It seems like there’s a resistance to expanding our conception of cyberpunk beyond the (admittedly iconic, but perhaps narrow) pop culture aesthetic of a hardboiled pink-purple speculative future, one of brutalist neon megacities and three-dimensional Metaverses waiting to be “jacked” into. But that’s a shame, because the very tangible world of the here-and-now resembles and subverts what artists like Katsuhiro Otomo and William Gibson were envisioning in the ‘80s in startling ways. The tech dystopia presented by the subgenre feels increasingly of a frustratingly banal present. But 10 years ago, another artist threw his hat in with those early architects, deconstructing the genre through a wholly contemporary lens — and introducing audiences to television’s most sardonic, unpredictably tortured millennial antihero in the process.
Much to the chagrin of real-life hackers and information security employees everywhere, cybersecurity had mostly been portrayed as some three-dimensional reality of esoteric, incomprehensible digital knowledge prior to Mr. Robot. Thankfully, showrunner Sam Esmail’s lifelong hyperfixation on hacker culture smashed headfirst into the revolutionary political momentum cultivated on early 2010s social media (in particular the 2011 Egyptian revolution, an event he had a personal attachment to because of his own heritage). The end result became one of the most authentic and expert-celebrated depictions of cybersecurity and hacking ever. It’s cut of the same nervy, disaffected, paranoid online cloth as David Fincher’s The Social Network, and it’s certainly not the only DNA it shares with the filmmaker.
