Overthinking Mr. Robot XIII: Control is an Illusion
See 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑦 𝑂𝑛 Mr. Robot for a 𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅 𝑠𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑟y all available essays.
In the very first episode of the series Mr. Robot tells us that money controls everyone in society. We’re also repeatedly shown the extent of its control. Like when Shayla sticks with Vera even after he assaults her because “he gives me a really good deal on the split.” Or how the puppy executioner justifies his vocation because he has “bills to pay.” Or when Ray allows his site to traffic in children because it earns “the kind of money that makes you question right and wrong.” Even Elliot, who famously “doesn’t give a shit about money” nonetheless convinces himself to go ahead with the 5/9 hack after looking at Angela’s debt records.
\"That’s the thing about money. It makes you care more about it than anything else\"
Money isn’t the only adversary Elliot will have to contend with over the course of the series, but the controlling power of money remains a theme throughout. And yet, we’re also told in that initial episode that money isn’t even real. In other words, money is an illusion that controls us.
Mr. Robot: Money hasn't been real since we got off the gold standard. It's become virtual. Software, the operating system of our world. And, Elliot, we are on the verge of taking down this virtual reality.
The absence of a gold standard isn’t what makes money “virtual,” though. Every form of money is a social contrivance. It doesn’t matter whether it comes in the form of gold doubloons, paper portraits of dead presidents, or in journal entries on a block chain. What makes money “money,” and what gives money value, is our agreement to accept it as a universal medium of exchange.
Dollar bills, gold coins, and blockchain debits are all just symbolic representations of this underlying agreement. They’re all just promissory notes that the entire community has agreed to honor. The sole source of money’s power comes from the good faith of the community in honoring this promise. Without faith in one another, without trust, without confidence, the whole thing collapses.
That is what makes money virtual. You can’t touch a promise. But what makes money an illusion is the way it masquerades as something tangible. We don’t think of the money in our hand as a symbol of a promise. It is a dollar bill. The illusion is the way we come to see the object form of money (e.g. the dollar bill, the gold coin) as the source of its own value. The dollar is what becomes important and powerful. The social relationships that guarantee its worth are forgotten behind the symbolic mask. This has a corrosive effect.
\"A con doesn't work without the confidence.\"
Contrast the cynicism of Price describing the global economy as one giant, manipulative, scam with the cooperative system we described above. For him, the social relationships that make society work are a “con.” Everyone in society is just a mark for him to cheat. Our commitment to honoring our promises is a weakness for him to leverage.
Elliot expresses the same view when he identifies all the vulnerabilities walking around Steel Mountain. For him, people are just potential exploits.
We hear a similar ideology in Mr. Robot’s “zero-sum” view of the world:
Mr. Robot: Everyone steals. That's how it works. You think people out there are getting exactly what they deserve? No. They're getting paid over or under, but someone in the chain always gets bamboozled.
Left unsaid in each of these perspectives is how this type of cynicism fractures the very trust in society that makes the whole thing run.
At the heart of this cynicism is the dehumanization of everyone in society. They’re not people to be respected and valued, they’re marks to be conned and vulnerabilities to be exploited. They’re things. Objects for me to do with as I please. It’s the kind of orientation Sam meant to invoke when he put Mr. Robot on a Ferris Wheel in homage to The Third Man’s Harry Lime.
Harry Lime: Look down there. Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?
All the way back in the Annihilation is All We Are essay I argued that this very perspective is what traps Elliot in his initial existential void. I said that he devalued everyone around him to such an extent that they were no longer real to him. They’re just objects in a world where only he exists.
Elliot creates this distance to protect himself from emotional harm. Money has a way of creating this distance among everyone else. Here’s how that works.
Money exists to equalize unequal things. It allows us to exchange things that are otherwise incomparable. An hour of my time isn’t generally reducible to a pile of potatoes. But when both are priced at $20 they become equivalent in the eyes of the market. This is how the ordinary functioning of a market economy dehumanizes its participants. By the magic of capitalism, I can now calculate, with total precision and a completely straight face, the value of all the hours of my life as being worth just so many potatoes.
This may seem hyperbolic. Nobody really believes people and potatoes are of equal worth. Except that is exactly how Colby justifies setting up a “rainy day fund” to settle future wrongful death lawsuits rather than paying to prevent those deaths in the first place. He’s reduced Emily’s life to a journal entry. From E Corp’s perspective, the pot of money representing her life’s value is just another line on its balance sheet. No different than the inventory of potatoes it records next to it. Colby comes to see the world the way E Corp’s income statement and balance sheet do.
Colby’s approach to Emily’s life is what Fight Club’s narrator describes as “The formula.”
https://i.redd.it/4x07bwi15f4g1.gif
The Narrator: ”I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.”
“The formula” isn’t dehumanizing because Colby and the Narrator or even the companies they work for are particularly evil. It is just the amoral logic of the system behaving as it was designed. Money flattens all qualities into exchangeable, equivalent, quantities. Human lives and potatoes and the cost of product recalls are all interchangeable dots when seen from the right perspective.
Harry Lime: If I offered you $20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?
Colby calculated how many dots he could spare at Washington Township. Mr. Robot calculated how many dots he could spare when planning to blow up pipelines and buildings. One building is justifiable, he reasoned. 71 buildings may be too many, he later claimed. In either event, “This is war. People will die. C'est la mort.”
Of course, Mr. Robot’s reasons are different than Colby’s. Money isn’t the only illusion that controls us. In our Daemons essay we talked about the illusion of Ideology. We said that ideology was a kind of false consciousness that helps us understand and cope with the world around us. It is a comforting illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. Like all illusions it has the effect of dissociating us from reality. And that has consequences.
Mr. Robot was going to kill for his ideology. Gideon died for someone else’s.
Of course, we come to learn that Gideon’s killer was manipulated into his false belief. But isn’t that just an illustration of the saying “Control is an Illusion” too?
Posted Nov 30, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC