Elliot’s 3.0 Monolog in Context

Facing the Facts (USA Network)

“This all started because I tried to hide from society. Remember? Fuck society. Well, I fucked society alright. I reset it to zero. If I don’t do anything about it, it will continue to grow in this malignant way. And that’s what I’m afraid of most: the future that I set into motion.” Elliot Alderson

A few years ago, the people behind the James Bond franchise took what had become the best ever reimaging of the series and, in one quick stroke, totally destroyed it (SPECTRE).

In the first two movies in that most recent Bond trilogy, Daniel Craig’s Bond becomes entirely aware and reborn into embracing and maintaining British and Western hegemony of the corrupt and broken world system.

Bond knowingly uses people and destroys them with no illusions and despite his guilt, sometimes in spite of it. It becomes clear that there is very little difference between the secret organization SPECTRE and the State System itself.

The secret hiding in plain sight is that SPECTRE has infiltrated every government on earth, which doesn’t mean that those governments have been compromised, it means that those government’s goals have become so similar to the goals of a shadowy sub-national terrorist organization that you can’t tell the difference between the edicts of one or the other.

Bond, despite having his eyes opened, remains ever “Her Majesties loyal terrier (So loyal, in fact, that when his mentor dies in his arm, she leaves him a cracked porcelain British Bulldog as her parting gift).”

In the second movie in the trilogy “Skyfall,” arguably the best Bond movie ever, Bond is confronted by former agent Raul Silva whose expectation is that Bond will understand, if anyone does, that the kind of dutiful patriotism agents engage in requires only the endless supply of new bodies not names or faces.

People who know the corruption, people who have carried out the violence up close, people who see the mountains of bodies up close, they can’t pretend that what they do doesn’t or didn’t have consequences.

Those are the people have no choice but to run screaming from the system (I have met many Vietnam Veterans who still suffer from this kind of PTSD every day), start working to tear down the system (Silva), or double down and embrace a system they know is corrupt and embrace the bullshit (Bond).

Unfortunately, just when things were getting super interesting, United Artists decided to do a 180 and make the third movie a Roger Moore style light Bond movie (people thought that the series was getting too dark, what a total waste of Christoph Waltz).

Elliot’s eyes are finally open.

Mr. Robot Season 3.0 presented Elliot Alderson with his Bond/Silva moment.

Eyes Wide Shut

Wake Up Friend! (USA Network)

“They’ll even have us build our own prison. This is what they wanted all along: for us to buy in on our worst selves. I just made it easier for them. I didn’t start a revolution. I just made us docile enough for our slaughtering. I can stand here and blame Evil Corp and every conglomerate out there for taking advantage of us, and I can blame the FBI, NSA and CIA for letting them get away with it, blame all the world leaders for aiding and abetting them, and blame Adam Smith for inventing modern day capitalism in the first fucking place, and blame money for dividing us, and blame us for letting it, but none of that’s true. The truth is, I’m the one to blame. I’m the problem. This was my fault. All of it. I did this. Fuck me.” Elliot Alderson

Elliot’s eyes are finally wide open and he is trapped between that part of him that still wants what Angela wants (Mr. Robot/Revenge) and that part of him that no longer wants to bring pain and misery to people that he doesn’t even know in the name of a revolution that is being coopted almost as quickly as it expands.

As much as we want to blame everything on a Trump or Elliot might want to blame things on E-Corp there is a complicity in the ongoing spectacle, as Sam Esmail mentioned recently:

I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, the election of Trump is a national tragedy for multiple reasons. It will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history. But he’s not a dictator <yet>. This happened because we either allowed it or voted for it.

Only in a world where our cultural <white> commitment to maintaining the status quo at all costs could accept, for instance, a five to one prison sentencing disparity along racial lines. What does it take for us to keep walking our daily routines ‘outraged’ because our President called someone a name instead of because he is trying to cut $141 Billion from Food Stamps or remove the subsidies used to allow poor people to have health care.

He can only be this cruel because we are ourselves largely this cruel.

Otherwise, 200 million people would raise up and say NO!

Otherwise, Congress and the Senate would be so overrun by protesters that they could not carry on normal business.

Mostly, our protest happens as we shake our fists at the television screen before we return to our normal routines.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of folks are protesting, but not even of a fraction of the amount that were active, per capita, during the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s or during the Vietnam War.

Once someone narcissistic enough to want to be a dictator saw that the American public cared far more about safety than they did about Constitutional Liberties and they cared more about patriotism (the symbols of freedom) than the protection of freedoms, our current debacle became inevitable.

The election was a spectacle, and for many their vote was about revenge for perceived slights and the cost of that angst has been borne by real bodies across our country, across our communities, across our families, and across our neighborhoods.

Just like SPECTRE could only infiltrate all the worlds governments, President Trump can only appear (barely) Presidential because the level of our own ethical corruption allows him to look like someone representative of us.

Our eyes are wide shut, but Elliot’s eyes are finally wide open.

Elliot remembers that he was possibly complicit in the death of some of his friends and team members or work friends.

Elliot remembers that he was involved in Shayla’s death and letting an entire wing of a jail escape.

Elliot remembers that the 5/9 hack ruined the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide (and probably only increased the power of E-Corp).

Elliot has finally realized that he was naïve and motivated more by the unadulterated rage attributed to him by ‘whiterose” than he was by a sober assessment of the likelihood of success.

The plan has failed, he is complicit, and he wants to reverse the damage (or at least one part of him does).

The Cooptation Blues

Classic Darlene (USA Network)

“Five/Nine didn’t get rid of the invisible hand. It turned it into a fist that punched us in the dick. Like a botnet, the fear I’ve created is spreading so fast, it’s practically airborne. It’s swallowed us whole, digested us, and now we’re stuck in its asshole, waiting to be dumped out. And while we’re here? They’re having their way with us. They’ve packaged the fight into product, turned our dissent into intellectual property, televising our revolution with commercial breaks. They’ve back-doored into our minds and robbed our truth. They’ve refurbished the facts, then marked up the price.” Elliot Alderson

It cracks me up that Elliot said that the invisible hand turned into a fist because I used say that the invisible hand was known “mostly for its middle-finger” back in the day.

One problem with a successful swing at instigating change is that the Master can always use the rebels tools to appropriate the rebels house (that trick doesn’t just work in one direction).

In this particular case, what makes you famous, even when you are famous for resistance or rebellion, can also make you marketable and once you are marketable, cooptation becomes increasingly likely.

If you have ever seen someone wearing a purchased Che Guevara T-Shirt before, you know exactly what I am talking about here.

The Corporations can always exploit divisions and take advantage of differences of opinions. There might not be that much of a real difference between a Republican, a Democrat, or a Progressive but the powers that be can always find ways to mine subtle fractures to make big gains.

The Tea Party was created, for instance, by the Koch Brothers. The Koch brothers, through ALEC, helped create, mandatory minimums but now they are against them (I suspect because mass supervision offers more profit potential than does the failed private prison industry). And, most recently, when feminism started to become cool (after the Women’s March) guess who bankrolled and profited from Wonder Woman?

You guessed it, those exact same Koch Brothers.

The problem isn’t a deep state, the problem is that people don’t realize that the people organizing the fight against the deep state are anti-liberal corporate fascists finding ways to redeploy legitimate public frustration in ways that only increase their own power and wealth.

My guess is that any real and existing deep state is nothing compared to the money behind the people challenging the deep state.

The real question, and I am as interested as anyone else to see if Elliot and Sam have an answer, and can show “his friends” how to defend actual freedom in the face of “Facebook Freedom” and future Pizzagates.

Investigating parallel universes could offer as much hope as trying to salvage this sinking ship, but I hope we all come up with something better (and soon).

Who Is Mr. Robot’s Landlord? Is my long-running Mr. Robot recap. You can always check out my blog for new recaps a few hours after every new episode (check links below).

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