Page - 28 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

continue to “con people into believing something” as Philip Price puts it in re- sponse to the state of panic after the 5/9 hack.38 But by seeking out and confront- ing this conspiracy, Elliot slips into paranoia – “I think they are following me” – because the machine that he confronts is already paranoid, it is what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the “paranoid social machine”.39 Elliot channels the perse- cuting voices into the voice of his father, as the antagonist against his self. Para- noia is never straightforward, however, for it always asks: What does this mean? Similarly, Elliot constantly searches for the authority behind the signs he encoun- ters in his pursuit of the event. Whilst his psychoanalyst attempts to map Elliot’s thoughts onto a concealed cause, an origin, a traumatic moment that is grounded on a One, he simply censors his spoken words and hacks her life, reads her secrets, identifies her sadness, and finds her point of vulnerability to manipulate her. The apocalypse functions here in the way it has traditionally worked: as sin- gularizing reaction against the sense of ever-multiplying states of being, as resistance against empire, a kind of counter-universality.40 Sam Esmail, whose family is Egyptian, has stated that the show was inspired by the Arab Spring as well as Occupy Wall Street and public awareness of the reach of big data.41 Whilst such social movements provide useful dramatic form for the series and its characterizations, there remains the question of the nature of the vision ar- ticulated through the series’ explicit formulations of something like the fiction- al 5/9 hack. The essential emptiness of the event – by necessity its secret and singular nature makes it devoid of any collective force – can be interpreted as a cynical response to the belief in radical change as its failures are revealed. As we have seen, on many levels, Mr Robot is concerned with secrets and it is precisely here that the notion of apocalypse as revelation gains its purchase. However, I would argue that the series has such wide resonance not so much because of the naïve idea of a conspiracy driven by the “1 % of the 1 %” but rath- er because of a growing awareness that the relatively slower unfolding techno- logical apocalypse of contemporary society reveals that today there are actually no longer any secrets.42 If there is a conspiracy, it is one organized around the storage of secrets as data for potential manipulation by subversive agencies. 38 Mr Robot: 2.02 (00:08:09). 39 Deleuze/Guattari 1983. 40 Portier-Young 2011. 41 McAlone 2016. 42 Jacques Derrida writes in a text dated 1994, later published in the book, A Taste for the Secret, “I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. I can rephrase this in terms of political ethics: if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. Derrida 2001, 59. 28 | John Lynch www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30