, purposeful God, but at the same time he never ceases to search for the truth in what is an increasingly feverish drive to establish something foundational. Yet this merely sees him wracked by doubt and perpetually tormented due to this irresolvable spiral of distrust. Like- wise, the 5/9 hack, as the event is named, has apparently produced not a new world, but simply a degraded old one that is materially worse for the ordinary people it was meant to liberate. The primary outcome of all of this is that E Corp emerges stronger and takes even greater economic control by establishing its own crypto-currency.28 Elliot can denounce God but the issue is whether he con- stantly shifts his appeal to authority elsewhere, never able to finally settle. So how has philosophy addressed such questions as they relate to an explic- itly resistant and political project of radical transformation? At this point, I want to turn again to Alain Badiou and his work Being and Event to unpack some of these issues and think through the relationship between event and subjectivi- 26 See Dostoevsky 1992, 237–246. 27 Mr Robot 2.03 (00:45:04–00:47:39). 28 This raises the intriguing idea that, ultimately, Elliot himself is merely a manifestation of the abstract machine that is capitalism. Don DeLillo makes reference to the idea that protest plays a key role in the continuation of capital in his allegorical novel Cosmopolis, where the main character speculates on an anti-capitalist protest as a functioning as a form of ‘systemic hygiene’ that is revealed by ‘shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state’, DeLillo 2003, 99. Mr Robot: Hacking the Apocalypse | 23www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30