Overthinking Mr. Robot XIV: A Kingdom of Bullshit
See 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑦 𝑂𝑛 Mr. Robot for a 𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅 𝑠𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑟y all available essays.
Is any of it real? I mean, look at this! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of food. Brain-washing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. . . We live in branded houses, trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen.
The situation Mr. Robot describes is what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality.” It is the modern condition where fabrications take the place of real things to such a degree that everyone loses all contact with anything real. One way to think about “hyperreality” is as an extension and modernization of the False Consciousness and Commodity Fetishism concepts we outlined in the last few essays.
That Elliot lives in an “Illusionary” reality is explicitly written into the text of the show. That everyone else does, too, is a bit of subtext I want to explore in more detail today.
Brands are hyperreal
What is important about the watch to everyone in this scene is the brand name. Whether it accurately keeps time or not is completely irrelevant. It is the brand that signals style, sophistication, wealth and power. Ownership of the watch conveys those properties to the one who wears it. And these properties are conveyed to the watch by the number of dollars it takes to purchase it.
The watch is less a timepiece than a series of signifiers. Like the dollar itself, its value is virtual. And like the dollar, its meaning is divorced from the reality of what it is.
Everyone in the room understands that this gesture is a display of dominance. The watch signifies the status imbalance between Scott and Tyrell. As does Scott’s dismissive reference to Tyrell’s “neat little two bedroom in Chelsea.” The watch is such an insignificant bauble to Scott that he can’t even remember which Prince gave it to him. For Tyrell, though, it would pay off the mortgage on his diminutive, little condo.
The symbolic castration Tyrell suffers here, at the hands of Scott Knowles, breaks Tyrell. His whole identity is bound up in these status symbols. What Scott is doing to him in this scene, by wielding his higher symbolic status as a weapon, is equivalent to what Elliot does to Bill. He’s telling Tyrell he’s nothing in a way that shakes the foundation of his very identity.
Baudrillard’s point is that most of society operates like this now. We no longer buy and sell physical things, like watches. Not mostly, anyway. What we’re buying instead are signifiers that communicate to everyone else the person we want to appear as. We’re purchasing an identity, originally created by an ad department, through the brands and styles we consume. But none of it is based on anything real.
Media is hyperreal
The voyeurs who think they aren't a part of this despite being here for all of it
In 1967, before we had the internet and before Baudrillard coined the term “hyperreality,” Guy Debord noticed how the media of his day disassociated people from reality. It presented them with a facsimile of real life he called The Society of The Spectacle.
People would watch their television and movie screens, passively absorbing experiences and information as spectators. Instead of participating in real activities, we became - in his words – simple “Voyeurs.”
And here we have the second meaning of the role “We” play in the Mr. Robot universe, in addition to the one we described in A Way Out of the Loneliness. In that essay we argued that Elliot created us because of a personal need. That is the micro-level story of “our” existence in the show. But the macro-level criticism at work here, the reason not-Krista looks so derisively at us in the end, is because our relationship with Elliot is exactly the kind of passive participation in the Society of the Spectacle that Debord describes. We’re part of this too, she says, because our demand for spectacle perpetuates the spectacle.
Fantasy is an easy way to give meaning to the world. To cloak our harsh reality with escapist comfort. After all, isn’t that why we surround ourselves with so many screens. So we can avoid seeing? So we can avoid each other?
There’s a different scene I could have captioned from S2E1 where Elliot equates television shows to the antidepressant Lexapro. In both instances we’re told media has a numbing effect on us. And that was exactly Debord’s point. If Religion was the “opiate of the masses” for Marx. And Elliot’s personal opiate is, of course, an opiate. For Debord modern media is what he called an “opium war” waged on the masses by industry. It serves to stupefy us into passivity. It dulls the pain of the world it perpetuates and pushes.
It is our complicity in the “Society of the Spectacle” that not-Krista admonishes in this scene. Sure, the “culture industry” supplies us with our aestheticizing media. But we’re the ones who consume it. We’re the ones who escape into our fantasies, our stories, our screens instead of “showing up” to confront the problems of the real world.
Baudrillard noticed, however, that media doesn’t just distract us from the real world. It actively replaces it. Our screens become our window into reality. What we see there becomes “the real world” to us. And the problem isn’t just that the experiences we have through media are poor imitations of the real thing. It is that they are an unreliable version of reality. What we see on the screen can’t be trusted.
Here, again, we can see a parallel between Elliot’s personal psychosis and the show’s social critique. When Elliot expresses uncertainty about whether the things he sees and hears are an accurate depiction of reality, he could just as easily be talking about the reality we encounter on our screens.
A major difference is that the virtual reality of our screens is controlled by someone with, as Price says, “an evil, secret, agenda.” What we encounter on television and online always has an ulterior motive. It is always selling us something. It is distorting our reality to convince us we need what they’re selling. Sometimes the thing they’re selling is a product. Sometimes it is an ideology that helps us see the world the way they’d prefer us to see it. And sometimes it is just mindless entertainment that habituates us into passivity. Whatever the motive, media is another example of how “Control is an Illusion.”
Relationships are hyperreal
The reason we get these scenes with Dom and Ahmed is because they illustrate the way commercial relationships can substitute for the more genuine kind. This scene serves as our introduction to Dom. In Ahmed’s store we see her as friendly and outgoing. But we soon learn that isn’t how she behaves elsewhere. She suffers from social anxiety, like Elliot. She doesn’t have any friends that we’re aware of. All her relationships before Darlene enters her life are either virtual or professional. Ahmed stands out as different somehow.
The reason Dom is comfortable engaging with Ahmed is because he is providing a service to her. He’s supposed to be polite. He’s supposed to laugh at her jokes. He’s supposed to indulge her casual banter whether he wants to or not. In a sense, he is paid to be friendly to her.
But what Dom has with Ahmed is a simulacrum of friendship. It is an imitation of the real thing. It has none of the risks or responsibilities that come with actual friendship. When Ahmed’s store goes bankrupt, so too, does their relationship. Whatever happens to him and his family after the store closes, we never know. I doubt Dom does either.
The internet is hyperreal
The falsity of Dom’s friendship with Ahmed is just an introduction to the deeper fiction that is Dom’s social life more generally. As far as we know, her intimate relations take place exclusively in isolation. When she reaches out for affection, it is to Alexa that she turns.
Debord’s passive society of the spectacle has grown more sophisticated. It now simulates two-way communication. Parasocial relationships become responsive. They’re more persuasive and more addictive than before, but they’re no more real.
Like Dom, Elliot also uses technology to mediate his relationships. For him, though, the internet is a one-way looking glass where he can see out and nobody can see in. It is the perfect protective blind from which he builds a simulacrum of intimacy. He feels he knows the people he hacks. He sees them down to their very “source code.”
But this is an illusion too. There is no intimacy established with what Elliot does. It is pure violation. And the truths he uncovers are only ever partial. The things he misses from this safe distance are often more important than what he sees.
Nothing real can be found in the hyperreal. It’s all just copies of copies of copies.
Money and Ideology are hyperreal
We talked about money and ideology in our Control is an Illusion and Daemons essays. I’m not going to rehash those discussions here, but I do want to mention how they fit in with today’s conversation on hyperreality.
Money is hyperreal because it is a symbol that takes the place of something real (i.e. the social relations that give it value). Everything built atop this hyperreal symbol becomes as virtual as its foundation. Status, merit, value, personal worth, desirability, respect – anything and everything we can think of that contemporary society reduces to a monetary value becomes hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, that describes everything now.
Ideology is hyperreal because it operates as a simulation of the real world. Ideology is what tells us “how the world works.” The American Dream and Meritocracy are ideologies superimposed on the physical world. They don’t exist in the natural order of things. They are, as Elliot says above, fantasies that give meaning to the world. But they do more than just that. Our fantasies actively create our world. Society is organized as a “meritocracy” because we believe that it should be. It’s just “common sense.”
Alienation is the outcome
The common thread connecting these various forms of societal illusions is the way they alienate us from real things. They alienate us from social relations, from meaning, from value, from each other, even from ourselves.
In the introductory essay to this series, I made the bold claim that “Alienation” is the single word that describes the whole of Mr. Robot. I demonstrated how the fractured, mosaic-like structure of the television show mirrored Elliot’s fractured, mosaic-like self. In subsequent installments I outlined how the dialectical process of uniting these various “personalities” also drives the series’ narrative arc and various plot points. For the last several essays I’ve been describing the forces working at the societal level that help keep our characters alienated. An alienating society creates and encourages alienated citizens. In future installments we’ll discuss how this alienation expresses itself in each of the show’s major characters.
Until then.
Posted Dec 7, 2025, 12:39 PM UTC