Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed

https://readpassage.com/severance-is-the-workplace-thriller-weve-needed/

58 78 4 years ago

This seemed like a good article that addressed ideas I had while watching. Alienation in the traditional Marxist perspective relates to the working class. But it's interesting to consider the implications for many "upper class" tech workers (many of those who browse this site) who are still bound by IP and trade secret laws and are effectively insulated from the fruits of their labor.

hackerlight• 4 years ago

Hannah Arendt thinks that alienation (defined more broadly and in a way that's less ideologically rigid than in Marxist thought) is a precursor to totalitarianism. Intriguing and probably partly true.

https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-...

rexpop3• 4 years ago

As a tech worker, I make $X/mo in wages and pay $X/3 in rent. In what way am I "upper" (and not "working" ) class?

drekipus• 4 years ago

You should read the Gulag archipelago.

Tip: "the enemy" is whoever we don't feel like we want at the time. Nothing personal.

texaslonghorn56• 4 years ago

Fair point, I meant for the quotes to function as scare quotes, and working class (or maybe even upper-middle or middle class in scare quotes) would have been more appropriate.

More generally, what I was going for was that many tech workers would think this doesn't apply to them. In particular, for me, "working class" conjures a historical picture of union factory jobs (steel, auto) and I have a hard time viscerally mapping that to tech. If you don't have this same implicit bias then sorry for the confusion and congrats for not having this bias.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 4 years ago

Under that formulation, anyone can be working class just by scaling up the ambition of their housing arrangements. Bezos' penthouse in NYC has an imputed rent of about $4M/year. If we are to consider folks who make $12M/year or less working class, then it kinda ruins the usefulness of the category, considering substantially 100% of the population would be in it.

oarabbus_2• 4 years ago

If you're upper-middle class (which describes the majority of tech workers), you aren't part of the working class, by definition. Most definitions of working-class include individuals in low-paying, unskilled and/or manual labor jobs.

If you're a tech worker in a major city and your take-home pay is $5000 and your rent is $1600, the fact you're spending $X/3 on rent is a choice. You are probably living in an area of your choice, have some amenities of your choice, you have a place to yourself or at least a private bathroom, etc. The working class isn't afforded that luxury. The fact someone you know lives in a $4000/mo high rise you cannot afford does not make you working class. If you could quit your job and survive for a year without going on welfare, you likely aren't working class. If your car broke tomorrow and you could get a replacement without significant financial hardship, you likely aren't working class.

I don't know if that's actually your salary or rent, but such numbers are typical for tech workers in places like SF and NYC (and of course many make significantly more than this). If your rent is significantly higher than the median mortgage ($1200) you probably aren't working class.

Pew Research defines the upper class as adults whose annual household income is more than double the national median.
Household income, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, refers to the combined gross cash income of all members of a household, defined as a group of people living together, who are 15 years or older.

That is ~135k (pretax) in the USA, and perhaps 40% higher for a state like CA. This is actually a rather conservative definition: take the median family income (which can include two working adults and also working children), double that number, and include anyone making _more_ than that.

cratermoon• 4 years ago

Not to be confused with Ling Ma's novel on capitalism and alienation titled Severance https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ling-ma-severan...

jsnk• 4 years ago

Please just use the title "Severance Is The Workplace Thriller We’ve Needed" as the link submission title.

Please follow the Hacker News Guidelines below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

texaslonghorn56• 4 years ago

I'm sorry. I can't edit the title anymore, but I'll make sure to follow the policy going forward.

echelon• 4 years ago

It seriously freaks me out that Apple and Amazon are making movies. The tech giants really shouldn't be in charge of popular culture and the arts.

Amazon paid to lock down Lord of the Rings and very nearly to James Bond. Apple did the same to Foundation. Next is football.

You need an Apple device to watch Apple TV+, and their website is buggy as hell on other operating systems and Android.

I really don't like where things are headed.

latency-guy2• 4 years ago

Well, after Netflix dominated the scene between 2007 - 2015 by themselves, the bigger entertainment conglomerates were keen on taking a little piece of the pie they made. After that, the cat was out of the bag, out came competitors and now everyone is eating everyone's lunch at the same time.

I hate where things are as well, I do miss Netflix's pseudo-monopoly on the premium streaming market, it was genuinely a huge value plus for the consumer then. Netflix was just too good at cornering the market and everyone wised up just in time for what we have now.

I pirate more these days than ever before and it's solely for the convenience so I don't have 30 different devices to stream x y and z shows and films. I remember looking at the titles offered on some service I used to have a while ago to realize that the show I wanted was not even offered on their platform...

What a sick joke.

lotsofpulp• 4 years ago

Netflix did not corner anything. Cornering would involve owning such a large portion of a market that you can dictate your terms as a buyer or seller.

Netflix was the subject of cornering. Disney told Netflix to take a hike because Disney owns the most popular content. Netflix had to pay $500M+ for 5 years of Seinfeld to counteract the news that Comcast was removing The Office from Netflix.

Selling media is a low barrier to entry business. Selling media that has cultural cachet spanning decades is a high barrier to entry business, with the barrier being decades of time.

warriormonk5• 4 years ago

You need an Apple device to watch Apple TV+

I watched severance on a Roku so I know that isn't true.

UIUC_065• 4 years ago

No, you don't. You need an Apple account.

jsolson• 4 years ago

You need an Apple device to watch Apple TV+

Watched it on a Sony TV running Android through Apple's official app.

nl• 4 years ago

You need an Apple device to watch Apple TV+

I watch on my Chromecast with Google TV fine.

There's lots of other non-Apple devices it works on too: https://www.apple.com/au/apple-tv-app/devices/

Amazon paid to lock down Lord of the Rings and very nearly to James Bond. Apple did the same to Foundation. Next is football.

Well HBO etc have been doing this forever. Not sure what the distinction is.

gonzo41• 4 years ago

Amazon could buy up physical cinemas and the just book to their own shops. The platforms are actually pretty good value. It would be better if you could have a more video store approach and then watch whatever from any platform. But the current system isn't that bad. And it's getting films made that otherwise wouldn't.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

"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.

Apocryphon4• 4 years ago

Who among us isn't doing macrodata refinement, really

armnot7• 4 years ago

Some of us are in charge of making sure quotas/OKRs are met

k2enemy• 4 years ago

Like all workers under capitalism, they’re also alienated from each other.
In the capitalist epoch, however, our labour as workers isn’t meant for us.
...it’s not labour per se that induces feelings of dread on a Sunday evening or the desire to escape, cognitively or otherwise, at the end of a week: it’s the alienated form of labour under capitalism.

What world is the author living in? What system of political economy is better, Soviet style communism? Funnily enough, I found the themes and aesthetics of the show more closely connected to communism than capitalism.

tynpeddler2• 4 years ago

Most of the public discourse on the current problems of capitalism is not serious. Many folks aren't actually comparing capitalism to an alternative, instead they're comparing their current situation to a mythical alternative reality. The is exacerbated by the fact that Marx himself and other communist/socialist authors make similar mistakes. The whole marxist obsession with "alienation" is a perfect example. They are largely delusional about the plight of the working class in non-capitalist systems.

Workers in socialist systems are inundated in propaganda in ways that would make the most ardent Fox News producer blush. They don't experience alienation between their work and their non-work life, they experience alienation between the life in their head and life in the physical world. Similarly, workers in a feudal system also experience fear and domination at the hands of a system that vests in them little power or autonomy.

texaslonghorn56• 4 years ago

The whole marxist obsession with "alienation" is a perfect example. They are largely delusional about the plight of the working class in non-capitalist systems.

You make two claims here. You provide some examples of the second claim in the second paragraph; for the first one, do you have any justification for why obsessing over alienation is bad?

More precisely, do you agree or disagree with the premise that alienation exists (in some form) in the capitalist system? If you agree, do you think workers would be better off if they were not alienated?

If you don't agree that alienation exists, how would you describe/judge modern IP rights and corporate hierarchy structures?

Would you say it's a good or bad thing that all of an employee's work product (during and outside of office hours) belongs to the company (assuming you accept my premise that this is enforced)?

runarberg4• 4 years ago

Workers in socialist systems are inundated in propaganda in ways that would make the most ardent Fox News producer blush.

This is ignoring the fact that not all workers in our economy are working for a for profit capitalist entity. There are non-profits, there are co-ops, there are even state corporations and institutions that employ millions of people. I’m not aware of any propaganda these workers are exposed to which workers in a for-profit capitalist organizations aren’t.

In fact the for-profit organizations I’ve worked for has many many mandatory “meetings” which only purpose seems to be to tout the superiority of that corporation, and spout propaganda on how much better it is to work there. The state provided jobs I’ve worked at don’t do this.

charles_kaw• 4 years ago

It's because for a lot of Americans, capitalism isn't "working" for them. As wealth continues to centralize, their quality of life isn't improving and class mobility is stagnating.

People aren't necessarily advocating for communism, they are simply frustrated with the current american political and economic system. It's easy to project a false dichotomy where there isn't one.

This is also why populism is on the rise - people are simply facing a sliding quality of life, and our leaders seem useless to do anything about it.

runarberg4• 4 years ago

And many who live under capitalism still read the Animal Farm connecting the themes to their own experience of being an exploited worker, rather then that of the Soviet Union (which the book was obviously written about). But that is not the point. George Orwell never thought our only choice was capitalism or soviet style communism. He obviously sympathized with the animal revolution but hated the results. A real worker liberation is not when you switch out one oppressor for another, but when the workers seize the means of production for them self.

Similarly I don’t think the authors of Severance are advocating for a Soviet style communism as an alternative to capitalism. In fact I don’t see them advocating for any alternative (at least not during the 1st season). Simply they are stating that our current system has issues.

peoplefromibiza6• 4 years ago

What world is the author living in? What system of political economy is better, Soviet style communism?

This is a pefectly by the book false dichotomy.

The issue is real: capitalism leads to alienation.

Actually, it's capitalism that needs alienation to work (I explain why later)

The more extreme is capitalism the more people living in it are alienated.

It's not necessary to live in other systems or propose an alternative to simply realize what's in front of our eyes.

Besides: there are many ways of being a capitalistic economy, some are worse than others.

The Elon Musk 80 hours work week or you're free to go (aka fired) while he impregnates every female he encounters just because he can't keep it in his pants is probably less desirable than the French 35 hours work week with mandatory 16 weeks of paid maternity leave (26 from the second child onward) and 4 weeks of paid holidays.

Just to name one.

Have you read "bullshit jobs"?

People tend to defend their way of life even when their way if life is shit. many people living in capitalistic economies identity themselves with their job and changing priorities looks scary to them: suddenly their identity and their carriers could become not so important and probably even be seen as detrimental to mental health.

Like many parents see football as a dangerous activity right now because the awareness around brain traumas is much higher than in the past.

Doesn't need an alternative to talk about it and having doubts when it's about your child's well being.

There's one thing we can be sure, beside death, people would go incredible lengths to keep their status and avoid changes, even if they could potentially benefit from that change.

It's the reason why avoidance is the most popular way to deal with problems in life.

Ask a psychologist if you do not believe me.

Anyway, it's very easy to explain why it is: capitalism without alienation doesn't work.

See, for example, "Amazon had employees Brett Daniels and Jason Anthony arrested on Wednesday in retaliation for their involvement with the union"

"Amazon has apologised to a US politician for falsely denying that drivers are, at times, forced to urinate in plastic bottles"

Alienation is key to become Amazon. But it only benefits Amazon and the shareholders who are already rich enough to not have to worry about money for generations to come.

Specifically when we talkbput alienation in capitalistic systems we refer to "the process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his/her own labor" which is exactly how modern capitalism works.

The urge for the typical workers is to pay the bills, not make something that other people really find useful or need, because that either doesn't pay the bill or it's too immaterial or disconnected fro the worker's grasp to even be possible. Aggravated by the fact that the aforementioned Amazon driver knows very well that most of the items being delivered are not necessary for the buyers, they bought them out of compulsion and fabricated needs.

That divide between the need for money and the lack of meaning in the job being carried on, it's what causes alienation.

It's a direct consequence of how the system works.

darthrupert• 4 years ago

Even if their founders deride communism in spirit, almost every corporation is run pretty much exactly like Soviet communism was. Even the aesthetics are sometimes similar.

I'm not saying that these things are equivalent -- they obviously operate at different levels of society. But the similarities are striking which makes some of the criticism a tad hollow.

UIUC_065• 4 years ago

we see that Severance is really a show about work under capitalism, exploring issues such as the role of uncompensated reproductive labour, the right (or lack thereof) to refuse work, the concept of work-life balance and employee surveillance.

No, what we see is someone incapable of viewing anything except through the lens of Marxism.

texaslonghorn56• 4 years ago

If not these ideas, then what would you say are the major themes/takeaways/lessons from the show? What do we or the characters learn?

The only other big things that I caught were the meaninglessness/vapidity and pseudo-intellectualism during the "dinner" party conversation.

If we assume that the show has some meaning or is at least trying to deliver some message, then I'm having a hard time finding an alternative interpretation.

luxuryballs2• 4 years ago

No matter how much we advance and abstract things there’s always a trade-off. You can’t escape the reality of having to toil unless someone else has already done the toiling for you. It’s like the natural law of thermodynamics transcending through human experience (can’t create anything for free).

UIUC_065• 4 years ago

Someone today talked about "artful ambiguity" in reference to Marxism (for the Logistics movie). If capital-exploits-workers is what you believe in, then you will see it everywhere. But it's thin and unsatisfying gruel. Life is more than politics.

I deliberately pick a left-wing magazine, The Atlantic [1], for this. If anyone would apply a socialist rubric to Severance, it's them. Yet the words "capital", "Marx" and "socialist" don't even appear in it.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/02/severanc...

rogerclark• 4 years ago

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.

sooheon• 4 years ago

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.

posnet• 4 years ago

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.

drifkin• 4 years ago

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.

throwaway290• 4 years ago

I read Egan but to me Severance is pure PKD, from general dystopian feel to Paycheck plot engine similarity in particular.

bsder• 4 years ago

Was this not the premise of "Paycheck" by Philip K. Dick?

Read the story. The movie is pretty universally regarded as horrible.

Jtsummers• 4 years ago

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.

Apocryphon4• 4 years ago

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.

runamok• 4 years ago

The irony is pretty poignant. If I can think of one company that would implement a Severance type program it'd be Apple.

rpgbr• 4 years ago

I found it almost a self-parody, probably the best joke Ben Stiller has ever told — a show mocking Apple that runs on an Apple service.

Shameless plug: my take on “Severance”: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/severance-apple-marxist-show/

abledon• 4 years ago

I found Apples other Premiere series "See" far more relatable to my workplace environment and how we operate as teams.

Dr_Birdbrain2• 4 years ago

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.

euroderf• 4 years ago

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 ?

Dr_Birdbrain2• 4 years ago

That’s an interesting idea. Maybe.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

Distinction without a difference.

runarberg4• 4 years ago

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.

eternalban5• 4 years ago

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.

science4sail• 4 years ago

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...

madmax108• 4 years ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DGOgvxP7LE

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

this series may also be a camouflaged dig at pervasive internet censorship....if tv writers want to address that issue, they must of course disguise their intent

IYasha• 4 years ago

Lol, there was a decent movie with the same title. About weapon research company corporate party trip going terribly wrong :)

Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed

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