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surveillance and control. Visually within the drama, this opposition between such spaces can be seen in the light and order of the official and sanctified spac- es of All Safe and E Corp, with their corporate design and brightly lit offices, in comparison to the hacker collective fsociety, which operates out of a disused Coney Island arcade, a kind of crypt where Elliot’s dead father is alive and, in his mind at least, acts as the leader of the project. In an encryption process, the key is what allows the data to be de-ciphered; otherwise it remains meaningless. In the show, the key itself is destroyed, but Elliot remains as the agent of deciphering, the only one who can engineer a possible decoding. Being in possession of the key is therefore to have abso- lute power as a mediator. Partly, then, this is a process for establishing secure communication between parties who are aware of the presence of adversaries whose role is to hack into the conversations. In cryptography, this agent is given the designation “Eve”, the one who accesses forbidden knowledge. For Elliot, possession of this key gives him power as he is able to intervene in a person’s life and make changes that will affect them profoundly, as we see throughout the show, whether a coffeeshop owner exposed as a child-porn profiteer or the secretly-married boyfriend of his therapist. Each one is confronted by Elliot and presented with the hacked information, rendering them stripped of their au- thority and subsequently rendered powerless. But such dominance drives Elliot to ever-greater isolation as he draws away from social interactions and retreats into loneliness, paranoia, and hallucination, highlighting the social cost of such a process.36. Ultimately, by Season Two, Elliot is literally in a prison of his own making, reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s words in “The Wasteland”, a poem centrally concerned with the degradation of daily life because of technology: … I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison …37 A CRYPTO-APOCALYPSE At the heart of Mr Robot is the idea of a secret and the role of the apocalypse in revealing it to the world, a revelation. Elliot is the decoder of the conspiracy that seeks to continue to hide this truth from the world, those powerful agents who 36 Dave Boothroyd writes of this process and the ontological uncertainties unleashed by it: “It is because the very idea of full and open disclosure is a logical impossibility that not only will conspiracy theorising dog those who claim to practise such a policy, but, may one not also ask in all seriousness: can anyone ever really know entirely whether or not by disclosing anything at all they have acted as someone else’s stooge?” Boothroyd 2013, 120. 37 Eliot 1922, lines 410–416. Mr Robot: Hacking the Apocalypse | 27www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30