Why Severance is terrifying

A brilliant show about the banal horrors of white collar work in the age of big tech and platform capitalism

“To this end we employ rigorous orientation protocols. Here are the 127 steps to maximizing glee and enforcing a productive workplace. From there, secure camaraderie with a jovial round of ball game. Make sure the ball is well-inflated and that players ensure mutual fondness by the end. Consider augmenting the game with jokes. But mind professional boundaries, as crossing these may necessitate toxic work environments. Well, there you have it. Remember managers: growth takes time. But happy workers bloom more quickly. To quote Lumon’s founder: ‘the mouth which is busy smiling cannot bite.’”

(I was a latecomer to Severance, whose second season concluded a few weeks ago. But I immediately knew upon watching the first episode that forging ahead would be worthwhile, and in doing so I was richly rewarded. If you haven’t seen the show and are planning to watch it, you may want to go in completely blind. But I wouldn’t worry too much about reading on. Beyond the basics, I won’t be discussing the specific plot details of any episode or giving anything major away. In any case, enjoy.)

The basic premise of Severance, for those unfamiliar, is both simple and ingenious. Employed at the opaque and inscrutable Lumon corporation, the show’s main characters have all undergone a controversial medical procedure that effectively splits their personalities in two. While at work, and specifically while on the company’s designated “severed” floor doing something called “Macro-data Refinement” (MDR), they have no memory or sense of their outer selves and only the most generalized knowledge of the outside world.

Upon leaving, conversely, they are unable to remember anything that happens inside and go about their lives knowing that they are severed people who work for Lumon and nothing more. The result is not just the imposition of a strict barrier between professional life and personal life, but the creation of two completely separate people (an “innie” and an “outie”) whose feelings, memories, relationships are distinct even though they inhabit the same body.

Here, the ethical implications are profound. Legally-speaking, the innies remain free people, both because they leave the office after 5 pm every day (via an elevator that serves as the daily transition point for severed consciousnesses) and because their outies formally consented to the arrangement when they originally decided to undergo the severance procedure. But once this has occurred, the remainder of an innie’s conscious life is confined to designated areas inside the Lumon building and termination or retirement become akin to death.

Sending messages to people outside, whether their own outies or anyone else, is rendered impossible by a system of panoptic surveillance — and the oversight of quietly-terrifying though disarmingly perky managers. These managers, notably, are not required to undergo the severance procedure themselves, meaning they can if necessary continue to monitor and surveil Lumon employees on the outside without ever being identified.

One gets the impression that the strictest discipline is applied only rarely, because the system is so self-contained and coldly efficient. If anything, in fact, some of the innies seem happier inside company HQ than their outies are beyond its confines. When the parameters of your entire universe are circumscribed by an HR-enforced rulebook and the company’s official agitprop, you become — from its perspective at least — the perfect employee: punctual, compliant, subordinate, and uncritically receptive to whatever is put in front of you, whether it’s the enforced camaraderie of the office or the inscrutable business of MDR itself.

Beyond the ingenuity of its central conceit, Severance is made highly watchable by fantastic writing, excellent performances, and an artfully rendered world whose intricate mysteries it gradually expounds and unpacks with carefully-paced suspense. This isn’t a review per se, nor the kind of speculative piece a show like Severance so clearly invites. I didn’t come here to editorialize about its Season 2 finale or make predictions about what its forthcoming third season will bring. Suffice it to say, the show is excellent television, and if you’re interested in dystopian psychological sci-fi, it’s almost certainly for you.

No, what really interests me is how Severance depicts both the world of white collar work and the culture of the modern corporation in all of their banal horrors. From demeaning team bonding rituals to intrusive oversight by managers, much about this show will feel eerily familiar to those who have ever been employed in a certain kind of office — and it only needs to exaggerate them very slightly to bring out the Kafkaesque truth of things.

Lumon, which as depicted draws inspiration from tech giants like Apple (which incidentally finances Severance) but also from the likes of early industrial age prosperity gospel and the Church of Scientology, is in many ways the ur-corporation. Its mysterious founder Kier Eagan — who died long ago and contains hints of Steve Jobs, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, and Big Brother — is lionized as a wise and avuncular patriarch and celebrated as a saint.

The company’s public-facing rhetoric, meanwhile, is transformative and promethean: in its official PR Lumon is in fact less a company than a crusade undertaken for the betterment of all (even if we aren’t exactly sure what it does). To work there is a privilege, and to dissent from its official line is an act of treason. In the real world, there is no job interview in existence in which it’s permissible to answer “because I need money to live” when asked why you’re applying. The Lumon ethos takes this to its logical end: the company is a family in which the owners are benevolent parents and the workers are its children.

If nothing else, the industrial era once made the tyranny and cruelty of work at large enterprises quite explicit. The culture of late and postindustrial work, on the other hand, often obscures the extent to which many workplaces are effectively private tyrannies. On a factory floor, repetitive tasks are performed alongside one’s fellow workers and the division between labour and management is usually quite easy to spot. In the modern office, whether attached to a corporate behemoth or nonprofit — to say nothing of an Amazon warehouse¹ — power and authority are comparatively subtle and diffuse. While the likes of Ford or General Motors employed Pinkertons as spies (and, when needed, as thugs), capitalist enterprises in the 21st century have a much wider and more sophisticated arsenal of tools at their disposal to control, discipline, and monitor their employees.

When deployed effectively, the upshot is that many will internalize company protocols to such an extent that they mostly forget they’re employees in the first place. Instead, they will simply do what they’re told whenever they’re told to do it — participating in captive audience meetings with the same unthinking deference they show while at their assigned cubicles; warmly accepting infantilizing rewards for productivity and good behaviour as if receiving a thoughtful birthday gift from a close friend.

One of the central questions of Severance is just what the hell the Lumon corporation actually exists to do. What, if anything, does it manufacture? What are its products? And how, exactly, has it become the globe-spanning corporate leviathan it evidently is? Lumon appears to be a biotechnology company of some sort, but beyond this its true nature and purpose is largely unknown.

The business of MDR itself is even more inscrutable. The innies who make up the MDR team spend their days sitting in nondescript cubicles staring into primitive DOS-era screens and moving their cursors across random sequences of numbers. Eventually, the process will elicit an emotional response in the employee — signalling that a particular combination can be put into refinement. What happens next, or why any of this is being done at all, is completely unknown.

Again, there’s a lot contained in this remarkably simple conceit. MDR bears a strong resemblance to platform capitalism, wherein all of us are constantly being studied by the devices we’re using for both work and play — partly so they can more effectively sell us things, partly so our responses can be turned into data that can be fed back into the algorithm so that it can better commodify our attention. It also resembles any number of dull as ditchwater email jobs that employ people to convey and process information about things in which they have absolutely no stake.

Either way, it’s a pretty potent stand-in for different activities that have come to dominate modern life both at work and outside of it.

POV: you wake up and stare at your phone before even getting out of bed, scrolling through apps streamlined to be as distracting as possible so that they can siphon your attention and use the resulting data to siphon it more efficiently in the future. You go to work and continue staring at your phone throughout your commute, then arrive at the office so you can gaze aimlessly into another screen and type “apologies for the late reply” two dozen times to other people who are doing the exact same thing. You ride the bus or train home and scroll through the same pages and apps you’ve been looking at all day while at your desk. You perform this exact ritual five days a week between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm, leaving every day via the same elevator — whose walls and carpets you know down to the tiniest coffee stain.

You aren’t entirely sure how or why, but for some reason all of this is making a handful of other people who seem happier and live more comfortably than you very rich. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to keep responding to emails from your manager well into the evening. You may also need to take part in infantilizing team-building exercises and sit through weekly presentations about the company’s social mission and the boundless compassion of its founder. If you’re fortunate enough, you might get along with a coworker or two and look forward to seeing them each day. But, if we’re being honest here, the only reason you’re here is because you need money to survive. You know this, and hate it but try and push the related thoughts away in order to maintain your sanity. The company also knows it, and wields it to its own advantage whenever it can. Neither side concedes these things openly to the other. Officially, you’re members of a team — a family even — working together to achieve a common goal…

The Severance procedure is, in a sense, meant to address the most hated things about working life. By creating a separate professional self someone’s non-professional — or real — self doesn’t have to concern themselves with, the tedium of work and all that comes with it are theoretically removed from the picture. Instead, it has the opposite effect: both for the main characters and for we the viewers. Despite the chirpy claims of Lumon and its management, the innies are quite literally slaves who have been stripped of their right to a private existence. They enter the world as blank slates with no memory of the outside world and, despite physically leaving the office every day, their conscious lives take place entirely within its fluorescent confines. Their purpose served, they are given a short retirement party and sent to the exit to commune with oblivion.

If there’s something uniquely unsettling — and terrifying — about Severance, this is the source. Aside from the fictional medical procedure that serves as its structuring conceit, the show has to contrive virtually nothing to make both Lumon and the experience of working there seem plausible and real. That’s because there are now Lumons all over the place and millions of us must spend the best years of our lives trapped inside of them doing macro-data refinement.

Thanks to the wonders of platform capitalism, moreover, there is actually no need for innies or outies. Increasingly, they are the same thing.

1. Much as Lumon strenuously restricts non company-approved speech and prevents the workers in MDR from sending messages of any kind to the outside, in 2022 Amazon was caught by The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein blocking the use of selected words on its worker chat app — among them: “union,” “restrooms,” “pay rise” and, I kid you not “plantation.”