I saw a post on Reddit that proved to me that other people have been applying Baudrillard to Mr. Robot. So… here goes.
I think some people use Baudrillard and the simulation in weird ways–and I’ve been told that *I* don’t always read him the way most people do–but there’s certainly a distinct hyperreal sense of money in MR: “money” is already a sign for something that is imaginary. When we take that a step further with cryptocurrency, which mimics the idea of a “coin” but a coin which represents value which is based on… what? That’s where this discussion leads. Down the rabbit hole.
Things can be made more complicated, to be sure, but the base of it all is that we already have things that are pure simulacrum in our world. There are places that will give me goods in return for “bitcoin,” which is a cryptocurrency based on — well, that’s a long, long discussion, isn’t it?– but is meant to signify something akin to money, which once represented an anchored value but now doesn’t, and we can now create money for people to owe (that’s basically what a credit card is, as a bank vouches for you to spend money, but that money isn’t sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent).
Of course money hasn’t meant anything other than what we all agreed it would mean for a long time. I can go buy a car and get a loan from a bank. The money for the loan is actually the value of the car. And I pay the bank for the car, which the bank already paid the dealership for, with the value of the car. It’s even more trippy if I get a new credit card, where a bank gives me a card that represents money, money they as a bank claim I am good for. I can then spend it, then I owe that money plus interest to the bank. But the money only exists because I signed a sheet of paper. There isn’t a reserve at Citibank to cover all the credit cards they issue. And that’s just looking at banks that are doing business “legitimately.” If we factor in places that have fake co-signers and give junk loans that they plan to bundle and sell for pennies on the imaginary dollar (often selling the same loan to multiple people for collection), it gets even stranger. Then of course there’s that whole idea of collection, that a person can buy your debt (giving over money for the record of money you created that you didn’t pay back to the bank who said you were good for it) and then come and ask you for money that you didn’t agree with them that they created. It’s… well, it’s fucked up.
This is also where I assume people are drawing in the Mandela Effect as something that is happening in Mr. Robot, as that’s also the creation of a simulacrum. Take the story of the first Thanksgiving. The story that school kids are told about pilgrims and “Indians” dining happily together has no historical referent (in fact the historical “thanksgiving” was a group of colonists celebrating that they’d slaughtered most of a tribe). But that story about coming together spawns the “horn of plenty” and the stereotypical pilgrim (which is not very much like what a true pilgrim is) and weird justifications or eating turkey. Our President even fake pardons a turkey every year to spare it from being eaten. Those are things that don’t have a reference in the real (but there isn’t a real if you totally buy in), but people accept their simulated reality.
So how do the two weave together? Watch this. The idea of “revolution” is often based on a simulation. The Boston Tea Party was a bunch of angry British Colonists who dressed up like natives and threw their tea in the harbor because they didn’t want to pay taxes to the Monarchy. They formed the ultimate simulation by declaring themselves a country on land that didn’t belong to them, waging a war, winning independence and with it possession of a whole hypothetical continent it had no real referent to.
So the idea of revolution happening– of massive change– is in itself an illusion, not precisely a simulation but treated as a simulation by those who think it’s real.
The procession of simulacra could explain why 5/9 happened on the show but it didn’t cause anywhere near the idealized revolution that Mr. Robot expected. Because it can’t. Because money isn’t money. If you control wealth, you just make a “new” money and go on. You can’t delete all the debt. It’s an idea that, when abstract, works. But when you start to “topple the system,” the system doesn’t have to play by anything that resembles real rules. It can just morph, making its own new reality. It is a simulation.