Mr. Robot Reflection
While watching the first few episodes of Mr. Robot, I couldn’t help but feel some awkwardness while tweeting about it because I felt as if my followers were judging me for not watching this amazing show before now (I highly doubt anyone even cared).
That was the best part I realized: no one cared. I could tweet hundreds of different things about Mr. Robot and while I may lose a few followers in the process, none of it mattered as long as I enjoyed the show. Okay, maybe there’s that small 2% of my followers population that would maybe care but at least they’d know I think vigilantism and technological hackings are pretty cool.
The first two episodes didn’t miss a step. Rami Malek’s Elliot can be seen as a socially awkward Robin Hood, just casually hijacking the private lives of internet users and exposing their dirty deeds. He even goes so far as to making sure the cops arrest a child porn distributor, fully mentioning that he has no interest in money. Initially, it looks like he’s doing great deeds but from a privacy standpoint, is Elliot a hero or lover of chaos?
It could be a little of both but the scariest part is that to develop this complex character, the show’s writers had to be basing Elliot off of someone or even a group of people. The fact that there are people out there on the internet, potentially getting pleasure out of seeing me write blog posts or post vacation photos is both intriguing and terrifying to me. None of us are ever alone and we’re never fully protected, no matter what are antivirus programs may be telling us.
Because I was so enthralled by the show, I live tweeted a whopping one time but it was the only way to explain how I felt. All of us are part of “the reality of the naïve,” thinking that the internet is a safe haven that is being protected and censored from the garbage of the world. The real message to get from Mr. Robot about “the reality of the naïve” is that sometimes, breaking the rules and not conforming is better than going with the current. Also, it’s important to remember that Starbuck’s network could be like Ron’s Coffee: someone’s always watching.
