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Comment by mahranch | Hacker News Reader

> There is a very real sense in which "anarchy" -- a kind of lack of predictably -- is always the resultant state after a large enough change to a power structure

If this is the kind of anarchy you envision, you're going to be sorely disappointed if something like that happened in real life. Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out. There would be mass looting, killings, raping, and people taking advantage of the chaos (opportunists). It would literally be the wild west with all services, including power and the internet going down.

The "anarchy" in Mr. Robot is a falsehood, it's a libertarian/hackers fantasy. That's not anarchy at all. Not even close.

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While I agree with your assertion that a state of anarchy introduced by force (technical or otherwise) in a relatively stable democracy would be nightmarish, I suspect that's going to be the thrust of season 2.

The activists leveraged some technical know-how and swashbuckling intrusions to bring down a big bank's systems, but the opening episodes of season 2 point to a mobilization of the democratic government forces to restore order by force. They didn't create anarchy by destroying the source of financial truth, they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down.

The series was supposed to have been composed as a three-act movie originally, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds moving forward in the second act.

>> "they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down"

Maybe, did you catch White Rose's fire side chat at the end of season one? Who is handing the keys to who in season two?

White rose is fascinating -- his obsession with time comes across to me as a very insightful attribute to associate with a hacker in a Confucian oriented society -- I wonder if social hacking a great harmony society would tend to involve a lot of precise timing attacks. And the name is great -- perhaps referring to the anti-nazi protest movement in Munich -- a subtle reference to an existence proof for the possibility that a "hacker movement" could be deemed "correct" to oppose the existing paradigm in which its embedded. And it's great that he's Chinese -- we are so conditioned in the west to think of "Chinese hackers" as only and always state sponsored black hats. How strange that preconception given how noble a calling we should perceive there to be for "hackers" operating domestically in China -- to tweak at what we perceive as an often overly authoritarian regime. It made me feel a startling lack of examples in western media of "good guy" Chinese hackers. The realization has me always looking to find ways to try to establish trust with the white rose character. Not sure if he should have it, but I hope he is revealed to deserve it.

> Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out.

This does not have to be the case at all. Look at Catalonia in revolutionary Spain. To quote Proudhon: "Anarchy is order." People naturally organise to support each other, and not necessarily through the power of a ruler or a state.

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