(may contain spoilers, click back now if you wish)

David Gauntlett describes media to fall into two peaks. The first being “basically inspiring and optimistic” and the second is “basically troubling and pessimistic”.

The latter peak that involves data manipulation, surveillance and evolving forms of “extreme… computerised capitalism” is heavily explored in Sam Esmail’s hacker tech drama Mr .Robot.

Other than being an asocial computer guru and frequent morphine user, protagonist Elliot Anderson is employed as a cyber-security engineer for the massive corporation E Corp (or in Elliot’s terms – Evil Corp). By night, he’s a cyber-vigilante to “saving the world, saving everyone from the invisible hand”. For instance, Elliot uses his ability to expose and lead the police to a coffee-shop owner’s child pornography content from hacking into the Wi-Fi the owner uses in his cafés. On the other hand, Mr. Robot would introduce characters through Elliot’s meddling ways into their online personas rather than through every day interactions. At times the hacking works in his favour to bring justice, but on the contrary, it becomes an act of breaching privacy. Thus, Mr. Robot puts emphasis on how vulnerable privacy is in the Internet age and the current inequalities of the world.

As Elliot successfully resolves a series of serious cyber-attacks onto E Corp, he attracts the interest of Mr Robot – the leader of FSociety. An alliance of underground hackers, who’s main agenda is to take down E Corp. In conjunction with struggling to establish the moral compass as a hacker, Elliot also struggles as a clinically depressed young man who is attacking a society he’s displaced within.

Having only watched the first few episodes of season one, Rami Malek’s portrayal as Elliot draws the audience into his complex persona and into his world that can often become an illusion of his reality. The witty dialogue also provides the audience with plot twists, realistic character development and while maintaining the episodes on Elliot’s perspective.

A cracker of a show and definitely made me perceive media in a different light, or in this case, at a different peak. Check out this snippet from the Pilot episode: