What Mr. Robot Teaches Us About The Danger of Corporate Dominance

Why we should be Weary of Big Corporations and the lesson we learn from Mr. Robot.

Behind the geekiness and the quest for justice demonstrated in the film Mr. Robot, one of the most important underlying themes is that of the power of corporations and their abilities to control people’s lives. Elliot, the main character in the film calls such corporations E-Corp to mean evil corporations because of their evil deeds and their ability to get away with it. Using the only superpower he has, Elliot resorts to hacking as a way to expose the evil deeds of corporations. Even though fictional, parallels can be drawn between the happenings in the film and what happens today in the real-life corporate world.

In the first episode of the Capitalisn’t, an economics podcast by Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales of Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, respectively, a future is contemplated where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg becomes the U.S president and revises the antitrust law to prevent any attempt to break up his company.  Having been born and raised in Italy, Zingales reminds listeners of how Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced former prime minister mixed his media business with political power. In the podcast, Zingales hypothesizes that if Zuckerberg did the same in the United States, he would end up with an enormous control of the U.S government as well as controlling the world’s biggest communication channel and hence be able to wield “absolute power.” Facebook is just but one of the many corporations today whose size and continued growth threatens to control the personal lives of people. In this paper, I present an argument that big corporations of the world are at the verge of controlling people’s lives, and that some of them could end up being “evil corporations” like is the case in Mr. Robot.

Background on "Mr. Robot"

Mr. Robot is a Tv show that taps into the pervasiveness of the world of cybercrime, the increasing levels of insecurities concerning people’s own digital footprints as well as the naiveté of the average person about security, rights, and privacy. The show also explores the skepticism and concerns regarding the massive influence and control of big corporations. At the center of the story is the general resignation of the ordinary people to the lack of control and privacy as the powers and influence of the big corporations continue to rise. However, even as the mass majority resign to the fate of submissive acceptance of the new reality, one person with hacking superpower risks to take down the big corporations that he had christened as E-corps, meaning “evil corporations.” 

The introduction of Elliot, the hacking hero, adds an interesting tech subculture to the show. The operations of Elliot, as he tries to take down large corporations, gives viewers a dystopian glimpse of what could happen in the real-life with the modern-day big corporations.

Watching the episodes of the show, one cannot fail to draw a parallel between the fictional E-corp and modern global corporations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, et cetera. Just like the E-corp in the show, the modern-day big corporations have permeated so much into the lives of ordinary citizens that they practically control how we live.  Mr. Robot channels legitimate concerns about the scale of influence and the reach of global corporate conglomerates; the ubiquitous and the “too big to fails” like Google and Facebook. In one of the episodes, Elliot asks a substantial question of what simple lines of code can do to the world. The vulnerability of the ordinary citizens to the influence of the big corporations is palpable in the show and one cannot fail to ask what would happen if the big corporations of today had evil intentions with the world.

Corporate organizations are increasingly becoming powerful and influential around the world. Research indicates that some of the biggest corporations operating in various industries account for a bigger percentage of revenues and profits in their respective industries than was the case a decade or two ago and that their powers and influence have grown tremendously. As the corporations amass more power and influence on the lives of people, the public trust in them has been dwindling.

According to a report published in the Harvard Business Review, issue of 2017 by Harrington, approximately 40% of Americans have little or no confidence in big corporations, up from 24% in 1985. Similarly, more people surveyed have suggested that big corporations such as Google and Facebook need to be regulated like utilities or be broken up.

Even though concerns have been raised by the proponents of dominant theories that big corporations can pose danger to the world, a section of innovation experts are not convinced that the concerned are justified. Robert Atkinson and Michale Lind argue in their book, “Big Is Beautiful,” that big corporations are more productive, innovative, and more diverse compared to the smaller corporations. Their argument goes along the lines of economic benefits of having big corporations. For instance, Lind and Atkinson posit that large companies provide better wages, better training and offer much broader benefits to employees; and that is beside their efforts in controlling pollution. The two authors conclude that attempts to “lionize small mom-and-pop shops” while “lambasting big businesses” is “getting it all wrong.

The arguments presented by Lind and Atkinson may sound contrarian, but they nonetheless, remain conventional wisdom supported by many economists and policy wonks. Research has backed up claims that big corporations have significant impact on economies of the countries where they operate. However, what many need to worry about is the fact that many of the big corporations create dependency among ordinary people. The argument by Connolly and Kaisershot that Big Food companies are increasingly becoming environmental and nutritional disasters makes logical sense when the situation is analyzed not only from the economic perspective, but also from a moral perspective. Similarly, Ruggie has argued that big banks pose the risk of global financial crisis because of the mere fact of their size and overdependency that people have on them.

The size of a corporation also determines its influence on the policies and their implementation. In the book “The Captured Economy,” Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, argue that many corporations, both small and big, have undue influence over public policy.

A close look into the financial sector, intellectual property, real estate, and many health sectors (pharmaceuticals), one gets the extent of the influence of the big corporations on public policymaking. In the United States, for instance, such corporations have powerful lobby groups that influence policymaking in Washington. 

The show “Mr. Robot” is a powerful depiction of the moral wars that are bound to happen between ordinary citizens and big corporations that control their lives. Besides the tech subculture that is dominant in the show, one cannot help but draw the parallel between the fictional world in the show and the real happenings in the world today. Concerns have been raised and data produced to show how big corporations like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, et cetera, are growing their influence and control of people’s lives, and the dangers that come with such undue influence if they unchecked.