Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed
readpassage.com
readpassage.com
Shameless plug: my take on “Severance”: https://notes.ghed.in/posts/severance-apple-marxist-show/
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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...
That's a straw man. I did not suggest that organisms do "sustainability" analysis. Obviously, we were discussing nature and natural processes.
except nature is constrained by nature laws.
Truth is in reality the Volterra equation describes an ideal environment[1], with unlimited food supply for both predators and preys and of course economists have rushed to use it to explain that capitalism is "natural" but it's as natural as plastic bags
[1]
Physical meaning of the equations
(!!! ->) The Lotka–Volterra model makes a number of assumptions, not necessarily realizable in nature, about the environment and evolution of the predator and prey populations: (!!!)
1. The prey population finds ample food at all times.
2. The food supply of the predator population depends entirely on the size of the prey population.
3. The rate of change of population is proportional to its size.
4. During the process, the environment does not change in favour of one species, and genetic adaptation is inconsequential.
5. Predators have limitless appetite.
Naturally we're not discussing imaginal worlds, but the planet that we inhabit.
Nature shows us that it is possible to have richly diverse, highly competitive, and extremely long running species operating in that non-ideal, resource constrained environment. And I think we should pay attention and see if we can emulate that in our socioeconomic constructs.
but not infinite unbalanced growth disconnected from natural resources.
when the balance is broken by men or natural causes, consequences are immediate and unavoidable.
Case in point, the population of moose in Yellowstone park
The Yellowstone moose population has declined from roughly 1,000 in the 1970s to about 200 in 1996, with the northern range population down by at least 75% since the 1980s. The population declined steeply following the fires of 1988 that burned mature fir forests. Many old moose died during the winter of 1988–89, probably as a combined result of the loss of good moose winter forage and a harsh winter
nature has no way of protecting individuals other than letting them die out and replace them with something that is more fit to survive
I don't think that's a good outcome for humanity at large or a good message to transmit to the future generations...
> And I think we should pay attention and see if we can emulate that in our socioeconomic constructs.
We should pay attention to the fact that the narrative of "nature is competitive so should we" is almost completely fabricated, nature is almost entirely about sharing the resources and inter dependencies between species.
Predator-prey is one of the mechanisms, but not the only one.
Bees and flowers don't follow that pattern, like also remoras and sharks, anemone and clownfish, oxpeckers and hippos etc. etc.
It's a last resort, not a daily activity predators carry out 24/7 just because they can.
If you watch a documentary you can always see a group of predators drinking water close to a group of preys, because both need to drink, more than eating.
If we think about it domestic cats are much more dangerous for extinction than wild predators, in the US only they kill more than 2 billion birds every year and over 12 billion other mammals.
Just because we put them there without thinking of the consequences and the sustainability of such a large cat population.
Nature wouldn't have allowed it.
Anyway, we are one species, we are all humans, we are not predators and preys, it's very illogical (and always leads to terrible consequences) to compare us to the entirety of nature.
We are all under the same label in the biological taxonomy.
You seem to insist on misunderstanding what I write. Not sure where you got that.
> we are one species
To clarify, the "species" in question are corporations, collectives, and/or any organized entity made by humans, existing in the ecosystem of human economic activity. Hope that finally clears it up.
I got it from this, that you wrote
My impression was that constant growth is the normal state of nature, not a malady
Your impression is wrong, constant growth is not the normal state of nature.
The normal state of nature is equilibrium.
Nature constantly moves towards maximum entropy.
> To clarify, the "species" in question are corporations, collectives, and/or any organized entity made by humans
See the problem?
Nature metaphors fall short every time one uses them to describe modern human society and its complexity.
In what you call "the ecosystem of human economic activity" all people coexist peacefully and none of them is the prayer or the prey, none of them is the sheep or the wolf, all of them have personalities and express different behaviors in different circumstances, sometimes they aren't even coherent, because they are people and not metaphors of the wildlife at large.
You'll never see a wolf help a sheep in need, a wolf will always be a wolf, a sheep always a sheep, a shark always a shark, while it's common among people to help each other, even for individuals who have the "predator" (with a thousand quotes around it) traits at work or when playing professional sports.
We are not organized in the same way nature is self organized.
At all.
We are very far from it, not because we are not part of nature, but because we don't have to follow its rules anymore.
The only rule we should follow and we constantly don't and end up in deep, scary, probably irreversible crisis is that "constant growth" means total depletion of the resources, which in turn means human civilization as we know it will disappear.
I did not write that.
"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."
I wrote that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464963
Anyway, there's one thing we can learn from nature.
How individual cells of different nature and scope, unaware of each other, cooperate by passing messages to make living beings functional.
That would be really interesting.
Please follow the Hacker News Guidelines below.
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.
Read the story. The movie is pretty universally regarded as horrible.
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.
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.
So an observation about current leanings of the workers is hardly irrelevant.
The post this spun from is actually a really good comment, as it states clearly how this article relates to us tech workers, despite mostly belonging to upper class (or at least the upper-middle class):
> "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.
This is a comment on the worker-boss dynamic which marxism describes in detail. And the realization is that the same dynamic extends even when the worker belongs to a social class not usually described in marxism.
What political party a member of the working class tends to vote is largely irrelevant to this discussion. Though it is fun to ponder. The democratic party is in essence not a worker’s party and in theory it is not in the interest of the average worker to vote for them. In fact, I would argue that most voters in the USA never voted for them en masse (with the exception of the great depression when F.D.R. advocated the new deal). Most workers have historically remained non-voting, and those that do vote do so for different reasons then to further the interest of the working class. That is, if they do vote democratic they do so despite their capitalist agenda, not because of their pro worker agenda.
Now I actually do like this tangent—even though it is irrelevant to the post this sub-thread spun from—because in the show, one of the worker’s “outie” is actually an advocate for the ruling class’ political party, who’s interest align with the business elite. She treats her “innie” with nothing but disrespect and is willing to let her suffer so she can exploit her labor. The struggle between her innie and her outie is a nice allegory for class struggle in general, and the fact that she is tied to a political party is a nice statement on how our political system tends to align it self with the owning class, and against the workers.
Does the person you’re replying to make decisions about how profits are allocated in the company? What product the company is going to make? Do they make the big hiring and firing decisions? No, probably not. They’re likely a software engineer. They sell their labor in order to be able to make money and sustain themselves. Ergo they are part of the working class.
You're essentially summing up the flaws in the author's attempt to apply Marxist theory to a modern, capitalist society. The core differentiation between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is financial and social/cultural capital, or lack thereof. Also relevant are education (cultural influence and power) and property ownership, as they relate to upward mobility (this also aligns with the British working/middle/upper class definitions).
>Does the person you’re replying to make decisions about how profits are allocated in the company?
By this definition a Google midlevel engineer without any decision making power who earns near 300k is the working class, but a tech startup COO or CTO making $200k is not; I doubt most people would agree these people are in different classes in modern society. Applying strict Marxist definitions (which as you say lack any consideration of income distribution) to a modern capitalist society is a fallacy.
>They sell their labor in order to be able to make money and sustain themselves.
Doctors, engineers, pharmacists, lawyers, pilots all sell their labor to make money. But they tend to be property owners, own investments/equity (means of production), and are highly skilled, educated, and have cultural capital/respect in society. This aligns with the Marxist bourgeoise and middle/upper-class definition. Whereas a plumber or electrician making $100k who self-owns their business but not their home or any investments does not have the same financial or cultural power and more closely aligns with the definition of proletariat.
With the title of "CTO" at a tech startup, I'd expect one to be a significant shareholder making nominal salary but, ultimately, your point stands: startup executives are just middle management of a distributed R&D department.
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.
Tip: "the enemy" is whoever we don't feel like we want at the time. Nothing personal.
https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-...
No, what we see is someone incapable of viewing anything except through the lens of Marxism.
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.
The big unanswered question in that is who is “us” referring to there?
Who is going to benefit from the toiling of automation? Especially when considering some of the poster children for robotic automation are Amazon and Tesla? The cynic in me doesn’t see much upside to automation for Amazon warehouse workers or Tesla assembly line staff.bit I have no doubt it’ll make Elon and Jeff richer still.
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...
In fact, there's a lot of ideas to the left of The Atlantic, and I'm sure many people who support these ideas would dismiss The Atlantic as being far too liberal/neoliberal.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/omniscient-gentlemen-of-the-at...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
>do you have any justification for why obsessing over alienation is bad?
Obsessing over alienation is bad for Marxists (and good for capitalists). As I said, Marxists are not being serious (maybe credible is a better word here) when using alienation to critique capitalism. Of the economic systems in discussion, capitalism has the least alienation. Marxist solutions are either pure fantasy, or have been tried and lead to worse outcomes and other socio-economic systems sfrom history are also worse than capitalism. In other words, Marxist concerns with alienation are hypocritical.
>do you think workers would be better off if they were not alienated?
Again, I'm discussing the Marxist use of alienation and how they undercut themselves when discussing it.
> 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)?
Nothing in my comment can be taken as arguing one way or another on this topic. However, given that you've decided to focus on the goodness/badness of alienation, it sounds like it's important to you. How do you feel about alienation?
is it true though?
I believe it's never been measured by anybody and you're only speculating here.
> Marxist solutions are either pure fantasy, or have been tried and lead to worse outcomes
If that was true, why the most capitalistic power in the World and recent history was so scares by them that went to war against them and used every dirty trick in the book to replace them with dictators or puppets (sometimes they were literally Nazis...)
> how they undercut themselves when discussing it.
you keep saying it, but the how it's not clear to me.
It looks to me your knowledge of Marxism is incomplete.
Marx was impressed by capitalism, he simply thought that capitalism was detrimental for the working class and that through the class struggle they could improve their conditions and participation to the wealth.
Marx wasn't against capitalism, but he knew it was tuned to favour the ruling classes and the bourgeoisie, but also argued that it was the most productive system the World had ever seen.
It's only a matter of where you stand: with billionaires that amass capital like never before while their employees do not earn enough money to make a living, while also being alienated by the work they do, or not.
It's bad enough to be alienated, it's much worse if the system only rewards those that do not actually do the work and/or do not need or deserve so much wealth.
Marxists systems were not worse of capitalistic ones on average, for example at the times Yugoslavia wasn't in worse shape than Greece and what happened in Romania wasn't much different from what Franco did in Spain, a fascist dictotator supported by the USA in exchange for military bases. Life in Cuba or Peronist Argentina was probably similar to Portugal, if not slightly better.
Of course USA had a better life style than communist Poland, but they literally had the highest standard of living in the World, it really doesn't describe capitalism in general, USA are an outlier where the good and the bad of their system show themselves to the extremes (and now it's mostly the bad i.e. the tribalism and the violence).
it's the distribution of wealth that is much different in the two systems, capitalists simply don't like that: to share
But even if it was true that all non capitalistic countries were much worse than capitalistic countries, literally everyone was in the same boat and services were free for everybody.
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.
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"
or
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Watched it on a Sony TV running Android through Apple's official app.
I watched severance on a Roku so I know that isn't true.
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.