“Do you think you’re free? You’re not free. Your lives are not your own.”

The latter was put to us as part of a Facebook Live stream, apparently coordinated by the hacker group, fsociety, for USA Network’s award-winning series Mr. Robot. We are reminded in the clip that the function of consumerism under capitalism is to keep the majority complaisant, via their accumulation of extraneous goods – “Brand A or Brand B” – and the avid consumption of a bread and circuses media.

Orwellian entertainment

It’s serious stuff, for mainstream TV, even if the clip was a marketing tool to get you to watch the series. Herein lies a contradiction: a series decrying consumerism, its attendant marketing and the habits of the herd, has become part of its own problem.

The anti-consumerist ethos in Mr. Robot has been compared – the creators gratefully acknowledged this comparison – to the film Fight Club: Its irreverent sentiments towards the spending of money to keep us moderately content, and apropos our thoughts about politics, to keep us docile, constantly on a dull-charge. Long before Fight Club popularized anti-consumerism, and long after Roman satirist Juvenal talked about pānis et circēnsēs, George Orwell made claims that it was consumerism acting as a blight on the progress of mankind.

In Orwell’s 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier, an exposition of poverty in northern England, Orwell writes:

“Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.”

Diverting revolution through consumption of artless entertainment, unnecessary luxuries, lotteries, and if all else fails prescription drugs, also seems to be what Mr. Robot it trying to get across to us. Orwell doesn’t credit the governing class, enshrouded elites, for coming up with this method of control as fsociety does, rather he sees our consumerism as “an unconscious process — the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.”

For Orwell there was no round table of machinating elites as we see in Mr. Robot, rather consumerism is just the natural consequence of capitalism, hard  work and poverty. This is important, because Mr. Robot is part of the stock that fulfills the common needs, according to Orwell. Not all “movies” are distractions though, and some might serve to educate us.

Thus spoke Mr. Robot

In the Facebook clip fsociety tells us that politics is a sham, that our choice between Side A and Side B is the illusion of choice, as our capitalist masters have rigged the game and each side is the same. Our ideals have become a bland consumer choice, and for the most part the majority lacks the intelligence to outwit disingenuous politicians and the media that provides them a soapbox.

In German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 book, On The Genealogy of Morality, he also blames consumerism for the “Undeniable and palpable stagnation of the German spirit.” The cause of this, he says, is “a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music.”

We are led to believe that Mr. Robot is, like the former authors, espoused to enlightening the majority and making society a more functional place to be. fsociety tells us, “Together we can build a new world where we are finally free.” This also sounds kind of Nietzschean, a world in which the rabble clears their heads of mainstream thought, ignites their will and becomes enlightened. I make these comparisons only to exemplify the serious subject matter of one of the world’s most popular television shows.

These are good sentiments in Mr Robot. One could hardly criticize a series for advocating social harmony; scrutiny of consumerism and the proliferation of myriad mind-numbing addictions; the chicanery of marketing; the maneuvers of our world leaders through a public relations machine, in the words of Edward Bernays, pioneer of public relations, designed to “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and control us. For Bernays, control of the herd is necessary, the alternative is chaos.

The revolution will not be televised

We must congratulate Mr. Robot for bringing these issues to mainstream television, but at the same time we might also ask if there is a danger in trivializing, or devaluing the issues under the sheen of televised entertainment. That by consuming the issues as entertainment we might be taking them more lightly, posting the memes to our Facebook walls, becoming a social media activist, content that we’ve done our bit by watching Mr. Robot.

In light of what Orwell and Nietzsche said above, is there contradiction in consuming the series Mr. Robot at the same time as advocating what it is supposedly against? Will such a series really spur a revolution, or act merely as another pacifier, palliative, a distraction? Moreover, the bigger it becomes it may lose some amount of respectability as it becomes more of a money-making machine for the corporation that owns it. The revolution will not be televised.

Series creator Sam Esmail and lead actor Rami Malek seem quite serious about the ethos behind the series. In an interview Malek recently said, “People are spending so much time staging photos — what they’re eating, how much fun they’re having … even the way they shape their faces in the pictures is contorted … Everything is filtered. Everything is manicured. It’s a house of cards and it’s going to come crashing down one day and you with it.” Social media is the enemy of well-being according to the script, and it’s also part of the reason Mr. Robot is so successful.  The Facebook trick, hack, was a master play. It went viral. Mr. Robot can’t afford to “Fuck Social Media.”

One would be hard pressed to sell narcissistic consumerism as a means to existential fulfillment and day-today well-being. Malek has a point, and most of us know it. But did he mean it? Is this all just a game, a hoax in itself, to promote the series and, in the end, make a lot of money? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can you sell-out with integrity, exploit the platforms you decry, be a commercial success, and also retain your plausibility as an iconoclastic series?

Cynicism opted by television

The clip above from the film My Dinner with Andre aligns with the ethos behind Mr. Robot. It’s serious, weighty entertainment. Nonetheless, you might ask if it were turned into a blockbusting series could it retain its profundity and sincerity? It wasn’t created with longevity in mind, even though it’s lately been brought back to life via social media as a description of how we live now. Can something become firmly established in the mainstream and remain fundamentally anti-mainstream? Ideals, such as in the series, run the risk of just becoming fashion. If this happens the art is degenerated, sullied by its own success. At what point does humanitarian art become commercial farce?

Esmail seems sincere in interviews, describing the advent of increased feelings of loneliness due to a slight denuding of social bonds as a result of us spending more time with technology and less time interacting with flesh. He told LA Times in an interview, “The irony is not lost on me,” speaking about making an anti-corporation series on a TV channel owned by one of the world’s largest corporations.  Esmail added, “We all went through that in our younger years, where we have this youthful revolutionary spirit in us — and I think Comcast understands that. They know the show is about this guy’s journey and not this whole anti-corporate polemic.”

Esmail might be wrong here, the spirit of cynicism and revolution in the show mirror the present reality of governments swayed by business interests and a growing number of people disenchanted with ‘the system’.

Mr. Robot is entertainment, but at the same time one of the reasons for its success is the fact it covers serious issues that people right now are taking very seriously. It’s a reemergence of Orwellian ideas, from Big Brother insecurity to seemingly intractable poverty.  I wonder what Mr. Orwell would make of the series if we could bring him back to life and school him on the last 65 years he missed, especially what he’d think about the Mr. Robot printable cut-outs available on USA Network’s website. First time tragedy, second time farce?

Exploiting known issues

The reason I’m discussing the authenticity of Mr. Robot is only because it tries so hard to be authentic – on and off screen. Esmail has often sounded wise and passionate in interviews concerning his chosen topic, stating that it was the Arab Spring movement that, in part, inspired the series. What we have is a revolutionary series, owned and propagated by its enemies. The series owes much of its success to what seems like honesty and pathos in depicting some of the more foreboding matters concerning technology consumption, inequality and government control. But this honesty will be difficult to maintain given that the series is also a lucrative entertaining commodity.

The fact that’s it’s mainstream entertainment does make its sentiments precarious, and perhaps help dilute, sensationalize and so trivialize serious problems that exist in the world. At the same time it brings important issues into the mainstream, and God knows it’s far better than most television. It’s difficult to assess its goodness, or how serious it is about its subject matter.

Season 2 of Mr. Robot starts July 13^th.

Photo credit: USA Network