Severance Highlights the Pitfalls of Our “Frictionless” Society

Image; AppleTV

Severance (2022-present) started as a brilliant satire, heightening the absurdity of modern-day corporate America. Our protagonists, or “innies,” are new consciousnesses created by Lumon employees via a procedure known as “severance.” These consciousnesses are partitioned within a person’s brain to only exist while at work. The original personality (i.e., the “outie”) has no idea what their innies get up to on the severed floor of Lumon, and vice versa.

That premise alone is cutting, but as the series progresses, what follows is a pretty on-the-nose commentary on how coercive corporate America can be to its workers. The innies do not consent to their lives within the Lumon hierarchy, and that tension sits in the backdrop of every scene.

Yet, as the second season reaches a close, we come to understand that the show is not just about corporations controlling their workforce but a much more insidious commentary on how corporations alienate us from our own experiences and then sell them back to us. Lumon’s endgame with the severance procedure is a world without pain, without friction.

A goal that is not removed from modern-day corporate America at all, but very much front and center.

Severance and friction

Friction is a shorthand for removing the difficulties of life, where the customer’s interaction with a product is entirely seamless. As Dominic Basulto remarks in Big Think: “The great promise of the Internet has always been the ability to create truly ‘frictionless’ markets, where buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, are able to do business directly with one another.”

We don’t have to look too far to see how Severance is commenting upon this conceit. The severance procedure quite literally removes the friction of work. Workers do not have to feel weighed down by the time and drudgery of their jobs as their innies take on that labor for them. As the character Mark Scout (Adam Scott), not to be confused by his innie Mark S., says to his supervisor on why he’s not giving a reason for skipping work that day:

“Isn’t that what Lumon’s all about? Balance? I mean, work is just work, right?”

You can think of severance as work without friction—at least, that’s Lumon’s pitch.

Yet even in season one, the severance procedure was not just about work. Outie Mark partly undergoes severance because he doesn’t want to think about the alleged death of his wife, Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman). Her death pushed him into severe depression, and he underwent severance as a coping mechanism to not think about her. As his sister Devon Scout-Hale (Jen Tullock) jabs facetiously during the pilot: “I just feel like forgetting about her for eight hours a day isn’t the same thing as healing.”

The same situation of removing discomfort is hinted at in season one when we learn that a rich woman used severance to carry a baby to term without undergoing the pains of childbirth. This fact is all but confirmed in season two, episode nine (The After Hours) when we learn about a cabin where severed births occur.

However, in season two, this goal becomes even more explicit. We are told directly by someone in Lumon management (Darri Ólafsson) that the goal of Kier — the mythical founder of this cult-like company — is to wage an “eternal war against pain.” The biotech company is philosophically committed to removing friction (however they define it) at every stage of life.

The central twist of the second season is that Lumon has been running even more secretive experiments in its basement on Mark Scout’s wife, Gemma (surprise, she’s not really dead). Gemma has been partitioned into countless different innies, each one tied to a particular type of discomfort — i.e., an unpleasant airplane flight, a dentist appointment, etc. — so the company can assess how far it can use severance to remove all forms of pain.

The business applications of this are obvious, as it’s easy to imagine how a corporation would love to be able to offshore its workers inside their own minds, especially if Lumon can make those innies compliant. As one Redditor theorizes:

“The big picture is that…success would pave the way for Lumon to make the severance chip a huge commercial product…everyone can just get the procedure to put any boring or traumatic task they have to go through onto a dedicated innie. With no need to deal with the messiness and ethical discomfort of having to psychologically break and crush the human spirit of the innie - because they will come pre-broken.”

Lumon seems not to care that by removing pain or friction, they are simultaneously removing agency — in fact, the removal of agency appears to be their end goal.

And while this scenario is dressed up in off-the-wall cult-like imagery and science-fiction technology, it is not as far-fetched as it seems. Corporate America would love to cut out all the uncomfortable parts of life and then charge us for the pleasure of it.

In many ways, it is already attempting to do this.

Part of the pitch of artificial intelligence is to take deeply human but uncomfortable experiences, such as articulating one’s points in an essay, struggling through learning a new skill like drawing, or even dating, and turning those processes into a frictionless experience. “Create your ideal companion, shape her look, personality, and bring her to life in one click,” boasts the AI get-honey, finding it more important to promote the ease of the process rather than whether the technology can actually replicate the intricate dynamics of relationship.

I am sure if we brainstormed, we could come up with even more examples of how corporations’ obsession with friction can lead to atomizing and alienating experiences: the ease with which our identities can be stolen now that they can be condensed into a string of numbers, the difficulty we have in making connections now that social media values engagement over in-person interactions, and so forth (but I’ll leave that analysis for a later article).

The point is to highlight how the desire to remove friction — to remove pain — is very much tied to the corporate imagination.

A severed conclusion

The joy of Severance, and really all effective satires, is using an exaggerated reality to comment on our own. Severance is a made-up procedure, but, again, the corporate impulse to make everything simpler for a price is something most of us should be quite familiar with: after all, it was the golden promise of the Internet.

We’ve experienced enough as a society to now know that a frictionless world comes with costs. It required a large surveillance state that tracked consumer information, so said consumers never had to keep track of that information themselves, and that has now been manipulated by both malicious state and non-state actors alike.

Hopefully, we will learn our lesson from this, but only Kier will know how far we go down this path.