Mr. Robot and the Schizophrenia of Capitalism

I finished Mr. Robot last night about an hour after seeing Parasite win best picture. It feels somewhat revelatory to see both of these things in the same year, and it becomes staggering to consider these only two of maybe a dozen similarly articulated and class conscious pieces of popular entertainment.

Mr. Robot is fundamentally a television program about mental illness and capitalism. It is, in my estimation, the greatest TV series made about capitalism, beyond the obvious (Breaking Bad and The Wire, etc) or the more niche (The extraordinary Wild Palms, to name one). It understands the mechanics of our current moment in a manner that is future forward, not backward looking. Where a series like Breaking Bad treats technology as an affect, a tool, to make calls with, to use in service of a plot that could largely exist in any era, Mr. Robot understands the way technologically feeds into the mechanics of who we are as people, the way that we are one with who we are online, and the way it has permanently altered our capacity to interpret, communicate and relate to both people and the world. 

It understands the schizophrenia caused by capitalism and made haywire by technology.

Much has been written about capitalism’s assault on our mental health. Author and academic Oliver James, writes that high levels of mental illness are essential to what he calls “Selfish Capitalism,” because “needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.” What James calls selfish capitalism, I call capitalism, but I digress.

Mr. Robot follows James’ rightful identification of mental health as an affect of an unfair society, and is a series marked by disorder - Dissaciative identities, depression, addiction, dependence, psychopathy, and megalomania. It’s also a series marked by a unique and pointed hatred of neoliberal capitalism, with actors seeking nothing less than the abolition of the banking class, and barring that, redistributing, in full, the wealth of the 1% of the 1%. 

It makes explicit that these two things are tied together. Elliot’s a protagonist with multiple identities, and his stark loneliness is a reflection of a world he feels perpetually alienated from. One of his personas is a protective ego, the one we spend the most time with is a vengeful id, determined to take out his anger on a system that has beaten down and immobilized the “real” Elliot. It’s a slick cinematic fantasy, a more stylish elevation of the compartmentalization by which we live our lives. 

As we are increasingly paralyzed by the world we live in, we take out or anger online, code switching from social network to social network, because it feels to us like an action that is viable, something that can be done simply, and that feels like some sort of retaliation against a system that is increasingly more cruel and more paralyzing at every material turn. Elliot’s condition in Mr. Robot is a sincere and genuine one, but it is also one that we are all hurtling toward under the conditions by which we currently live. 

I came across Frederic Jameson via Mark Fisher, and this specific quote from Postmodernism and Consumer Society sticks with me, when talking about the schizophrenia we feel as a part of modern capitalism: “schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time. On the other hand, the schizophrenic will clearly have a far more intense experience of any given present of the world than we do, since our own present is always part of some larger set of projects which force us selectively to focus our perceptions.”

For those of who are terminally online, who are confronted with bad news at the literal speed of thought, the sheer amount of information is untenable. We have the capacity to experience and learn more about the cruelty of our world in a day than prior generations would have had in a year. On one hand, it’s a valuable tool in articulating and organizing for a better world - we are called into action because of the immense change that is needed, not soon, but now. On another hand, it’s paralyzing to be faced with the immense cruelty of the world, to feel like you are a drop in an endless ocean, contributing to something, meaninglessly. 

And through it all, the information we experience scratches and exacerbates our already held mental illnesses, ballooning them into untenable forces in our lives, ones that require us to compartmentalize and re-compartmentalize ourselves in order to function. We live in the loop of living and working under capitalism, and we act outside of that in ways that never challenge that structure as we would like, in ways that make us angry, cruel, and never address the underlying loneliness of our conditions. 

One the reasons Mr. Robot is so compelling in its relationship to identity is its articulation of loneliness. Elliot has a support system. A loving sister. Kind friends. An activist community that shares similar interests. He’s not a particularly cruel or bad person. But the sense of isolation that cuts through every angled frame of the show, every monologue and every moment of human interaction, understands that the Elliot we are watching is at odds with everything around him. It’s a repeated state of mind for every major character on the show. The quirky obsessions of the rest of the cast cease to become asides and become integral parts of how we deal with the loneliness and paranoia we are forced to cope with, something to engage with on your terms, to consume and perfect and practice and dream of in a world where social relationships appear more and more flimsy at every turn. The show understands something that every cliched statement and op-ed describing us as “The most and least connected we’ve ever been,” does not: That as information accelerates, so do our relationships. There is a perpetual sense of missing out, instant knowledge of whether you’re in the in or out group. Friendships can begin, accelerate, end and fade in a matter of months. Small moments of connection cease to be miraculous experiences and instead become noise. 

News in real time, memes, and little hits of approval come and go at a pace we can’t keep up with, and we forget that people do as well. The boom-bust cycle of our economy is now reflected at lightspeed through the boom bust cycle of what so briefly makes us feel whole socially, from the material to the personal, and all of it exists in a hallucinatory unreality that we materially view through a screen but have no physical relationship with. We do, however, have a physical response to it. 

Our quiet illnesses, and panic attacks and physical ailments are intensified by the volume of content and humanity we consume and the ways we manufacture responses to it. An excision of every thought we’ve ever had slipping into a void in a way that is anxiously designed to put out a certain “best self” to prove that we can keep up with all the other manufactured “best selves” we see at any given time. There’s an aspirational, achieving quality to the presentation of aesthetics on the internet. We’re perpetually questioning why we aren’t those people, and those people are perpetually questioning why they aren’t us.  Mr. Robot is a piece of programming that embodies the visceral and hateful fantasy of cutting through the facade, penetrating into the recesses of someone’s search history, someone’s mind, someone’s life, and revealing them to be more miserable than you are. To know that the individuals you aspire to blow by are nothing but smoke and mirrors, and that you are the special and unique one.

We live in a system that demands we are ever wanting more, producing more, and desiring more, and one of the most insidious parts of late capitalism is the fact that we have largely become the agents perpetuating that want. Advertising and wealth have become so embedded in our on and offline social networks that a company needs to only pay a small fee to a few minor influencers and run a few bots to push a product before the want for that product perpetuates and reproduces itself through regular people alone, a snowball effect that ultimately makes us the billboard, the product, and the consumer all at once. Through this process of reproduction emerges a uniformity of aesthetics, of values, of semiotics, and of language. Memetics are not just relegated to image macros, they’re the driving force behind the fact that every “photographers photo” on Instagram looks the exact same, that every film on Netflix has “that look,” that there are guides to creating the most likely to be swiped Tinder profile, the most likely to go viral tweet.

 On some of these platforms there are rules you follow that make your material more profitable for the company, in the hopes that some of that profit will trickle down to you one day (YouTube pays out creators the most for 10-12 minute videos, for example, because it is also the most profitable for YouTube). To break from this uniformity is to do the unthinkable, and to be punished for it. To make this incarnate in Mr. Robot, take the villain, Whiterose, a wealthy and powerful Chinese woman who must present as a man in order to serve in the upper echelons of society. For her, it is easier to imagine the construction of a vast machine that will put her in a parallel universe where she can live her truth than live truthfully in her own world. For all the social progress we have made by fighting at the bottom, all marginalized people are only let up higher and higher as a result of our potential profitability, until we are largely indistinguishable from the ruling class we initially fought against. Whiterose doesn’t have to work through a white proxy, because there is a minority billionaire class now. To me, who is not the most informed, White Rose feels like the perfect articulation of a trans character in that space: trans right are good now, as they should be, but are not profitable enough to allow for an out trans Chinese billionaire. A few years ago, it was gay billionaires. Before that it was black billionaires, so on and so forth. 

This is not an organic process, or a symbiotic one. It is parasitical. It is like George Romero’s biting zombie consumer satire in Dawn of the Dead taken to its most aggressive, destructive endpoint. This is part of what makes Mr. Robot so enticing, that even its aesthetic construction is anathema to the uniform look of prestige TV. Its choices are daring and willing to alienate. It’s a small miracle it even got made, but hey, it was profitable too. 

There are those who are less terminally online, who are more checked out of the news cycle, but most people are locked into the social cycle. Deleuze would call the whole thing a part of the schizophrenia produced by capital, a deliberate method by which capitalism focuses and intensifies our mental illness so as to make us compliant. I’m more inclined to agree with Mark Fisher: It’s more of a bipolar disorder, one that functions as peaks and valleys in a cycle that both makes you too powerless to act at the bottom, and too happy to act at the top.

Mr. Robot’s solution to our neoliberal hellscape isn’t primitivistic. It presents one solution, to wipe out the financial records of the most powerful corporations on earth, and then sees society regress to a chaotic, near feudal state, still run by those corporations but in a way where out material conditions are even more flimsy. Mr. Robot understands that creating revolution without inculcating a popular vision of the society that comes next is a losing proposition. The next solution it presents is a total wealth distribution of the 1% of the 1%. This one is successful, the climactic hack of all hacks that ends the show’s cyberpunk mission. The material anxiety that guards our world, that forces us into our boxes, once removed, doesn’t do away with our problems, but it gives us the freedom to deal with them, to slow ourselves down, to not be crippled with the burden of the wealthy making immense and cruel choices we have little ways of pushing back against. 

It’s in this way that series creator Sam Esmail and his team understand that technology cannot be done away with simply. The tools and institutions on our computers and phones that govern our lives will not be done away with simply. We rely on them. We’re too disparate to not rely on them. They are a fabric of how we work, play, communicate and love in a manner that is more woven into us than the corporations that control them. But we can stave off the decline they cause if we organize for a better, more just physical world. 

And in between the beginning and the end, what we have is a depiction of a world that understands where we are, technologically. Our relationship to the smart home, our desire to dig below the surface of what people present, the uncomfortable tension in our relationships between the online and the real, that overwhelming desire to be someone, anyone other than who we are. We are not master hackers, we do not have a revolutionary cohort in the recesses of Coney Island, but we can relate to the loneliness of Mr. Robot. The effects of trauma, present and future. The overwhelming amount of data and humanity at our fingertips that we can never parse, no matter how many programs we write, no matter how we refocus our brains. We also have a valuable document about what it means to organize. What it means to build community, power through that community, and stick with people even when you’re most distant from them in service of a project that will make you and them and everyone else feel human again. 

It’s often said that we are in the golden age of television, but we’re also in the bronze age of an emerging, popular media of anti-capitalist resentment, one that doesn’t evangelize, but communicates the cruelty, beauty, and solidarity of our modern world through storytelling which rises above the schizophrenic glut of uniform productions that are slowly boring us, maddening us, and locking us into recursive loops of entertainment. Our dissociative state is breaking down, and we are at last getting to a place where our media reflects our moment - where the stories we tell will inspire us to feel, think, and organize into resurgent left wing movements.

Maybe this is temporary. Maybe it will be recuperated, or stamped out in the new red scare, but it’s valuable while it lasts. We have to make sure it does.

import sys

import random

ans = True

while ans:

    question = raw_input("Modern Cinema of Agitation: (press enter to compile) ")

    answers = random.randint(1,8)

    if question == "":

        sys.exit()

    elif answers == 1:

        print "Mr. Robot"

    elif answers == 2:

        print "Parasite"

    elif answers == 3:

        print "Last Black Man in San Francisco"

    elif answers == 4:

        print "2 Days 1 Night"

    elif answers == 5:

        print "I Daniel Blake"

    elif answers == 6:

        print "Leviathan"

    elif answers == 7:

        print "Chop Shop"

    elif answers == 8:

        print "Sorry to Bother You"