Media Review: A Severed Organizational Reality?

Summary of Severance

The central plot of the nine-episode first season of Severance (a second season is in production) focuses on the lives of employees at a fictitious corporation, Lumon Industries, which has developed a medical procedure for separating memories inside the office from memories outside the office, using the implanting of a chip in the brain. Several of the series’ major characters, including its main protagonist, Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott), are employees of Lumon Industries who have undertaken the ‘severance’ procedure and work in a Lumon Industries’ corporate office building. When the ‘severed’ employees enter the office building, their memories of life outside the building are de-activated and their memories of life inside the building are activated. When they leave the office, memories of their life inside the building are de-activated and memories of their life outside the building are activated. As a result of separated memories, each ‘severed’ employee has two conscious versions of themselves: an ‘innie’ who only resides in the office and an ‘outie’ who only resides outside the office. Because the ‘innie’ and the ‘outie’ have no memory of each other, they live separate lives, where boundaries between the two lives reflect the physical boundaries of the Lumon Industries corporate office building and the temporal boundaries of a 9 to 5 work schedule. The ‘innie’ only knows of life inside the office building, whereas the ‘outie’ only knows of life outside the office building.

Throughout the series, a power dynamic between the ‘outie’ and the ‘innie’ emerges because of their contrasting levels of agency. The ‘outie’ makes a conscious choice to have no memory of office life and thus to have no awareness of their experience at work. The ‘innie’, on the other hand, is born into a world that exists only within the confines of the office and has no freedom to experience life outside the physical boundaries of the office. This power differential is central to the story because while the ‘outie’ chooses not to know about life at work, the ‘innie’ has no opportunity to know about life outside of work.

The Science Fiction Gedankenexperiment Hypotheses

The juxtaposition of one body and two minds separated by space and time, and the power dynamic between the two minds, presents a set of Gendankenexperiment hypotheses that are interwoven throughout the story. One hypothesis is about the motivation for severing two minds. What would motivate potential employees (i.e. ‘outies’) to undergo an invasive procedure and give up control and autonomy of their work selves? In Severance, two characters’ stories present two different motivations. In the case of Scout, personal trauma outside work has led him to believe that he cannot function at work, thereby motivating him to undergo the procedure to provide autonomous time and space for him to work and forgo emotional pain for eight hours a day. In the case of Irving Bailiff (played by John Turturro), a personal desire to have a fulfilling life as an artist outside work has led him to believe that he needs to erase his mind from the eight hours of work when at home. While these motivations are unlikely to convince everyone to undergo such a procedure, they do reflect experiences of emotional rumination from home at work and from work at home that individuals try to reduce or eliminate. These are experiences that motivate individuals to seek other psychological mechanisms for reducing emotional rumination, such as the practice of mindfulness, which focuses the mind on the present. Therefore, by answering the hypothetical question of what motivates someone to neurologically sever their mind into two, Severance highlights the interrelationship between organizational spaces and the mind, and the tension that arises when multiple spaces are entangled within a single mind.

Unlike ‘outies’, ‘innies’ have no choice in whether to undergo the procedure. Instead, their entire existence has been created by the severance procedure. By examining their unique experience, however, we can include an additional hypothesis. What is the impact of a life devoid of an outside world on the well-being of employees at work? Most of the stories in Severance point to an unambiguously negative answer. Throughout Severance, there are multiple instances where ‘innies’ are dissatisfied with the monotony of their work, try to establish deeper personal bonds outside the confines of their official working relationships, and desperately seek knowledge of the outside world. One ‘innie’ is so dissatisfied with her life within the office building that she tries to escape through any means, including through self-inflicting harm. Prior research corroborates these negative effects, as the research has found that employees will naturally seek personal connections and meaningful work and be unsatisfied if these aims are not met while at work (see Lysova, Allan, Dik, Duffy, & Steger, 2019 for a review). Simply knowing that an ‘innie’s’ life helps serve the benefits of their own ‘outie’ self will not quench their appetite for seeking more, especially if life at the office is the only life they know. One reason for the motivation, as exemplified in Severance, is the lack of a personal connection between the two selves. ‘Innies’ have no experience interacting with their ‘outie’ self and thus consider them to be, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies who led them to their predicament. If we think about this case metaphorically, we can see how Severance demonstrates the importance of us knowing both our personal selves and professional selves and understanding how the two selves relate to each other. Otherwise, we run the risk of not being able to empathize with either self, as we will have difficulty empathizing with our work self unless we are at work and difficulty empathizing with our home self unless we are at home. In short, Severance presents a simple proposition to those concerned about their own work–life balance. If you are thinking about cutting your work life from your home life, be careful what you ask for.

The Ecological Validity of the Gedankenexperiment

However, as in any experiment, to assess whether we can make inferences based on the experiment, we need to also assess whether the setting itself is ecologically valid. In the case of Severance as a science fiction Gedankenexperiment, this entails examining whether the organization, as an entity, is sufficiently representative. Severance depicts Lumon Industries as a draconian instigator of a dystopian world, where ‘innies’ are granted little autonomy to either act or think. This draconian world is comparable to early 20^th-century dystopian views of organizations, as exemplified in Modern Times and Metropolis. Each ‘innie’ spends their day engaged in monotonous computer tasks, which resemble modern manifestations of Taylorist factory floors. It’s a riveting storyline, as it suggests that the ‘outie’ is bargaining with the devil. We, as viewers, can view this devil’s bargain and ask ourselves the extent to which we can accept this bargain ourselves, where we accept our own misery at work if we do not have to experience this misery first-hand. This dystopian vision, however, ignores any possibility that an organization would want to create meaningful work and meaningful personal connections for those disconnected from their non-work lives. Moreover, even if we assume that every organization is draconian and has only the interests of the organization at heart and not the welfare of their employees, we must ask whether organizations today are even interested in the type of control exemplified by Lumon. Lumon controls employees by confining them within physical boundaries, restricting their mobility and enforcing monotonous tasks. In today’s age, where organizational life is becoming more networked and dispersed, with growing reliance on remote work and temporary labour, organizations are less likely to control their employees by limiting mobility and more likely instead to control employees by limiting access to information and communication channels to a select privileged few (De Vaujany, Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, Munro, Nama, & Holt, 2021). In other words, in today’s world, organizations are as likely to usurp their power by keeping people isolated from the social perks of permanent ties to an office building as they are by constraining them within an office building.

Whose Dystopia?

Severance addresses this ecological validity issue in some ways by demonstrating that the information technology used by Lumon employees mirrors those used in the pre-Internet age of the mid-to-late 20^th century. In their fictional world, the biological technology may be in the future, but the information technology is in the past. The antiquated information technology found in Lumon is perfectly aligned with an organizational culture and structure that enforces physically bounded control, as all information and communication is centrally monitored. We as viewers can relate to this world, as long as we can imagine a world without the empowerment of an open Internet that is now commonplace in contemporary advanced democracies.

However, if we consider the context outside the story, as Severance is streamed globally through the Apple TV+ streaming service, it is difficult to imagine this world without a dose of cynicism. This is the same corporation that produced a television commercial in 1984 that positioned their personal computer as a destroyer of an Orwellian world. The commercial ends with the statement: ‘You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ Is it a coincidence that the central storyline of the series is the dystopian nature of the interplay between a biological technological innovation and an information technological lack of innovation? Or is Severance contributing to an ongoing narrative promoted by a corporation whose market capitalization is higher than the GDP of all but seven national economies? Can we imagine a Gedankenexperiment situated within a contemporary reality with a less utopian vision of information technology? We may not be able to answer these questions, but we can still appreciate how this entertaining television show makes us think by contemplating a world where we eliminate key aspects of when and where we think.