It's both apt and unexpected that it's an Apple TV+ production, given how the compartmentalization of knowledge and ultra-secrecy of Lumon is evocative of Apple corporate culture.
Severance seems heavily influenced by the works of Greg Egan, a sci-fi author famous for his writings about technology and consciousness. I assume this is the origin of the name "Eagan" used frequently in the show.
I love both the show & Egan's writing, but Egan's stuff feels a lot more optimistic to me. I do like the theory that things are not quite what they seem in Severance and there might be a Ndoli Jewel-type device involved.
Good catch. The best parts of many sci-fi shows are lifted directly from Egan, Black mirror's "cookie" concept (copying a consciousness) and Egan's "jewel", for example.
I always feel that so many of the 'digital humans' narratives sci-fi are just approximations of the depth of world achieved in permutation city or diaspora.
Slight tangent, but for the intersection of folks who are fans of both Severence and The Office, Stephen Colbert recently did an incredibly humorous mashup of the two:
I actually disagree with the idea that alienation is a feature of capitalism—I think it’s a feature of an industrial mode of production that is not necessarily linked to capitalism.
Suppose there is a creative designer who develops a widget with a specific purpose, and then this widget is mass produced by humans on an assembly line who might not even get to see or understand the completed product, since they are just performing a repetitive chore on an assembly line.
One observation is that the assembly-line workers are more alienated than the designer, who understands the purpose of the widget and who produced the blueprint. However the designer is still somewhat alienated, since they don’t get to see the final product.
Another observation is that it is possible to have a capitalist society in which there is no alienation at all—a designer develops the concept of a widget, and then manually builds a small amount of the widgets by themselves (see for example Etsy).
Also, I would contend that assembly-line workers in a communist society suffer the exact same amount of alienation as those in a capitalist one.
Is this the source of the contemporary obsession with "mission statements" - a lame attempt to push "values" downward and generate "motivation" that is meant to work in opposition to alienation ?
Alienation looks the same from a worker’s perspective regardless of if it is the state or the wealthy class that exploits their labor. In the case of the Soviet Union, the workers were never empowered to own their own means of production, their bosses were simply replaced by the state. So from a workers perspective this is a distinction without a difference.
The main issue with alienation isn’t about the worker’s understanding of the purpose of the work, but how they are exploited for the work. In capitalist society both the designer and the assembly workers are exploited if their work will ultimately benefit the shareholders of the company they work for. The exploitation through the stock market is something the workers have no control over. So they are alienated from their profits.
> Another observation is that it is possible to have a capitalist society in which there is no alienation at all—a designer develops the concept of a widget, and then manually builds a small amount of the widgets by themselves (see for example Etsy).
That's not capitalism. That's how artisans before capitalism earned a livelihood, and your designer is an artisan (part of the Etsy market/guild).
Capitalism requires continual growth, as the fundamental goal is the increase of capital and not meeting (steady-state) needs. Optimizing production (for growth) as necessitated by capitalism (such as due to debt service) strongly implies specialization and compartmentalization. Alienation is built in to capitalism. Capitalism is not about humans and human needs.
(Note: private property; right to produce and engage in commerce; competitive markets; none of these are unique to a capitalist system. All these made their appearance long before capitalism.)
p.s.
I find it thought provoking that there are no natural analogues to a capitalist system. In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity.
> I find it thought provoking that there are no natural analogues to a capitalist system. In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity.
My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady. Biological systems don't stop growing because they think that they've reached a maintainable steady state; they stop growing because they run into resource constraints.
"The worker is split in two: an “innie,” who exists solely to work at Lumon, and an “outie,” who continues to live their life normally. Or, as normally as one can when they don’t know what they’re doing for 40 hours a week."
I think the politically correct term in our industry for this is "mission driven company", and it's particularly telling that the companies at the forefront of that culture seem to be financial platforms solely concerned with shoveling symbolic exchange value around, with many people not really understanding what they're even doing.
Similar, but not quite. In Paycheck he had a whole section of his life blocked out, and during the work (presumably) had his prior-to-starting identity intact. In Severance, the "innie" person is a blank slate for biographical memories. They know facts, language, skills, but have no clue who they are. And at the end of the day, they return to being their "outie" person with the innie experience entirely suppressed (it seems). This is actually a big part of the conflict for the innie characters as they have no identity beyond the persona they develop in their office environment.
So from the perspective of the outie, yes, very similar story. From the perspective of the innie, very different. And then there's the interleaving of the two lives which doesn't happen in Paycheck.
Readit News
Shameless plug: my take on “Severance”: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/severance-apple-marxist-show/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DGOgvxP7LE
Suppose there is a creative designer who develops a widget with a specific purpose, and then this widget is mass produced by humans on an assembly line who might not even get to see or understand the completed product, since they are just performing a repetitive chore on an assembly line.
One observation is that the assembly-line workers are more alienated than the designer, who understands the purpose of the widget and who produced the blueprint. However the designer is still somewhat alienated, since they don’t get to see the final product.
Another observation is that it is possible to have a capitalist society in which there is no alienation at all—a designer develops the concept of a widget, and then manually builds a small amount of the widgets by themselves (see for example Etsy).
Also, I would contend that assembly-line workers in a communist society suffer the exact same amount of alienation as those in a capitalist one.
The main issue with alienation isn’t about the worker’s understanding of the purpose of the work, but how they are exploited for the work. In capitalist society both the designer and the assembly workers are exploited if their work will ultimately benefit the shareholders of the company they work for. The exploitation through the stock market is something the workers have no control over. So they are alienated from their profits.
That's not capitalism. That's how artisans before capitalism earned a livelihood, and your designer is an artisan (part of the Etsy market/guild).
Capitalism requires continual growth, as the fundamental goal is the increase of capital and not meeting (steady-state) needs. Optimizing production (for growth) as necessitated by capitalism (such as due to debt service) strongly implies specialization and compartmentalization. Alienation is built in to capitalism. Capitalism is not about humans and human needs.
(Note: private property; right to produce and engage in commerce; competitive markets; none of these are unique to a capitalist system. All these made their appearance long before capitalism.)
p.s.
I find it thought provoking that there are no natural analogues to a capitalist system. In nature, unimpeded, continual growth is typically a malady. Ecosystems, species, and even individual biological units at most experience a growth spurt to bring the system to a viable state for steady-state continuity.
My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady. Biological systems don't stop growing because they think that they've reached a maintainable steady state; they stop growing because they run into resource constraints.
For example, the balance between predator and prey populations is maintained via a feedback loop, not via assessments of "sustainability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
Please follow the Hacker News Guidelines below.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think the politically correct term in our industry for this is "mission driven company", and it's particularly telling that the companies at the forefront of that culture seem to be financial platforms solely concerned with shoveling symbolic exchange value around, with many people not really understanding what they're even doing.
Read the story. The movie is pretty universally regarded as horrible.
So from the perspective of the outie, yes, very similar story. From the perspective of the innie, very different. And then there's the interleaving of the two lives which doesn't happen in Paycheck.