What Rigoberto the Roomba Represents in Margo's Got Money Troubles
What Rigoberto Is and Where It Appears
Rigoberto is the name Margo gives to a Roomba robot vacuum that first appears in the TikTok series she creates with KC and Rose. In the early videos, Rigoberto is a comedic prop: Margo, playing the character Ghost, insists the vacuum is sentient, calling it a friend while KC and Rose react with exasperation. The joke is that Ghost—an alien who has supposedly landed on the couple's balcony—treats a household appliance as a companion, and the humans around her can't tell whether she's serious.
The symbol transforms in Chapter Eighteen. After a difficult mediation session with Mark over custody of Bodhi, Margo returns home and builds a new OnlyFans video around Rigoberto. She modifies the Roomba—screwing its battery panel back on, giving it a female, Siri-like voice generated with AIVoiceOver—and then performs a scenario in which Rigoberto takes control of her body. The Roomba issues escalating commands, from the ridiculous (doing the Orange Justice dance naked) to the explicitly sexual, culminating in Margo masturbating to its instructions. The video earns over $12,000 in its first hour.
She also repurposes footage into PG TikTok clips in which Ghost, now controlled by Rigoberto, becomes an evil heel who does terrible, comical things to Rose and KC. Her plan is for KC and Rose to eventually incapacitate her, unscrew the panel, and reset her into a new version of Ghost—one that is neither the naive original nor the evil bot, but something more complex and human.
From Prop to Controller: How the Symbol Evolves
In the early TikTok appearances, Rigoberto is inert. It doesn't move, speak, or act; it's simply an object that Ghost misrecognizes as a friend. The comedy comes from the gap between what the audience knows (it's a vacuum) and what Ghost believes (it's a companion). Rigoberto is a prop in the service of the alien persona—a way of making Ghost seem endearingly naive.
By Chapter Eighteen, Rigoberto has become an agent. Margo gives it a voice, and that voice issues commands that she obeys. The shift is significant: the Roomba moves from being something Margo talks about to something that talks through her. The object that was once a prop for her performance becomes the supposed author of her actions. This inversion—the performer becoming the performed-upon—is the core of the symbol's meaning.
The change also tracks with Margo's circumstances. The video is made immediately after mediation, where Mark sought full custody by citing her finances, her father's violence, and her sex work. The Roomba video is, in part, a response to that pressure: it's the content that will fund her legal defense. The symbol of surrender is also a tool of survival, tying directly into the novel's exploration of economic survival and the commodification of the body.
The Performance of Powerlessness
The Rigoberto video is a performance of total surrender that is actually a calculated act of control. Margo stages herself as a body without agency—a woman who will do anything the Roomba says—but she is the one who wrote the script, modified the device, and edited the footage. The video took nearly three days to make. The appearance of spontaneity is the product of meticulous labor.
This paradox connects directly to the novel's treatment of performance and authenticity. Margo reflects that the video was very much her—that she was being herself. The performance of being controlled is, in her view, more authentically her than the naive Ghost persona she'd been maintaining. The Roomba lets her stage a version of powerlessness that is actually a claim to power: the power to decide what her audience sees, to set the terms of her own objectification, and to profit from it.
The video also literalizes something Margo has been navigating throughout the novel: the sense that her body is not fully her own. As a mother, her body is subject to public scrutiny and legal contest. As a sex worker, it is a product for consumption. The Roomba's commands are a grotesque exaggeration of the demands her fans make of her—the endless requests for more exposure, more talk, more performance—and by staging those demands as coming from a machine, Margo makes visible the automation of desire that underpins her work. This connects to the theme of motherhood under surveillance, as her body is simultaneously maternal and sexualized, watched by both the state and her subscribers.
Automation, Gender, and the Gaze
The choice to give Rigoberto a female voice is worth pausing on. Margo makes the voice on AIVoiceOver, and it's not unlike Siri's—the default feminine voice of consumer technology. The Roomba, a domestic appliance, speaks in the voice of a digital assistant, another machine designed to serve. That a female-voiced machine commands Margo's body complicates the power dynamic: the controller is itself a servant, an object of domestic labor.
The scene also echoes an earlier moment in the novel. In Chapter Two, during her first ultrasound, Margo describes the transvaginal probe as getting fucked by a robot to meet her unborn child. The image of a machine entering her body to produce knowledge about her pregnancy prefigures the Roomba video, where a machine directs her body for the production of content. In both cases, technology mediates her relationship to her own body—once for medical surveillance, once for commercial spectacle.
The Escalation Trap
The fans' ecstatic response to the Rigoberto video—five hundred purchases in an hour, over $12,000 in earnings—reveals the economic logic that drives Margo's content. The video is a hit precisely because it is more extreme than what came before. And the logic of escalation is already visible in Margo's plans: she tells Rose she wants to make another video where she fucks herself with a Dyson, which she frames as an excuse to buy one. The joke masks a serious point: each video must outdo the last, and the Roomba—a modest household appliance—will give way to a more powerful machine.
This escalation is the trap of the attention economy. Margo's success depends on her willingness to push further, to surrender more of herself to the machine's commands. The Roomba is the first controller; the Dyson is the next. The symbol thus points beyond itself to the larger system in which Margo is caught: the platform, the fans, the algorithm, and the money that makes it all feel necessary. It also reflects her struggle for narrative control and storytelling—the attempt to write her own story even as the demands of the market escalate.
Study Questions
1. How does Rigoberto's role change from the early TikTok videos to the Chapter Eighteen OnlyFans video?
In the early videos, Rigoberto is an inert prop that Ghost misrecognizes as a friend; the comedy comes from the gap between what the audience knows and what the character believes. In Chapter Eighteen, Margo modifies the Roomba, gives it a voice, and performs a scenario in which it controls her body. The shift is from object to agent: Rigoberto stops being something Margo talks about and becomes something that commands her.
2. What does the female, Siri-like voice on the Roomba suggest about the relationship between technology, gender, and control?
The voice links Rigoberto to the default feminine voices of consumer technology—digital assistants designed to serve. That a female-voiced machine commands Margo's body complicates the power dynamic: the controller is itself a servant. The choice also echoes the earlier ultrasound scene, where Margo describes the transvaginal probe as getting fucked by a robot, suggesting a pattern of machines mediating her relationship to her own body.
3. How does the Rigoberto video function as both a surrender of control and an assertion of it?
The video stages Margo as a body without agency, obeying a machine's commands. But Margo wrote the script, modified the device, and spent nearly three days editing the footage. The performance of powerlessness is a calculated act: she controls what her audience sees, sets the terms of her own objectification, and profits from it. The Roomba lets her stage surrender while actually exercising control.
4. What does the planned Dyson video reveal about the logic of content creation in the novel?
The Dyson plan shows that each video must outdo the last. The Roomba video's success—over $12,000 in an hour—creates pressure to escalate, and the Dyson is the next, more powerful machine. The escalation is the trap of the attention economy: Margo's survival depends on her willingness to push further, surrendering more of herself to the machine's commands. This dynamic also connects to her relationships with Jinx, Suzie, and JB, who each respond differently to the person she becomes through this work.