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For the rest of us, our sin is of being led around, if not by these wolves than by our own myopic concerns. Several times, Eliot basically lists the faults and fears of the people around him, the niggling cracks through which slips their ability to be independent, and through which he can creep when he needs an “exploit,” a way to hack through. He invariably talks about people in computer terms, which is as much as a sign of his disconnection as his core belief that they can be manipulated just as easily.

Eliot’s basic justification for hacking into people’s lives is that other more malevolent forces have already done it. This doesn’t have to be something as monolithic as Evil Corp, either: he prods into his psychiatrist’s life — one of the rare people with whom he feels a skewed sympathy — to separate her from her lying new boyfriend, that one who is cheating on his wife with her and a parade of other online dates and escorts. Her sense of loneliness, her need for connection, they’ve already been backdoored and exploited by this man: Eliot’s digital version is like surgery to remove a parasite.

There is something intoxicating about revolution, but nothing that draws a crowd is made to look ugly

It doesn’t take much to scale this up to a corporate scale, and one of the things that keeps Mr. Robot from descending into internet conspiracy rants is the degree to which it understands that corporations are made up of people. In Fight Club, they are still just monoliths, the dark symmetry between a group of smiley-faced anarchists and smiling suits never quite laid bare. The men who run Evil Corp. are after all just men — although Eliot’s friend Angela seems to be infected by the finale — irredeemably hacked by an ethos that places them above others, and money above all. One suit even goes so far as to say he deserves his place because people are idiots, who need to be protected from themselves — money is his proof of intelligence, but also his ribbon for valorous service.