Is this season going to have a lot of "weird" stuff going on as well?
I watched the first one. I enjoyed the first few episodes, seemed like it was going to be a drama about people working in InfoSec. Definitely appreciated the relative plausibility of the hacks. Was very disappointed when it turned into a psycho-druggie-anonymous-whatever sort of thing. It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.
I understand how that's more appealing to a wider audience. Just saying what I'd prefer personally for my own sake.
The first two episodes were definitely on the 'trippy' side of things.
I wish they'd ditch the whole split-personality plot, but seems like we're stuck with it. It's not a disaster, just sort of tiresome. Seems cheap when compared to the rest of the show's plotting, and I was hoping there'd be less focus on it this season now the 'reveal' is done with. I think it's mainly that they want to keep Christian Slater on screen.
The trippy 'Lynchian' stuff really doesn't work for me here either, it seems out of place/poorly handled. Judging by the critics/friends though, I think I'm in the minority there. I think the show is generally a victim of its writer's grandiose ambitions; it wants to appear epic and sophisticated but it ends up oversimplifying.
I feel like the split-personality plotline kind of undermines the rest of the show. This show gained early praise for its more realistic portrayal of both mental illness and technology but I feel like as soon as you go down the path of "oh he actually hallucinates people, loses track of time, etc" all the realistic parts get thrown out of the window. This plot seems to have taken over the corporate espionage/corporate morality vs new age civil disobedience which is what made me like the show in the first place. That being said, the style and direction of this show still puts it above most.
I might be weird, because I'm the opposite. I find the whole "fight the man" anonymous posturing stuff kind of juvenile and even cringe-worthy at times (though I kind of liked the nod to tinfoil hatters with the "crisis actor" murder; I'm hoping this is part of further self-aware plot development where E Corp is revealed to not be quite as bad as originally portrayed). The hacking side is cool, but the politics feel extremely shallow.
Yet I find the psychological issues and split personality exploration really fascianting. Is it realistic? No, not at all. But I like how the actor portrays Elliot's anguish.
Same feeling here. I stopped watching after the first complete-hallucinations episode. It simply doesn't make sense to include those. There are some movies where hallucinations are either important or the main part of the plot (fear and loathing, requiem for the dream, scanner darkly, ...), but if it's just a case of the main character tripping? Just show me them behaving like an idiot in real world. In most cases it literally does not make any difference what they're seeing.
The brilliance of the show is that it portrays dissociative disorders in an extremely realistic fashion.
If you didn't identify with that, then you're obviously not part of the subculture that the show portrays and is really made for. Mr Robot is not about the drugs or computer hacking, it's far more grandiose than that. Similarly to Fight Club, it can be viewed as a social study of a subculture that's operating on the frontier of consensus reality and could characterize where that reality will shift in the future.
Have you had to juggle multiple identities in your head, every day for years if not decades? Have you thought what this does to you?
Have you had to keep secrets from everyone around you?
Have you "felt" what cyberspace really is about? Have you experienced the VICIOUS feedback loop of projecting a thoughtform/idea (what the audience views as "hacking") into that new domain only to have it manifest and achieve its own reality, as if by magic?
The technical aspects of the show are by far the least interesting.
I would agree that the technical aspects of the show aren't very interesting, but the way that they are dealt with is remarkable and refreshing for a TV show. Usually these plot lines are jarring to me, but in Mr. Robot they aren't, because they're well researched to be in line with the verisimilitude the rest of the show seems to strive for. It's an aspect of the show (along with it's characters and more on-the-nose satire) that I enjoy.
Usual disclaimer that this is my opinion, not trying to come off as snobbish though it might sound that way, but personally, like in Fight Club, I find the show's 'grandiose' attempts to be more than little simplistic. It doesn't effectively/subtly explore anxiety, isolation, schizophrenia, depression etc as well as I think it thinks it does. Honestly most of that narrative feels cheap and repetitive to me.
Taken as a satire ('Evil Corp', FSociety/Anonymous etc), the show works for me, but when it spends time plumbing Eliot's mental illness, it becomes dull to me. Some of it I appreciate, and in smaller doses it might work, but for me it's overblown and only elevated by the show's sense of style, not because it's telling the viewer anything of particular interest, or actually advancing any of the plotlines/character developments. I think the show is worse for it.
Having said all that I enjoy the show a lot. I'm just not willing to heap praise upon it since I have these reservations.
>> "Have you "felt" what cyberspace really is about? Have you experienced the VICIOUS feedback loop of projecting a thoughtform/idea (what the audience views as 'hacking') into that new domain only to have it manifest and achieve its own reality, as if by magic?"
What would be an example of this?
Are you referring to something similar to multiple discovery:
Hacking [breaking boundaries, making the seemingly impossible possible by pure force of will] is the archetypal example of this. Obviously, the discipline is not new and has been present for thousands of years, any sort of artistic/creative process encapsulates it.
The arrival of cyberspace however and its subsumption of more and more aspects of our everyday lives acts as a positive feedback loop. What was unthinkable or even heretical 20-30 years ago is now routine.
In a sense, we are witnessing a new paradigm shift where the intermediate substrates (mind/inception to manifestation) are being dissolved and the feedback loop gets shorter.
>What was unthinkable or even heretical 20-30 years ago is now routine
You can see this with the subsequent breakdown of social structure and monetary philosophy. The masses are reaching harmonization through their own voices rather than having a conductor leading them (politician/bankers/middlemen in general)
Ok, it's not just me. I also find the split personality thing is a huge distraction and they spend a lot of time on it while glossing over everything else that is going on.
Agreed, they need a way to keep Christian Slater on screen. My guess, they'll realize the split-personality is tiresome, and bring the the real person back from the dead somehow.
Strongly Disagree. Not only is he great to watch, I think his entire career combines to enhance his fit for the character he is playing. To me it's as though all his previous roles were sort of past lives, partially remembered in the mind of this darkly motivated hacker-Loki persona.
> It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.
It's understandable that a lot of people on HN went in expecting a realistic show about hacking, and wound up with a much more abstract (and arguably ambitious) show about mental health, drug use, the role of corporations in society and politics, hacking, etc. I can see how that might be disappointing, but personally I like it.
But I don't think it's a fetishization of hackers. It's a stylized, exaggerated portrayal of many elements of society, that happens to include hackers.
This is what hacking really is about. The discipline has nothing to do with computers and can be applied to everything. Those who are fixated on the technical aspects of the show are missing the elephant in the room.
>> It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.
One can already see from the first episode of season 2 (which I suppose you haven't seen yet) that it's much more complex than that.
In season one we saw the culmination of that extreme "fight club" ideology. In season two we're going to see the results of those actions. And so far it isn't pretty.
Agreed. I'm ok with both versions but a switch was definitely flipped in my head when elliot hacked a prison from the outside, via bluetooth in a police car, in order to release a prisoner from the outside. All with 24 hour notice.
That was so ridiculous. Oh and after he breaks out the prisoner he stands outside the prison in plain view of guard towers etc. for like an hour just to have a lengthy monologue. There is 0 chance you don't get caught in that situation. Oh and theres a dead fucking body next to him at the time.
I actually loved it for the most realistic depictions of drug use I've ever seen on TV or film. Really helped lend it a bit of cyberpunk-ish credibility.
What? It was ridiculously far removed from reality. First, he eats 3x10mg morphine pills. Morphine has a terrible oral bioavailability (and morphine pills are relatively rare). Any self-respecting drug user would at least google some basics. He talks about "withdrawal" and having to avoid being sick, so takes Suboxone (buprenorphine) which is stronger than his regular morphine dose! It's pure fantasy.
Also, he has an attractive drug dealer girl that just comes over to give him free drugs and screw him? I'm sure this happens. But I doubt it's remotely representative to say that happens to introverted semiautistic "hackers".
I just binge watched the show last week. I'm fairly certain he always crushed the pills with mortar and pestle, then snorted it. As for the girl, she was his middle woman, and it was only them doing MDMA that one night. Not for nothing but that's not terribly far-fetched. I've had a girl offer me MDMA before.
MS Contin pills are very waxy. Snorting them would be a terrible way to use; he'd literally be better off with IV. I don't think it increases BA anyways.
Would the shitty BA matter for someone who isn't used to harder opiates or would it flat out be useless? His character makes of point to talk about how he's careful to not get addicted.
It is more than that, he clearly has a version of schizophrenia and maybe DID syndrome with Mr. Robot being a personality in his head that takes control of his body. He isn't always aware that Mr. Robot takes control. That one time in the cafe Mr. Robot showed that he could control Elliot's body and mess with one of the guys to get punched out. What Eliot sees isn't always reality.
There are also those three days Elliot lost that Mr. Robot took over to do the Evil Corp hack.
After the completion of the first season, I started to think of the show differently. At first, I believed the civil disobedience to be resistance against the unfair banking and credit systems that run our society.
The show's creator expressed his motivations being from the Arab Spring. I'm starting to see the parallels when looking backwards at season 1. Elliot appears to represent the varied nature of the masses. Not all who want change are willing to commit such extreme acts. To me, Elliot represents that by being both the most revolutionary and quite neutral. In a way, it gives the show's creator a moral pass by showing Elliot as both the instigator of bad things and as a passenger just watching it happen. From a moral point of view, Elliot is not really a good guy, but it is hard to hate someone who is so deeply broken.
I'm starting to agree with you. From a personal point of view, I'm starting to tire of this neutral zone that is entered by Elliot's inability to take a moral stand.
There are quite a few homages to the film including the piano cover of "Where Is My Mind" playing when Elliot is showing Tyrell around the Fun Society gaming room. Quite analogous to The Narrator showing Marla the buildings collapsing.
Fight club meets Hackers meets Network. I'm still waiting for the epic "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Alderson" which you know is coming.
Honestly, I think the message is completely different. Fight club was about how cynical existentialism leads to pointless disobedience and a conspiracy narrative of the world. Ultimately it was about how misguided and purposeless the disobedience was. Mr Robot isn't about cynical existentialism, its about looking in the right places and pulling of the right sheets to expose actually broken systems. Elliot's early vigilante hacking shows he isn't some broken man angry at the world, but a purposeful actor trying to make the world a better place.
My interpretation is that it's very intentionally heavily based off of Fight Club in season 1, but that's just the setup. Now it's what happens after Fight Club. If it were a rip off, you wouldn't have so many Fight Club references and easter eggs. I think it's "sampling" and not "biting." Of course there's disputed gray area, but I think the self-awareness makes it clear that there's a respect for the material it's building off of. There's a lot of American Psycho, Taxi Driver, etc. in there too. It's basically an amalgam of all the mind-bending/character study plot techniques.
I'm trying not to spoil the show, but Mr. Robot exists in Elliot's head and is based on his dad who died when he was young. The show changed when Mr. Robot showed up on the subway and said "We live in interesting times!", from there it started to turn into a black hat hacker/Anonymous spin to take out Evil Corp by deleting their bank database and record of debt. Eliot thought Mr. Robot controlled F-Society, but Mr. Robot takes over Elliot's body sometimes and has him do black hat/Anonymous style things.
So in season 3, Elliot is staying away from computers and the Internet and trying to get a life and go outdoors. But Mr. Robot is there trying to take control. Elliot speaks to his friend who he describes as a monster inside him, but really it is the audience he speaks to, like he is breaking the fourth wall like Deadpool does.
The show isn't just about anarchism and tech. It's about madness -- hell, it basically steals all of Kubrick's most notable filming styles. It will definitely be "weird".
Spoiler alert; I think they gave away the point of the second season in -- how to put it -- bringing the perspective of the other both into play and under doubt: jub jnf chfurq, naq jub erpnyyf jung? It's not just a disguised diatribe on mental health issues, or even drawing on a wider understanding and appreciation of such issues in its target demographic, it's more participatory and "phenomenological" than that.
Eh, while the "black hat hackers can destroy anything and anyone who is paid to do it is definitionally worse" annoyed me, I always thought of it more as using technology (a language that really does not require interpersonal skills to speak - that doesn't mean that speaking it will make you successful though) as a way to explore an extraordinarily lonely person.
Allready a lot of bad marketing in hacker branding. Yes,im kinda disappointed how oddness mr robot work. Encrypt bin? I rather chown root user to my special user .
The coolest thing about this show I discovered was that every hack depicted is actually tested to see if it would work, and the screenshots cut into the show are always shown in the correct order of execution. Amazing.
Wish there was a clip on YouTube but their tech consultant Kor Adana explains it in the "Hacking Robot" panel discussion they ran after the season premiere (around 8:50 tons of ads sorry): http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot/videos/hacking-robot-101
Yeah, S02E01 impressed me in particular. The SET usage, ransomware, and IRC logs all seemed 100% accurate.
Only part that's not quite accurate is Cryptowall would never be used for this, since it's a specific ransomware family used to collect money from generally unknowledgeable end users. In reality, they probably would've written their own lightweight ransomware.
If they changed it to some other pun ("Cryptofence" or something), that would've made it a bit more realistic.
They worked with Chinese hackers in order to pull it off. Most likely working for the Chinese government to hack into US servers and steal data without getting noticed.
I'm not sure how the data tapes got erased, but they planted a Raspberry PI to the heating system to turn up the heat and fry them all? Bypassing safety checks and displaying normal readings to the people monitoring it? Wouldn't those people feel the heat going up and panic?
plausible imho. data tapes could be in area A where people rarely go. admins could be in area B. temps could be set higher in area A, but not in B, at 4 am on a saturday night.
I think Mr Robot has good tech in it, because it's not a show about tech CSI-Cyber style. It's a drama, which uses tech as a basebone. All the hacking largely stays in quick snippets displayed, and maybe a sort of slow-marathon style of filming where it's clear something takes a while.
It's a show about hacking, but hacking is secondary to the other aspects, it just moves the plot forward, and that's why it works so well.
I think its a bit more than that. The hacking is realistic, because its more than just Mad-Libbed in.
When writing shows like Star Trek, writers often put things like Insert Technobabble Here into the first draft of the script, and it gets filled in with Reverse Tachyon Inductors later. This works for SciFi, since any explanation can be RetConned. But its glaringly obvious when done with real tech. The tech terms and snippets are more than just buzzwords dropped into a middle of the sentence. They are clearly defined plot devices with real world meaning.
Saw that movie with a large group of ThinkingMachines employees. We'd rented out the theater for one of the first showings, since they'd used a ThinkingMachine CM-5 supercomputer instead of a Cray because Cray wouldn't loan them one of theirs.
Anyway that line got a huge reaction of cheering and applause, bigger than any other during the movie.
That particular example seems so strange. The first half of the movie seems believable: long debug/compile times, never shut down the mainframe, disgruntled employee ineptly tries corporate espionage. Then we get that atrocity of a file explorer.
It could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad.
From what I remember about the book, the dinosaur motion-tracking system was programmed to only find N dinosaurs each day because there was no reason for there to be more dinosaurs. It's why the dinos were able to breed undetected, because even though they were being picked up, the system only looked for N dinosaurs.
> It could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad.
Or... Film is a visual medium, and so things have to look gee-wizy, because light grey text on a little black window looks incredibly boring. Have you you not seen a movie featuring computers in the last 35 years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6gGUR3Ga4
Filmmakers can probably get away with light grey text on a black window much easier now, because it's now so far from most filmgoers' everyday experience of computing. Whereas in the time of Jurassic Park, the DOS command line was not at all exotic.
In Star Trek I don't know why they don't use fuses and circuit breakers so nobody dies if a panel explodes, if it overloaded it would just break the fuse or circuit breaker if the enemy fired at them causing a surge or whatever.
In the future with Star Trek, they should have quantum computers using fiber optic wires that are harder to hack because intercepting data changes it and the receiver will know it was tampered with.
Kirk and company basically had a Siri they could talk to and it would do things. "Computer show me yesterday's video log on the bridge at 3:32 PM" or whatever.
The point is why they consulted with people in the industry. Often when media shows hacking it's as an action scene, and you can have some very exciting realistic hacking scenes, but only if you can rely on the audience understanding a lot of the context, which you can't, so instead they present a charicature of hacking that is exciting to a wide audience. The same can be said of many other domains of knowledge. You can make realistic historical settings extremely interesting, but that's very hard if the audience doesn't know the historical background so that they can connect what is happening on the screen with what happened in history.
Mr. Robot consulted with people industry because their hacking scenes more closely resemble Sherlock Holmes detective work than action sequences, so they don't have to make things happen fast to get viewers' adrenaline flowing and can have time to give lay-people more room to understand the context. Without this story structure any expert consultations would be wasted.
I appreciate your comment, I think is insightful, but I have to say it: about the 'get viewers adrenaline flowing', they could, at least, make a little effort in avoiding the totally ridiculous.
If they are not aiming for realism, they could, at least, try to be coherent in their own 'universe'. Sometimes, the things that come from Hollywood feel like they don't respect their public.
We leave for another day the discussion about if their public deserve the respect.
Don't watch the new Person of Interest tv show then, it's a lot like CSI but they name-drop technical jargon in only semi-relevant context, which makes it even worse for some reason.
I think that's rather over-criticizing it. Person of Interest may not be able to match Mr. Robot in technical realism, but it is set in a fantastical universe with a fully functional AI. I wish they were as committed to realistic hacking as Mr. Robot, but it cannot be said that they didn't try. Its hacks were explained enough for a layman, and shown enough for a technical person.
And its story was good, too. I'd recommend it to people just for that.
But that's what makes it worse than CSI, because it's so heavily grounded in technology that suspense of disbelief is disrupted when technical terms are misused.
Person of Interest has some of the most realistic uses of tech on TV. It could match Mr. Robot... the only reason it doesn't is... it's a scifi show.
Yes, you have to make believe some things about bandwidth and just how smart one person can be. But classifying POI, an incredibly high quality and well researched show, as "worse than Cyber" is doing nothing but hurting the cause you claim to support. And the reason I'm pissed off about that is that I support it too.
Sorry that science fiction show is not a documentary about the NSA. May I recommend Citizenfour instead?
I am probably going to wait for the season to complete so I can binge watch. Am I the only one?
My big concern is all of the media and spoilers that surround these popular shows. Why do I know who died in Orange is the New Black? Why does Google think I need this as part of my news feed that I check only once or twice a day because I just need the most important news items.
It appears I'm pretty unusual in that I actually like reading spoilers and they don't really spoil anything for me. The few times that people have had spoilers but still read or watch the story in question, I've asked them, "did you enjoy it less because you knew what would happen?" and they said "no". I don't know of someone who actually had their enjoyment of the story modified by knowing the story, but many people who loudly proclaim that spoilers make them upset.
A good story should work even if you know what will happen. The components of the story (such as the easter eggs in the present discussion) should be more interesting than some gimmick of a big reveal. The whole concept of spoilers is extremely modern, probably invented by Hitchcock as marketing to sell more tickets to his movies. When you go see the ballet or an opera, you're given the whole plot upfront as part of the programme.
When a story is well done, I can immerse myself in it and see it from a character's point of view. So I can still enjoy a movie with a big reveal at the end even if I already know the reveal.
On the other hand, some movies are simply too intense to be enjoyable for me. So I often pull up Wikipedia first to make sure that the payoff is going to be worth it.
An example that falls into both categories is "The Fugitive" (Harrison Ford movie based on the TV show). I already know who the villain is and who dies at the end, but I can still enjoy Harrison Ford piecing it together and Tommy Lee Jones trying to stop him. And the last part of the movie is more intense and action-heavy than I really like, but I can take it because I know how it turns out.
I sometimes joke that I'm a member of the "Wikipedia Film Club" because I read about more movies than I actually end up watching.
I sometimes joke that I'm a member of the "Wikipedia Film Club" because I read about more movies than I actually end up watching.
That's so funny. I definitely do that too. However, a lot of the times I don't end up watching the movie unless it's really good. That's probably my favorite use of Wikipedia.
You've seen it and know you enjoy it. Surely you experienced the twists of The Fugitive unspoiled by the media. Additionally, I don't think anyone could have pictured Harrison Ford as the actual killer in the movie. And you always have to suspect the overly slick friend/business partner.
I'll admit, for a while, I spent a lot of time on themoviespoiler, a website dedicated to, well, movie spoilers. Like you, I sometimes can't take an emotionally exhausting ride. I like to watch movies for a little escapism, not to come out of the other side drained.
The ferishizstion of spoilers is very modern. The very term dates from usenset I believe. However, the first movie that the had a mainstream "don't spoil" movement I can remember was The Crying Game. The meme at the time was "Don't tell the secret!" and "What is the secret of The Crying Game?" (Note the lack of the term "spoil.") The secret is that the girlfriend is trans. (There. I "spoiled" a 25 year old movie you probably had never had any intention of watching, that is really only notable for "the secret" and the socialization around it for a few months in 1992.)
I think it's a great film, and it would still be a great film without the twist.
It's also a case where knowing the twist in advance really would profoundly affect a lot of people's experiences of the film, probably even more so in 1992.
> A good story should work even if you know what will happen.
Agreed. My first play-through of Dark Souls was thoroughly spoilerified, because I was consulting a walkthrough and reading a little bit ahead of my current progress, from start to finish. And you know what? It was still a phenomenal experience.
In fact, the experience was enhanced somewhat by knowing what was coming ahead. I could look forward to facing a boss like the Four Kings, having already read some of the lore and knowing it would be a brutal encounter.
Later in the series, my first play-throughs of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 were blind and unspoiled, but I don't think the experience was gigantically better for it. Some reveals were pretty cool [1], but I don't think I would have suffered to have known about them in advance. In fact, I still thoroughly enjoy all of those games, despite knowing them inside out and back-to-front.
[1] I'm thinking specifically of the transition from The Consumed Kings Garden to Untended Graves in DS3. Probably better unspoiled.
They're both very expressive. Opera used to be in common languages instead of "foreign" languages like Italian or German, so people could actually understand the words. Nowadays, each time I've been to the opera it has had supertitles. It's not difficult to know what is going on if you don't read the programme.
Ballet is a bit more like miming, but overall, the plots are still obvious, and frankly, very thin. We don't watch the Romeo and Juliet ballet wondering if they will survive or not, but rather wondering how they will express their anguish and suffering through dance.
> I don't know of someone who actually had their enjoyment of the story modified by knowing the story, but many people who loudly proclaim that spoilers make them upset.
You don't know anyone? At all? Isn't that a bit... arrogant to presume?
I really do think the same. Actually the crime sera drama "Columbo" worked that way as we knew beforehand who the culprit was. The point of the whole episode was to discover why the victim was killed and not how or who by.
'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' explicitly based its plots on discovering the motivations behind the crime, while the perpetrator was known to the audience from the start.
'Criminal Minds' similarly examines profiles the state of mind of the perpetrator to identify a suspect, with the person's identity known to the audience in advance more often than not.
I think the risk of being exposed to spoilers is something you have to accept if you want to binge watch and not keep up with the populace.
I enjoy binge watching, so I always wait for the season to complete; sometime for multiple seasons. However, I don't find the occasional spoiler detrimental to my viewing pleasure. I can only speak for myself, but I have watched many classic movies with prior knowledge of the plot; and I believe they have not significantly affected how I perceived them. Of course, it is impossible to tell if I would have enjoyed them more had I not known anything about them
I watch live for that reason. There aren't many shows that I do that for, but this is one, and Game of Thrones is the big other one. But I agree that the media spoils too much, though it's not unexpected - spoilers and discussions get big clicks these days.
I feel like I can one-up you on this. Here in Switzerland, the day after some popular shows in the US have ended (for example Breaking Bad, or a GoT season finale), some daily newspapers print two page spreads with all the spoilers from "last night's" episode - despite the fact that 100% of their readers are legally unable to watch that episode for probably another couple of months.
And even those that do follow the show through non-legal channels probably haven't downloaded the episode yet, since it has aired in the middle of the night for us.
Fortunately it's far less popular in the UK - indeed I watched it before any of the hype started, but I get what you mean. I have the same issue with watching F1 - I usually don't watch it until afterwards as my girlfriend and family have no interest, so I watch it when I get a chance rather than annoy everyone with it. But blurting out the result (even when it's not been on live on terrestrial TV) seems to be the thing that news readers do; if it's football they warn you - anything else, TOUGH!
Agreed. I have the same problem with Google news and now and sports scores... I don't see why they're treated as general news... why can't it be more like books where time shifting has always existed and conversations have always been deferred. And yes I understand the legacy with sports news but we've evolved damnit!
My Google news feed also spoiled my TV watching. There was a news story about the final episode of Game of Thrones, and the title of the story was enough to spoil something that happened in the episode.
On top of what I consider to be utterly extraordinary film making craft, this show really gives me a new appreciation of the nature of anarchy. There is a very real sense in which "anarchy" -- a kind of lack of predictably -- is always the resultant state after a large enough change to a power structure -- if it were more predictable then the rules of the incumbent power structure would be likely to predict and prevent such a large change.
I feel like this idea is present at many levels in the story -- including the dynamics of Elliot's personality disorder and his attempts to construct trust in his perception of reality and his own motivations.
Intermingling these themes with the idea of hacking -- the art of finding/manipulating unexpected behavior in systems -- is incredibly rich -- and mesmerizing.
> There is a very real sense in which "anarchy" -- a kind of lack of predictably -- is always the resultant state after a large enough change to a power structure
If this is the kind of anarchy you envision, you're going to be sorely disappointed if something like that happened in real life. Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out. There would be mass looting, killings, raping, and people taking advantage of the chaos (opportunists). It would literally be the wild west with all services, including power and the internet going down.
The "anarchy" in Mr. Robot is a falsehood, it's a libertarian/hackers fantasy. That's not anarchy at all. Not even close.
While I agree with your assertion that a state of anarchy introduced by force (technical or otherwise) in a relatively stable democracy would be nightmarish, I suspect that's going to be the thrust of season 2.
The activists leveraged some technical know-how and swashbuckling intrusions to bring down a big bank's systems, but the opening episodes of season 2 point to a mobilization of the democratic government forces to restore order by force. They didn't create anarchy by destroying the source of financial truth, they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down.
The series was supposed to have been composed as a three-act movie originally, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds moving forward in the second act.
White rose is fascinating -- his obsession with time comes across to me as a very insightful attribute to associate with a hacker in a Confucian oriented society -- I wonder if social hacking a great harmony society would tend to involve a lot of precise timing attacks. And the name is great -- perhaps referring to the anti-nazi protest movement in Munich -- a subtle reference to an existence proof for the possibility that a "hacker movement" could be deemed "correct" to oppose the existing paradigm in which its embedded. And it's great that he's Chinese -- we are so conditioned in the west to think of "Chinese hackers" as only and always state sponsored black hats. How strange that preconception given how noble a calling we should perceive there to be for "hackers" operating domestically in China -- to tweak at what we perceive as an often overly authoritarian regime. It made me feel a startling lack of examples in western media of "good guy" Chinese hackers. The realization has me always looking to find ways to try to establish trust with the white rose character. Not sure if he should have it, but I hope he is revealed to deserve it.
> Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out.
This does not have to be the case at all. Look at Catalonia in revolutionary Spain. To quote Proudhon: "Anarchy is order." People naturally organise to support each other, and not necessarily through the power of a ruler or a state.
Mr Robot propelled Kali Linux into the top of the Linux OS rankings. After watching the Season 2 premiere yesterday even I decided I'm going to check Kali Linux out - either on Virtual Machine or my Raspberry Pi 3.
Also I was pleasantly surprised to see Joey Badass in the show (his first acting gig I think). Hopefully they will allow the character he plays to shine. Great show!
Thats really good detective work. I was not expecting this much attention to detail at all - even after season one seemingly surpassed every film/tv show in history on that account. I will definitely be screen pausing for the rest of this season myself now.
There is a QR code drawn in Elliot's journal that leads to www.conficturaindustries.com (one of the URLs linked to the same SSL cert) - the same company name that is on the front of the journal. And the meticulous zoom-in on the apple skin left on the floor looks very similar to the logo of the company. Looks like they had fun making this :)
I want a sci-fi show about an engineering team that debugs and deploys fleets of robots/organic aliens inside the bloodstream of a giant space whale creature in which, humanity itself is living on some sort of floating enclosed solarsystem bubble.
They would have standup meetings each day (ever second episode) and you would see how a large organization would operate efficiently using something similar to Nexus-Scrum.
I'm now at my third company where I'm the only techie that thinks internal code names are useful and everyone else just uses very generic terms like 'the app'. And when a second app is made, they all seem oblivious to the amount of time wasted in describing which app is which in nearly every damn bug or feature request.
Given that I'm the only ops guy and I have to package this stuff, I give them a damn name and that proliferates back through the rest of the techs. Anyway, the point of this comment is that the latest thing to come my way was a notification service called 'notification service', a seven-syllable horror that will cause confusion with another service that sends notifications, and it does things other than notify (it'll touch and mediate a few things over the network). I said "Can we please call it 'nexus' - because every company needs a bit of software somewhere called 'nexus'" :)
As a bonus, today I set up the first nexus server, for testing...
Yea, Im on the other end of the spectrum: So IDP integrates with SN, OHS, ADP, RDC, Xym. The support is managed by the SSD, DC2 (and many, many more....). I think the Project and Product managers make these up to prove they are doing something productive. So many acronyms, and no documentation except the main project docs. So you need to read a mountain of documentation to even know what people are talking about. Even better when you have IDP, ADP, EDP etc and people from several different countries trying to pronounce all of these correctly.
My personal naming rules are "one unemotive word, two syllables max, with clear unambiguous spelling and pronunciation". Maybe go to three syllables if it's really fitting. Generally the name is not meant to reflect the function - the point is to be memorable, not descriptive (and not customer facing). This being said, I'm a small company guy, so I haven't run into the need for amazing amounts of acronyms or product names (I'm not sure how far my rules would stretch...)
My favourite shortening was a netadmin friend of mine who worked at a bank a while back, describing coding schemes for network hardware: "blah blah ethernet concentrator blah address blah city makes XXXECO1" => "What's an 'ethernet concentrator'?" => "Is it a switch? Is it a hub? Is it (*rattles of a couple of other things I can't recall)? Who cares? They do similar things in the grand scheme..." And shorten down to a clear 'EC' to cover them all.
I'm a bit the same. It was really enjoyable, and then just bogged down at the end of the first season, with an amazingly trope-ish 'twist'. I think the lead actor is outstanding, being able to convey 'numb at the world' rather than just 'unexpressive/emotionless', but yeah, it's just too slow.
And when push comes to shove, while it's great to see actual tech in action, it doesn't actually matter that much to the story. As long as the characters aren't doing things that actively break immersion (blue ribbon award goes to NCIS having two people type on the same keyboard...), it doesn't matter to me so much if the 'hack' is real or not.
My favorite hacking scene is still from Scorpions (well there are two, the one below and the one where they are hacking a jet, with a RJ45 cable, from a car while landing).
"We need to hack NORAD!"
Guy reaches for keyboard (without touching it), "Done!".
Sarcasm apart, while Mr.Robot has good tech, I got bored by the story line around episode 4 or 5. I think it was just too slow for my taste.
There is a fantastic short (scifi) story about consumption/attention economies taken to their logical conclusion on SomethingAwful (I think), but I can't find it right now.
It's a _super_ tropish twist, but I think that's a knowing choice. There's a great Extra Credits episode (usually a video game analysis show) exploring that theme at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghrI2Vb8u2U
In my mind (though future episodes could prove me wrong), Mr. Robot is taking its favorite tropes from hacker culture, anarchic culture, and corporate culture, and using them to paint an interesting picture of helplessness and instability.
I dunno, I certainly like the show. Maybe it's just the general malaise I'm feeling, but it's certainly poking at many of the things I feel are wrong in the world. God knows, if it were possible to accomplish what they did in season 1 I would have been more than on board.
"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
– Thomas Jefferson"
Apparently I have more in common with Jefferson than I thought (Re my numerous comments in the past regarding the danger of consumer credit).
Does anyone recall a Mr. Robot giveaway with American Giant hoodies? I went to the AG retail space two days ago to figure out what hoodie size I needed, and made a Mr. Robot joke. The salesperson said, "hey, we did a promo with Mr. Robot, actually, where there was a website in the show and if you followed a bunch of clues, there was some morse code and eventually you got a free Mr. Robot hoodie from us."
At the time, I marked it up as "awww, too bad I missed it", especially since I tend to binge shows after they're all available at once. But I wasn't able to find any evidence of this promo existing on the web, and now there's this thing with morse code and so on. Soooo maybe there's a nice hoodie at the end of this road.
Aha, thanks - so the free hoodie (and they're really nice hoodies!) happened already. The promo page is still pretty neat, though, and a quick perusal of the javascript indicates there may be some more hidden material in there somewhere.
Yes, they sent hoodies on premiere night to the first 509 people that reached the end sign-up page. Very cool of the marketing team and everyone involved.
I feel like I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't drink the Mr Robot kool-aid.
It's cool that they get the tech right, but I just feel as though the protagonist has the mentality of an angsty teenager trying their best to be 'edgy' by 'fighting the man'.
Maybe if the show took itself a little less seriously I might enjoy it more.
Neat easter egg. Though you should get some better servers for your site. That load time is crazy. Especially on my 1GB connection. Granted, I'm going through proxies, but wow, still horrible.
Anyhow, can't wait to see what this season has in store. I find myself relating to a lot of the personal struggles in the last season. Maybe that makes me crazy. ha.
Fun fact. Mr Robot S02E01 was doing a scene right around the corner next to AWS NY Loft. Not sure if it was accidental or intentional. I only came to realize until this HN post and looked at what the main character looks like. Yeah the kid with hoodie. He was there.
Thought it was intriguing that a schizophrenic uber-hacker's poison of choice was morphine; it seems more in line with methamphetamine use, imo! Hacking on morphine... would.. be... something..... like...... this........
Episodes are filmed 6 months to a year ago. Would it be a 0-day at that point? I remember when 0-day actually meant brand new (typically a release on that particular day), but that was 15-20 years ago. Over that time, the definition could have changed.
That's still the definition. But if they filmed an episode with an unknown exploit, it didn't get leaked and nobody else finds it between filming and release, it would be 0-day. Very questionable to do though.
I just binge watched the show a couple of days ago. Remember how Elliot stashes the gun given to him by Darlene in the popcorn machine instead of taking it to the meeting with white lotus? When Elliot shows Tyrell the Fsociety space, that same popcorn machine starts making popcorn.
I sincerely doubt Elliot turned on the machine just for popcorn.
Tyrell could be another alter ego. If we assume that Elliot's other alter ego represents some aspect of himself that he represses, Tyrell could be the same thing. Elliot's meetings with Tyrell tend toward the surreal which all of his hallucinations do, and in the last meeting between Elliot and Tyrell's wife they didn't have her act as if Elliot was a stranger to her. She acted really cagey when he asked if she'd seen him.
I mean I doubt he killed Tyrell, but Tyrell did put on the threatening gloves in his apartment, so I'm guessing Elliot wanted to make sure that he walked out of the fsociety building alive. Makes sense he'd go for the gun.
Maybe he used the gun to threaten Tyrell after them finishing their work, and has locked him away somewhere. Maybe he shot to incapacitate him, and Tyrell is passed out in some hospital.
We joked that Tyrell is another split personality, since the main character never really seems to interact with Tyrell and other people in the same conversations.
Tyrell's wife could know about his personalities and just not care, hence the weird conversation at the end of season 1.
However, there's also a scene depicting Tyrell making the video while Elliot prepares the worm, while the scene you mention had Tyrell preparing the worm while speaking with Elliot.
>btw, having the mailware deliverable ia that auto-exec flash exe is really old school, no? I keep seeing this in plots of procedural crime shows where digital savvy techie or detective shoves a newly discovered victim usb into their working computers. Who does that?
This is still a very real exposure and is used by penetration testers all the time. There are several ways to disable USB autorun across a domain, but there are definitely still a lot of big companies that don't prevent it.
> Raising the level of geek creds is not unlike Big Bang Theory
IMO, Big Bang Theory is effectively "nerd blackface". It doesn't treat its characters as particularly intelligent - they often lack empathy, common sense, etc. The laughs are frequently at their expense and I find it highly uncomfortable to watch.
Mr. Robot is far more respectful to its complex protagonists.
It isn't just effectively "nerd blackface". It is "nerd blackface". Every time one of my well meaning friends asks why I don't like Big Bang Theory I just direct them to a blog post [0] I came across a while ago that does a far better job explaining my feelings than I could. The only thing that differentiates me from the author of that post is that it took far less time watching the show for me to feel incredibly insulted and put down in a way I hadn't been since I was in middle school.
The tl;dr:
> And all this wouldn’t really matter if not for the fact that The Big Bang Theory targets nerds as part of its fan base. We’re used to being ridiculed on TV but it’s usually by shows which aren’t aimed at us. The Big Bang Theory goes to Comic-Con, it sells its merchandise at Forbidden Planet. The fact that it sells merchandise at all says that wants part of a cult nerd following. The Big Bang Theory is the worst kind of bully – the one that pretends to be your friend and then takes the piss out of you behind your back. It will take your viewership, it will take your money and it will laugh in your face as it systematically puts you down.
I watched the first one. I enjoyed the first few episodes, seemed like it was going to be a drama about people working in InfoSec. Definitely appreciated the relative plausibility of the hacks. Was very disappointed when it turned into a psycho-druggie-anonymous-whatever sort of thing. It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.
I understand how that's more appealing to a wider audience. Just saying what I'd prefer personally for my own sake.