Rami Malek "You don't need to be more than yourself" video

Rami Malek video: featuring stills and candids, soundtrack: "You don't need to be more than yourself" by Elliott Murphy.

"Mr. Robot" is centered on hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), whose morphine-monotone describes to us in somber detail why he spends much of his life stealing people’s information and planting bugs in their machines. He often seems like a hopeless character, but nonetheless one who wields a lot of power. While he legitimizes his illegal activity with his own somewhat tired moral compass – hacking a drug dealing rapist and having him arrested – it’s not enough compensation to provide him with any kind of emotional stability or even ephemeral happiness.

The perils of hacking, especially when it involves social justice, is one of the fundamental aspects of the show. Hacking is portrayed as being a very lonely, slightly demented, and never truly fulfilling vocation – the more he knows, the heavier the burden. In some respects Alderson is suffering for our sins. He’s a martyr in the age of computer technology. In one scene he admits, “I’m good at reading people; my secret, I look for the worst in them.” And he finds it, in ample measures. When he’s not involved in hacker vigilantism, he’s working at his desk, a job he doesn’t enjoy, as an engineer for a cyber-security firm called Allsafe.

One of Alderson’s inner monologues should resonate with anyone who’s read Palahniuk: "The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our commentary bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking us into intimacy, or is that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. Fuck Society." Source: siliconangle.com