Severance and Tech

At the time I was made redundant from my desk job at a large corporation, I was deeply obsessed with the hit sci-fi series Severance.

For the uninitiated, the show centres around the eponymous severance procedure where a chip is implanted into a person’s brain, creating a memory barrier between work and home.

This essentially creates a new personality that exists only in the office, an ‘innie’ that dies at 5 pm when the ‘outie’ comes online and is resurrected at 9 am the next business day.

The innie remembers nothing of their outie’s life and the outie knows nothing about what their body does while at work.

The severance procedure asks timeless sci-fi questions like “what is the self?” and “what is to be human?” 

It’s all good stuff that lets celebrities brag about their self-discovery trips to India on podcasts, but not, I believe, why the show has such broad appeal.

What speaks to the current era is the themes of corporate control. The severance procedure was invented by Lumon, a health-tech mega corporation, and provides the company with pliable naifs that can be enticed to work hard with the promise of toys and custom stationary.

But it is the ironic lack of modern office tech that reveals further truths about our own tech-rich world.

Despite being one of the world’s biggest global tech companies, Lumon’s office equipment is oddly anachronist.

CRT monitors display low-pixel, green-tinged letters on a black background; speakers in wooden boxes crackle and employees even swap their digital watches for analogue ones before they can descend into the windowless office.

Yet, Lumon still exercises so much control.

In Severance, the invasiveness perpetrated by modern technology is exposed when it is  replaced by human action. 

When good corporate citizen innie Dylan G. (Fallout’s Zach Cherry) naively steals an enigmatic corporate secret, outie-Dylan is visited at home by his Lumon supervisor.

Outie-Dylan is forced into his own closet and switched into innie-Dylan to be grilled on the secret’s whereabouts. 

While no manager has ever come knocking on my door at dinner time, email and instant messaging keep us tied to our offices to the point that Australia made it law that workers can silence the incessant notifications.

While we recoil at the supervisor using his power to invade Dylan’s home life, it’s just normal to get the occasional afterhours email – yet both represent the cold hands of corporate power grasping at our attention.

As a tech reporter, you constantly hear how technology saves company time and money but watching Severance made me realise how much modern office technology is about replacing human methods of control with technological ones. 

That little green, yellow or red dot in Teams or Slack is not just about letting people know when you’re reachable, but about sending that message that unless you are expressly busy, you are available. 

I was never a great corporate citizen. I kept a second phone for work that was put away from 5:30 pm to 8:30 am, went home early when I could, and never attended the Severance-sounding Monthly Mingle social events (it’s not quite a Music Dance Experience but it echoes).

However, maintaining that stance always felt like an unspoken fight, like I was doing something wrong, a naughty innie roaming the halls instead of feeding the behemoth that hungers for human time and energy.

In Severance, the innies are guilted into behaving through the scripture of Kier Eagan, the founder of Lumon whose pseudo-holy texts proclaim the Eagans to be prophets and are filled with such profundities as “We must be cut to heal”.

In the early 2000’s, you may have seen something similar in white print on a thick black border surrounding an image of a man standing atop a mountain.

In the real world, it is the technologies – email, status indicator dots, laptops you’re expected to take home for some reason – they all add to that feeling that disconnecting from work is an action you have to take, rather than the norm.

It’s a subtle form of control but it’s potent, and it benefits those at the top. 

This is the most powerful question of Severance to me: who, ultimately, am I working for?

There are the shareholders of the company, sure, but also tech companies that they pay for business technologies.

Consumer tech companies can do well, but most making small-country-level revenue do so by selling tech to big businesses.

Perhaps the weakness of Severance’s cutting observations is that it presents oligarchical tech CEOs as ominous figures, filled with a dark mana that pours from their tongues like so much mist.

Maybe if we had a Jame Eagen suddenly looming in the shadows, or a competent but cold Helena Eagan crushing spirits, it would be easier to recognise the uncaring malice. 

The reality is Elon Musk’s dopey jumping and clumsy salutes as he rips away funding for global aid projects. It’s Mark Zuckerberg donning a spray tan and million-dollar watch to announce he’s making cyberbullying great again.

I clearly wasn’t generating enough shareholder value to be worth keeping around – but did I want to go into another company to try to be more valuable if it meant taking the elevator down once more and doing my best to forget my life outside?

I have the choice to say no, for now at least.

One day, I may end up back in a cubicle, staring at a hungry screen. Thinking of Severance and feeling a vertigo, like looking up to see myself in a ceiling mirror.

I’ll ask myself who I really am, what I’m really doing, and who it’s even for, but I won’t be able to disconnect.

Instead, I’ll think of my family and the bills I have to pay, and I’ll keep my outie’s voice silent as that little dot turns from red to green.

Severance streams on Apple TV