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Severance is the workplace thriller we’ve needed
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoThis 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 4y agoHannah 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-rooted-in-loneliness https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-...
- rexpop 4y agoAs 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 4y agoYou should read the Gulag archipelago. Tip: "the enemy" is whoever we don't feel like we want at the time. Nothing personal.
- rexpop 4y agoI've read it, and I'm sure it isn't relevant to this conversation.
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoFair 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 4y agoUnder 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_ 4y agoIf 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 4y agoNot to be confused with Ling Ma's novel on capitalism and alienation titled Severance https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ling-ma-severance-captures-the-bleak-fatalistic-mood-of-2018 https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ling-ma-severan...
- jsnk 4y agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoI'm sorry. I can't edit the title anymore, but I'll make sure to follow the policy going forward.
- echelon 4y agoIt 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 4y agoWell, 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 4y agoNetflix 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 4y ago> You need an Apple device to watch Apple TV+ I watched severance on a Roku so I know that isn't true.
- Barrin92 4y 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.
- Apocryphon 4y agoWho among us isn't doing macrodata refinement, really
- armnot7 4y agoSome of us are in charge of making sure quotas/OKRs are met
- Apocryphon 4y agoThen this will make you feel right at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg
- k2enemy 4y 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.
- tynpeddler 4y agoMost 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.
- texaslonghorn5 4y 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)?
- UIUC_06 4y 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.
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoIf 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.
- luxuryballs 4y agoNo 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).
- EtienneK 4y agoAutomation is already doing a lot of the toiling for us and this will increase in the future.
- bigiain 4y ago> Automation is already doing a lot of the toiling for us 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.
- rogerclark 4y agoSeverance 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 4y agoGood 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoI read Egan but to me Severance is pure PKD, from general dystopian feel to Paycheck plot engine similarity in particular.
- bsder 4y agoWas this not the premise of "Paycheck" by Philip K. Dick? Read the story. The movie is pretty universally regarded as horrible.
- Jtsummers 4y agoSimilar, 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.
- Apocryphon 4y agoIt'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 4y agoThe irony is pretty poignant. If I can think of one company that would implement a Severance type program it'd be Apple.
- rpgbr 4y agoI 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/ https://notes.ghed.in/posts/severance-apple-marxist-show/
- abledon 4y agoI found Apples other Premiere series "See" far more relatable to my workplace environment and how we operate as teams.
- Dr_Birdbrain 4y agoI 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 4y agoIs 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_Birdbrain 4y agoThat’s an interesting idea. Maybe.
- anothernewdude 4y agoDistinction without a difference.
- runarberg 4y agoAlienation 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.
- madmax108 4y agoSlight 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DGOgvxP7LE
- RappingBoomer 4y agothis 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 4y agoLol, there was a decent movie with the same title. About weapon research company corporate party trip going terribly wrong :)