Apple TV+'s Severance as an analogy for 21st Century Digital Identities

Note: This post is very long.

I'm getting very excited about the upcoming second season of the Apple TV+ series Severance. If you've not yet watched it, I highly recommend you do so before the new episodes are released in January.

I loved it so much that I gave a talk about it at the Seattle Metamodernism Summit in September 2022, and did a presentation and a paper on it for my MA on Central Saint Martin's. I decided that I'd cannibalise those and cobble something together because I spent so much time thinking about this series that I hope some people might be interested in what I’ve thought about it…

If you haven't yet watched this series, then maybe don't read this as there are bound to be some spoilers (though not huge ones). If you have watched the series and like my take on it, then please feel free to share it with other fans...

Anyway, here you go...

THE PREMISE OF SEVERANCE

A select group of employees at Lumon Corporation have volunteered to undergo surgery in order to implant a “severance chip”, this is a small device embedded in the brain that spatially segregates their memories. It is activated and deactivated when they arrive at and leave Lumon. Memories from their experiences when they are at work can only be accessed when they are on the ‘severed floor’ of Lumon and cannot be accessed from elsewhere. Equally, experiences they've had outside work cannot be accessed when they are at work.

This effectively produces two versions of them. The one who is in work at Lumon Corporation is the Innie. The one who is outside of work is the Outie- or in this analogy, the Digital Self and the Real Self.

(Severance, 2022)

They share a body and yet are two different people with two different lives, different experiences, different friends, different memories and, in many ways, different personalities. The Innies and our Digital Selves only exist because the Outies or our Real Selves put them in those spaces. The Innies work for non-monetary rewards: finger traps or caricatures or waffle parties in Severance; our Digital selves work for likes and followers and upvotes. The Innies and our Digital selves have no ownership over their real counterparts' bodies. They have no say. They are entirely at the mercy of their Outie or Real Self.

Let's watch the trailer.

THE METAMODERN CONDITION

Metamodernism is the name given to the current cultural era we are living in. It is informed by both the oversaturation of Postmodernism within culture over the past 50 years and the recent rise of a new type of Modernist affect. This 21st century “structure of feeling” (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010) is one that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010) It’s as if the Postmodern “compression of time-space” (Harvey, 1992) has allowed us to look back past any sense of merely being nostalgic or ‘retro’ and recognise the desirability of the concrete nature of Modernism- the grand narratives, the stability of meaning, the move forward towards a collective future- while also understanding implicitly the skepticism and cynicism of the Postmodern critique of exactly these ideas. As cultural time travellers, we see these separate cultural epistemes that have molded our world over the past 150 years as merely parts of what it means to Be Human. We have come to feel that we can’t be fully human if we exist solely in one or the other state and in the 21st century we are trying to combine them somehow to exist in the porous border between them in a “both-neither” way (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010).

At exactly the same time this dispositional conjoining is taking place, the internet came along. Or vice versa. This means we are simultaneously stepping outside of Time and stepping outside of Space by creating Digital - non-physical, bodiless - selves that live alongside us. We are creating an entirely new way to Be Human.

We now exist in-between Modernism and Postmodernism; in-between Irony and Sincerity; in-between Pragmatism and Idealism; in-between Apathy and Passion; in-between What We Know and How We Live; in-between The Real World and The Internet.

The Apple TV+ series Severance operates as an analogy of this Metamodern ‘splitting’ of ourselves between Modernism and Postmodernism, between Real and Digital. We can use Severance as a way to understand how the internet is changing how we are currently experiencing ourselves.

ALIENATION

“Do you know if I’m happy up there?” – Miss Casey (Severance, 2022)

Karl Marx’s writings on alienation describe the separation of the individual as it pertains to their work life:

“[T]he worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object[…] The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object[…] it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” (Marx, 2009)

Marx's idea of alienation pre-supposes the presence of an Ideal You that exists outside of society and if only there wasn’t all of this messy real world stuff (eg society, science, work…) you would be your Ideal Self. Marx's thinking was that alienation was caused by the worker putting their life into making an object, so that the life no longer belonged to the worker, but to the object. So this working life is external to her, existing independently to her… A Work Life, if you will. Marx said the only time one was Human or Real was when they weren’t working, when they were at home. So… a Home Life. We were divided between two worlds.

Marx was writing at the birth of the idea of having a Work Life and a Home Life and tried to articulate this Modern division. This Marxist sense of alienation is the most obvious, surface level interpretation of what Severance is about, but the world and the thinking on alienation has moved on since 1844.

(Severance, 2022)

The separation of ourselves as 'worker' and 'human being' wasn't an issue for us conceptually in the latter half of the 20th century, even if we still had ideological or ethical issues with the Capitalist work space. We acquired a language to describe this separation of the self. We spoke about work/life balance. We worked hard; we played hard. We had work friends. We went for work drinks. We needed to buy a specific wardrobe for when we were at work. We were no longer thinking of ourselves as “separated from our true nature”. We weren’t divided, we just went to different spaces.

Within the Postmodern era, however, we couldn’t be alienated in the way Marx articulated because there isn’t an Us to be alienated and there isn’t an Ideal Us to be alienated from. Fredric Jameson (1991, p14) said, within Postmodern society 'the alienation of the subject is displaced by fragmentation of the subject’. This splintering of the Human into discrete, affectively and experientially bounded labels – for example, the refreshed Coca Cola drinker, the satisfied Camel Lights smoker, the rebellious Simpsons fan– turned us into both consumers of objects and objects to be consumed (Baudrillard, 2017, p150). The Postmodern self is experienced as a collection of labels. We are what we consume, so we consume what we are. In order to be that ‘refreshed Coca Cola drinker’, we first need to consume Coca Cola. We cannot be refreshed without it.

And it’s not just within Postmodernism, in psychology (Hood, 2011) and neuroscience (Feldman Barrett, 2018) we started to understand that there is no Innate You that exists outside of the social influences and conditioning, the experiences and memories that have molded you into the You you are right now.

(Severance, 2022)

Our 21st century selves know there is no Real Me, but we are increasingly feeling like there is a Real Me, a Better Me, a Me “I should be” (if only there wasn’t all of this messy real world stuff…). In the 21st century, we are going through what looks like a resurgence of Modernist alienation where huge numbers of people from all walks of life and different political persuasions feel like there is a different, perfect life they should be living, they feel ‘excluded’ from society, feel like they can’t be their ‘authentic selves’, feel like they are being prevented from ‘being whole’.

(Bartleby, 2022)

As more of us become self-employed or work from home, when work life intrudes into home life because we are accessible 24 hours a day and we no longer have different physical spaces to divide our time between, we are now very clear that there is – or must be – a separation between these two states of being: Work Me and Home Me.

“Cyberspace makes the concept of a ‘workplace’ archaic. Now that one can be expected to respond to an email at practically any time of the day, work cannot be confined to a particular place, or to delimited hours. There’s no escape—and not only because work expands without limits.” (Fisher, 2018, p 466)

The splitting of ourselves between the Real and Digital worlds is also hastening the uptake of a 21st century dualism. Our Digital Self is taking over our ‘Non-Work’ Self as more of our leisure time is spent in the Digital Space. And this Digital Self doesn’t relax, it works in that space not for money or to produce any type of object – material or otherwise – but it labours purely to exist. I post, therefore I am.

Our 21st century Digital Self needs to exist because it is the product of social media companies, not their customer (Solon, 2011). And technological advances in media production over the past 20 years mean that everyone has become a marketing manager, a photographer, a filmmaker, a star, but most importantly a brand. We have evolved from the Postmodern consumer into the product to be consumed (Fromm, 2013, pp 32-33). We photograph our lives as social media marketing content to sell our brand. We even have our own AI photographic retoucher in our pocket- our phones automatically impose a skin smoothing filter on each selfie we take (Madrigal, 2018). We have become so used to seeing filtered versions of our Digital Selves that when we look in the mirror we are faced with unacceptable imperfection in our Real Self (Curran and Hill, 2019). Luckily for us, along with technological advances, there have been advances in cosmetic surgery.

As we have become accustomed to the filtered and surgically augmented versions of the Digital and Real versions of ourselves and others, we have become besieged with worry about being negatively evaluated by everyone else. We are unable to deal with criticism or failure. In fact, criticism as it existed 20 years ago, no longer applies, instead we face ‘cancellation’ – as if we were an unpopular Truman Show-esque television show.

Because we are able to edit and retouch both our Digital and Real Selves, we have started to believe that perfection is not only desirable, but possible. Near perfection- or even just ‘good enough’- is no longer acceptable. The need for perfection isn’t simply directed at ourselves. Demanding an all-encompassing perfection from others and perceiving excessive pressure for perfection from others (Curran and Hill, 2019) has increased to the point where many desire nothing less than a kind of Utopia and believe it can be achieved. Though we know a Utopia isn’t possible nor desirable, our Digital Selves have started to behave as if it is. This split between knowing and believing is our 21st century Metamodern state, which “seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find”. (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010)

BELIEF

“We serve Kier, you CHILD!” – Harmony Cobel (Severance, 2022)

“The very same society that produces this sense of alienation and estrangement generates in many a craving for reassurance, an acute need to believe, a flight into faith. [They] seek redemption from the spurious.” (Merton, 1949)

Increasingly, in the digital realm- online or in games- we are able to live as a different Us and we feel like it is real. More and more of us believe we can be that True, Authentic, Heroic version of our Digital Self in the Real World, too.

The reconceptualization of ourselves as divided while simultaneously understanding we are fragmented is at the root of our Metamodern alienation. We know that there’s no innate ‘essence’ of Us, no Us that exists independently of our socialisation, and we know that we are a complex, constantly evolving product of our experiences and our memories, but we are currently living and speaking about ourselves as if we are divided between two different selves… but the border between them is porous.

We believe we are Body and Mind, Real and Digital, Real and Unreal, Real and Timeless/Spaceless.

The Real World Us is fragmented and the Digital Us believes the perfection or the Utopia that a non-physical space promises will somehow come into fruition in the real world.

There’s a scene I keep looping back to in Errol Morris’s 2018 documentary about [Steve] Bannon, American Dharma. Bannon is recalling his Hong Kong days in the 2000s, when he was working for Internet Gaming Entertainment. He notes how stunned he was to discover how many people played multiplayer online games, and how intensely they played them. But then he breaks it down for Morris, using the example of a theoretical man named Dave in Accounts Payable who one day drops dead.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers,” Bannon says. “And that’s Dave.”

But that’s offline Dave. Online Dave is a whole other story. “Dave in the game is Ajax,” Bannon continues. “And Ajax is, like, the man.” Ajax gets a caisson when he dies and is carried off to a raging funeral pyre. The rival group comes out and attacks. “There’s literally thousands of people there,” Bannon says. “People are home playing the game, and guys are not going to work. And women are not going to work. Because it’s Ajax.”

“Now, who’s more real?” Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax? […] I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in his life.”

But that’s precisely what happened on January 6. The angry, howling hordes arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. (Senior, 2022)

(Hockstein and The Washington Post, 2021)

In the 21st century, our lives are almost entirely mediated by machines and screens (Monteiro, 2017, p1). Separately from our computers or televisions, we have screens on our kitchen appliances, in our vehicles, on buildings, in our pockets and in our hands. We may have more face-to-face encounters each day with screens than with real people (Monteiro, 2017, p1).

Severance starts with the first moment Helly R arrives on the severed floor. She’s frightened, she doesn’t like it, she wants to leave the job, but she needs the permission of her Outie in order to quit her job. She threatens to self-harm and receives a message from her Outie…

“When one sees in person someone whom one only knows from television, one says “He looks just like he does on television!” Reality is the TV picture; and the correctness of one’s perception of how that person really looks is measured against that reality.” - Eric Fromm (2013)

Helly’s Innie is a shadow of the real Helly on the screen. Helly’s Innie isn’t “real”, the Helly on the screen, however, is. In the 21^st century, our Digital Selves are only a shadow of our Real Selves that we see on the screen. The selfie we use for our Digital Self’s avatar is our Real Self. The image of us on our Zoom meeting screen is our Real Self. For us, our sense of reality exists both on the screen and somewhere beyond it. It used to be that we’d only see actors or performers on a screen, today we see ourselves there and we have easily come to believe that the person we play on the internet- our Digital Self- is actually as real as our Real Self. It exists “outside [us], independently, as something alien to [us]” (Marx, 2009).

SEPARATION FROM TIME

“It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history.” -Irving B. (Severance, 2022)

Mark Fisher (2014) in Ghosts of My Life wrote about ‘lost futures’- the idea that during the Modern era we had a collective vision of the future, but as Postmodernity removed the arrow of time by always looking back and reinterpreting the past, we have lost our collective future. We are disconnected or separated from time. A chronological alienation. It is the missing connection with time that deeply pervades our culture.

Severance has a constantly shifting representation of time. The production and costume design have used influences from the 1930s on and we never quite settle on one particular era. We are neither stuck in a past nor stuck in a future. It feels contemporary- the dialogue, the humour, the characters’ personalities all feel ‘now’- but visually it could also be set in a retrofuturistic 1980s.

(Severance, 2022)

This operates in a similar way to ‘crackle’ on a record. Again Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life, said about crackle in songs, “Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence.” It’s now, but not now. Then, but not then. The design in Severance is visual crackle.

SEPARATION FROM SPACE

“Nothing down there is what they say.” – Petey (Severance, 2022)

As the Traditional Episteme - or ‘societies of sovereignty’ (Deleuze, 1992)- transformed into the Modern Episteme, we had to renegotiate our ideas of Space, as Industrialised and Institutional Space - schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, etc (Foucault, 1995)- took over our daily lives, and time and temporality came to dominate our “psychic experience [and] our cultural languages” (Jameson, 1991 p 16).

In Severance, the workers on the severed floor exist in an entirely fabricated space. Every object they use – from computers to cups, from soap to snacks – is produced by the Lumon Corporation. The Innies have no access and have never had access to the natural world.

When we are in the grand, brutalist space of the Perpetuity Wing of Lumon’s severed floor, we feel the enclosure of an “exhaustive disciplinary apparatus” (Foucault, 1995, pp 235-236). It’s a high ceiling, but it’s still a ceiling and we are underground a couple stories, at least. That isn’t daylight coming in from above. The Innies never see the ‘real world’. They have access to nothing from the outside, including light. The Innies, like our Digital Selves, are trapped in an unreal space, never able to “touch grass” (Vicente, 2022).

“Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.” (Foucault, 1995, p143)

In the large Macro Data Refinement office, there are four desks lumped together with partitions between them. Even in their own large office space, the four workers are both bound together and kept apart. ‘Always connected. Always alone.’ (Milinovich, 2022) is the constant state of our Digital Selves. Online spaces are constructed and inhabited by other people, giving us the illusion of being with others and yet we only really experience them in the solitude of our own minds.

(Severance, 2022)

(Severance, 2022)

The severed floor operates with Foucault’s Hierarchical Observation (Foucault, 1995, pp 170-177) – there is a very clear path of supervision from department head all the way up to the mysterious Board. Employees keep tabs on their colleagues’ behaviour, pointing out even minor infractions of the rules. There are prohibitions against ‘fraternising’ with your colleagues. The departments are kept separated from each other and socialising with others outside of your department is discouraged. At some point, myths about the deadliness of other departments were distributed in order to evoke feelings of fear so that the workers separate themselves from people in other departments. This mirrors the Us and Them factions created in online spaces. Those divisions can be based on anything from political ideology to whether one knits or crochets. As we lack any kind of visual signalling online to display our ‘tribe’ (eg a particular haircut or a t-shirt from our favourite band), our Digital Selves base our tribalism on non-physical ideas and language. We create stories and myths and memes in order to fiercely differentiate ‘Them’ from ‘Us’.

(Severance, 2022)

The hallway set in Severance was built on a large soundstage and was constantly moved around (Wittmer, 2022). The main Macro Data Refinement office set was situated in the middle of the soundstage, so the actors had to walk through these constantly changing hallways to get to the set, always getting lost. These hallways operate in the show and in the filming of the show in the same way – as a kind of heterotopia (Foucault, 1984), a space ‘without law or geometry’ (Foucault, 1994, p xvii) that collapse the distinction between the unreal and the real, just like the online spaces we exist in (Rymarczuk and Derksen, 2014).

Unlike Alice (Carroll, 1994) or Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz, 1939) who get lost in their heterotopic Wonderful Wonderlands, the Innies have no one to help them find their way around.

(Severance, 2022)

The hallways on Lumon’s severed floor are navigated like spaces in Deleuze’s Societies of Control (1992), which describes the data driven, computer mediated world that tracks our every move. The hallways in Severance have “variable geometry” and seem to “continuously change from one moment to the other” (Deleuze, 1992). The workers seem free to walk in them as they wish, though they only have access to spaces that their key cards can open.

(Severance, 2022)

Their moves are tracked both on cameras…

(Severance, 2022)

… and via the extensive security system that knows the exact location of everyone on the severed floor.

(Severance, 2022)

This mirrors our Digital Self’s experience online where we need passwords and codes to access various spaces and we leave a trail of data that knows everything about us.

As the character of Harmony Cobel says, “The surest way to tame a prisoner is to let him believe he’s free.”

ALIENATED EMOTIONS

"You’re easy to pretend to care about.” – Mark S. (Severance, 2022)

For Seeman (1959), alienation was less a matter of why we were alienated or what we were alienated from, but what psychological states caused a sensation of alienation. When we first meet the Innies in Severance, they each represent one of Seeman’s alienating experiential dispositions:

POWERLESSNESS, the feeling that one “cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes…he seeks.” Mark is powerless and resigned to his situation. He has come to accept the limits and rules in Lumon. For him, there’s no point in fighting.

ISOLATION, the feeling of separation when one “assign[s] low reward value to goals or beliefs that are typically highly valued in the given society.” Helly doesn’t know why, but she feels that she doesn’t belong on the severed floor, there is something about it that she doesn’t like. She feels isolated and under siege.

MEANINGLESSNESS, the feeling that one “cannot predict with confidence the consequences of acting on a given belief.” Irving is attached to the rules of Lumon desperate that they will provide meaning. He may be acting out of fear of both punishment and of discovering the meaninglessness of it all.

NORMLESSNESS, a feeling that there is “a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviors are required to achieve given goals.” Petey has broken foundational rules and challenged supposed scientific certainties by ‘reintigrating’ his Innie’s and Outie’s minds. He has excluded himself from Lumon.

SELF-ESTRANGEMENT, an individual’s inability “to find self-rewarding…or self-consummatory activities that engage him.” Dylan is motivated to work for ‘incentives’ because his work isn’t inherently rewarding. He spends a lot of time thinking about how much more interesting his Outie’s life might be.

(Severance, 2022)

With the exception of Petey, who has made his own journey before the series starts, each Innie goes on a voyage towards ‘unalienation’ and ultimately- hopefully in a future series - reintegration of their two selves. It is worth noting that their individual journeys can be seen as being prompted by their Innies feeling what their Outies are lacking: Mark’s Outie is suffering from grief; his Innie finds Compassion. Helly’s Outie comes from a privileged and cold background; her Innie finds Connection. Irving’s Outie lives a solitary life; after meeting Burt, his Innie finds Love. Dylan is immature; after his Innie is briefly woken up in his Outie’s home and sees that he has a child, his Innie finds Self-Sacrifice and Responsibility.

Compassion, Connection, Love, Self-Sacrifice and Responsibility. Just like in the Wizard of Oz (1939), these qualities were inside each of them the whole time.

In Severance, we have a removal from Time but with a hope of a perfect future; a sense of confinement, scrutiny and control in a non-physical space that isn’t easily navigated; and fragmented selves that are split between two worlds. This is also our 21st century Metamodern condition: we hover between Modern and Postmodern eras, between the Real and the Digital worlds, unable or unwilling to set foot firmly in either one. Despite everything that has attempted to separate the Innies in Severance from a grounding in The Real, they discover Connection, Love, Responsibility and a sense of Sacrifice for the greater good. Most importantly, however, they find Compassion for their fellow humans beings, which comes automatically when they realise- or remember- that they are all fully-rounded, fully-emotional human beings with a real life and history that exists in the natural world outside of the unreal space they find themselves in.

As we re-learn how to Be Human in this new era, we must remind ourselves we are physical, material beings whose origin is in the real world and remember the lessons we learned in stories we have told ourselves time and time again: “there’s no place like home”.

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