Vulnerable: Intersecting Disability and Precarity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Case of Mr. Robot

Abstract

In 2015, USA Network released Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot, an original series in four seasons ending in 2019 that tells the story of Elliot Anderson; a young hacker working in cybersecurity who develops the alternative personality of a Mr. Robot to bring E-Corp’s financial oppression over the American people. This chapter explores Esmail’s depiction of human vulnerability in his digital TV series Mr.Robot in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Thematically speaking, my analysis is concerned with economic precarity as well as physical and psychological disability as the most salient vulnerabilities endured by the American working class. This thematic approach is paired with a formal analysis of Esmail’s narrative as a case of vulnerable text that heavily relies on narrative prosthesis. I will be using Klaus Schwab’s (2016) definition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to set the historical frame depicted in the series and Luciano Floridi’s notion of “infosphere” and “interface” (2014) to determine the series’ setting as well as the particularities of character construction in this context. My formal analysis employs Jean Ganteau’s textual markers for the literary category of “vulnerable text” (2015), as well as Mitchell and Snyder’s identification of disability as a “narrative prosthesis” triggering narrative interest at the expense of the “materiality of the disability metaphor” (2000). This materiality is thematically developed as a case of vulnerability as defined by Judith Butler in 2004, including psychological and disability as well as economic precarity.