Recently I watched Severance on Apple TV+ and It made me think a lot about work, corporations, technology.
Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, the series isn’t just another dystopia, I think it’s a mirror. The cast give life to a group of workers that decided to cut theirs lives in two, so they are one person inside the work and another very different in the outside.
The idea of Lumon Industries (a giant, mysterious corporation) stayed with me. It reminded me the tech corporations like Amazon, Google, etc.
Companies so large that their influence seeps into every corner of daily life: the way we shop, what we read, how we move, and sometimes, what we believe. Lumon in Severance takes this power one step further, playing god by splitting human memory in half. A “severed” employee doesn’t know who they are outside of work, and their outside self knows nothing about what happens inside.
Watching those scenes where the characters descend into Lumon’s basement, transforming into their “innie” selves, made me think about if we are somehow severed by our smartphones, specially by our social media.
Isn’t it similar when we bow our heads to our phones, entering that other dimension of endless scrolling? One moment we’re ourselves, the next we’re a version curated by algorithms, trapped in echo chambers of reels, memes and notifications.
We lose time, memory blurs and when we look up, the outside world feels like it belongs to someone else. We consume so much information, so quickly, that little of it sticks. Entertainment floods our attention and social media keeps us distracted with personalized content designed not to challenge us, but to comfort us. Isn’t that its own kind of severance? A constant fragmentation of who we are and what we remember.
By watching the series, you could see that inside Lumon, the workers spend their days performing tasks that are obscure and incomprehensible. They don’t know what their work really means, only that it’s “important”. I think if this is similar to the reality of many modern jobs. Millions of people everyday sit behind screens, pushing data around, building slides, tweaking code, without ever seeing the bigger picture.
In giant organizations, the purpose often dissolves into abstraction. We become cogs, not creators.
Another thing that I reflected was about who is the perfect worker for a company. Seems that is very convenient for Lumon that theirs workers don’t know about their outie lives. Translating that into the real life, would it be more productive if, at work, we couldn't remember our personal problems? Seems that Severance is the dream of every corporation: total productivity without the mess of human complexity.
This is a good series I’d recommend. It’s an opportunity to think about corporate power, technological control, the dilema of trading our freedom for something else (confort, money, security?).
