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The rejection of an external transcendent agency plays out in Mr Robot as an interior dialogue that fragments into endless, fractal digressions, unable to re- solve into a final authoritative voice. This fits with both a contemporary cultural mood and the serial form itself, which operates with an open and deferred, nev- er-finally-resolved, character motivation. Elliot and Mr Robot appear trapped in a zero-sum game where one seeks to initiate a radical change in the world with all its attendant violence, and the other shows signs of the exhaustion that hov- ers over any shift between event and void.34 At this point, we can ask the question of whether, in fact, this is an event? Stripped of any engagement with a wider collective, it is the action of a single mind, with the small group of fsociety hackers functioning as subdivisions of Elliot’s personality. Waking up one morning to find that, without warning, the global records of debt have been wiped out, would propel us not into a new world of freedom or a fresh start but rather into a materially worse one, stuck in a state of limbo whilst the same powerful forces regroup, ready to emerge with even tighter economic and political control. An action concomitant with exactly how the State responds to any acts of terrorism that aim to destabilize it. To this extent, Mr Robot fundamentally offers a liberal critique of the wish-fulfillment fantasies of this techno-anarchist idea of change that has nothing to with imag- ining revolution as a collective process of radical social transformation out of which something truly new could emerge. CRYPTOGRAPHY In this section, I address an aspect of the series that resonates greatly with re- ligious notions of apocalypse, namely, the encryption process at the heart of the 5/9 hack. What we find in Mr Robot is not an attempt at destruction per se, such as an attempt to simply delete the records, but rather the encryption of all the data using a highly secure 256AES key.35 This key is then set to self-destruct, making it impossible for E Corp to retrieve the data through any later decryp- tion. Therefore, to encrypt is make hidden or secret. The word crypt derives etymologically from the same source and refers to ritual rooms found beneath religious buildings. This sense of descending rather than ascending is a useful way of characterizing Elliot’s journey as he goes from the light of the cathedral into the gloom of the vault. In modern terms, a crypt is also a burial vault where family members are interred, hence the appearance of the ghost of his father. Creatively, all of these associations become manifest in Mr Robot, a series that is nominally about living in an advanced computer technological world of 34 S2:04 Elliot and Mr Robot play several games of chess to resolve the question of who is dominant. All end in stalemate. 35 Advanced Encryption Standard. 26 | John Lynch www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30