Breaching the Severed Floor: Layers of Reality and the Right to Imagine
This is part three of my three part rambling about Severance. Expect spoilers for Seasons One and Two. Part One addresses how Lumon maps to high control groups. Part Two is about Innie humanity, their rights, and an exploration of what we owe to people whose lives are more conditional and contingent than our own. This essay will address physical and informational control in Severance and Severance as a Techgnostic story.
The penultimate mechanism for controlling the Innies is limiting their exposure to ideas and experiences not sanctioned by Lumon.
Keeping their existences physically constrained to the Severed Floor is perhaps the most obvious mechanism by which the Innies are kept "pure." Restricting the possessions that may be taken with them into the Severed Floor also plays a major role.
Control of information is a thing I think a lot about. My day job is one where I have professional commitments to intellectual freedom. As such, the way in which the information environment of the Innies is managed and the apparent functions of different information management strategies is one that draws a lot of attention from me.
Lumon is a business that is also a cult. As a result, it seems to not be able to help but get in its own way because the interests of the business side seem to conflict with the urge to proselytize. Realistically these things probably work in reverse: Lumon proselytizes because the Eagons sincerely believe these various rituals and philosophies aren't just good for the soul, they're wise and effective management techniques.
As a result, Lumon probably doesn't really think of itself as inefficient or incompetent, because the metrics by which outsiders would judge Lumon's productivity simply aren't relevant to the Eagons. In part because they are convinced of their own superiority to those outside of the Kier milieu but also because, at least for the activities centered around Mark S and his cadre of macrodata refiners, conventional metrics for success like profitability are irrelevant: the Mysterious and Important Work is what matters. This also tends to mirror tech startup mentality where a pathway to profitability is assumed to manifest after the product matures so having a plan in place to control costs and deliver a product people actually want to pay for is less important than doing the work.
Because of the nature of the Mysterious and Important Work, the Eagons are only able to rely on a relatively small number of trusted acolytes to manage their most sensitive operations. Anyone who is not 100% bought into the program who comes into contact with the Innies may contaminate them with outside ideas. In my opinion, this is the answer to why security at Lumon is ultimately so lax. The physical and psychological constraints are meant to do the heavy lifting for the handful of acolytes who oversee the Innies which in turn permits the Eagons to hand pick the people who are brought into the inner mysteries.
This is the ouroboros of downsizing and automation. Many a fan has criticized Lumon's poor security, but real companies do this in various forms. While the stakes are less existential, its been widely reported that the pivot to self checkout in big box retail has caused losses from user error and outright theft to skyrocket. Yet this is tolerated because, at least in theory, the savings from a streamlined workforce wherein one inconsistently motivated and trained employee babysits as many as ten checkout stations (source: my local Walmart) where there is rampant error and theft is greater than paying more cashiers to be available for customers.
Lumon clearly isn't directly motivated by profitability nor does anyone really complain about being understaffed. There is a supreme confidence in the capability of their physical and ideological interventions to keep the Innies docile and productive as long as these interventions are competently enacted.
Lumon does undergo a certain amount of introspection after the failures of Season One. Seth Milchik seems to have overall less freedom than Harmony Cobell did after the revelation of her having gone rogue to stalk Mark Scout in the outside world: a sign that the mysterious Board of Directors and the Eagons have realized that even lifelong acolytes cannot fully be trusted to have "mastered their tempers" and faithfully execute its directives. The company also enacts a series of innovative distractions and incentives to try to restore the "buy in" of the Innies long enough to complete Cold Harbor.
At the same time though, all of the sweeteners are obviously designed to keep the Innies from paying attention to the conditionality of their existence and the imbalance of power between themselves and Lumon. Yet the breaches of containment and with it the loss of total control over the Innies' access to information and the outside world are a bell that cannot be unrung.
Ricken's book on self actualization becoming Innie contraband due to a single act of sloppiness on the part of their Lumon captors is worth assessing both from a security standpoint and also from an information control standpoint. On the side of security, it reflects Lumon's overconfidence and the inherent problems on relying on hermetically sealing the information environment that their employees live inside of. The more that Lumon controls the environment of the Innies, the more restrictive it is, the more that it actually creates more failure points.
Because its impossible for any human to maintain a peak level of hyper vigilance day in and day out guarding for wrongthink and outside contamination, much of the security is simply automated. The Outies are searched before they enter the elevator to go down to the Severed Floor first by a security guard and then by a scifi magic system that can detect concealed writing on a person's body. This ensures that the Outies can't bring anything in and the Innies can't smuggle anything out. At least in theory.
Except its unsevered supervising staff that wind up contaminating the floor. Its Lumon's own conditioned acolytes who are the uncontrolled variable because the processes of the Severed Floor work so reliably with so little human intervention that no one in the moment considers the consequences of carelessly leaving a book where Innies might be able to access it. This is the sort of mistake that seems highly improbable on any given day. Yet as with any low probability event, over the long run it becomes inevitable that an unsevered would leave, to use a Dan Carlinism, an "intellectual contagion" somewhere that Innies are unlikely to visit unsupervised on a day where an Innie does just that: visit unsupervised and encounters the contraband.
Which is where we encounter that which has become a major animating force in modern society: the allure of the forbidden. This is not to say that the allure of the forbidden, Dan Carlin's "intellectual contagion", isn't present at all times and places. People have always rebelled. There have always been people who feel an attraction to that which feels mysterious, scandalous, or excessively denounced. At the same time, it doesn't feel controversial to say that we're in the midst of a period where just the aesthetic of something being censored or restricted is enough to generate tremendous energy and interest, even if the "forbidden" nature of the ideas in question is nonsense or at least lacks a nuanced understanding of how information flows through various mediums.
The Techgnosticism of Severence
The notion that we are being lied to and our access to truth mediated for nefarious purposes isn't new. "Orwellian" didn't enter our lexicon by accident. The Matrix is a cyberpunk tribute Gnosticism, a worldview nearly two millennium old that engages critically with the repeated motifs of punitive, capricious, and vain gods in the supernatural realm across belief systems both contemporary to the original Gnostics and predating them. Its almost assuredly also a reaction to the corporeal forces that wielded compliance with assorted rituals, taboos, and theologies as a convenient filter to screen for malcontents. Malcontents who might undermine authorities relying on the divine as the stick to compel obedience where and when legitimacy based on competent and just governance is unavailable.
Severance, the tv show, is in my view another entry into that long tradition of asking why the universe seems to be at best indifferent to human happiness and why so much intellectual effort goes into trying to recontextualize the harms of authorities and deities as justified and for our own good.
In this way, Ricken's book is a lot like Gnosticism being introduced to someone who finds the religious institutions of the Roman Empire oppressive, finds a lot of bothersome contrasts between the behavior of the early Christian church and the minister folk hero at its center, and perhaps has privately questioned the protection racket style of relationship between humans and their gods present in many spiritual frameworks.
I'm going to repeat my disclaimer here that I don't have any issues with people who practice what they preach if what they preach is empathy, charity, and mercy and I'm not unaware of assorted theological explanations for what the Gnostics and other critical observers see as a radical transformation between a wrathful Old Testament God and a New Testament God who is seemingly all about love. The metaphysical reason someone feels compelled to be kind and abstain from cruelty is interesting to me but its not necessary for me to buy into it to accept them as a good person.
In this view, I see Lumon as a sort of Demiurge relative to the Innies. A wrathful, controlling creator god who has interposed itself between its creations and a higher reality of "truth." In Gnosticism freedom and a more benevolent existence is found on the other side of the stern patriarchs and their entourages that humans have bent the knee and sacrificed to since time immemorial.
The literal form of the analogy falls apart here, much as it does in the Matrix, in that the world on the other side of the Severed Floor is one that is largely inhospitable for the Innies. Their survival is contingent on technological infrastructure that is primarily controlled by Lumon. Their survival is conditional on Lumon seeing value in their continued existence. The lives of the Innies are also in the hands of Outies with whom they cannot have meaningful contact with except where mediated by Lumon or through some challenging skullduggery.
On the other hand, if we get a bit less literal with this, the metaphor can be extended. Gnosis is often used as a shorthand for spiritual revelation. In this way, while Neo and the Innies weren't particularly greeted with an ideal world upon awakening in the outer world, they did gain a greater understanding of their selves and their circumstances. With that understanding comes a greater capacity to yearn for, if not true freedom, then at least greater autonomy and to take measures to demand the forces arrayed against them to bend.
The Innies have pierced the boundaries of reality, done an end run around the oppressive god that rules their universe, and come back with tangible proof of a life that could be led outside of Lumon's capriciousness. After the false start of using the Overtime Protocol to awaken in the Outie world and Lumon's "new covenant" with the Innies where it affected greater compassion and genorosity, the Innies reject Lumon's velvet glove and seem poised to lead a general strike.
Their demands are almost certainly going to go beyond merely improving working conditions and into recognition of their personhood. A personhood that a corporation cannot summarily switch off, even though it is their creator and the operator of the infrastructure that gives them consciousness. Phrasing it this way also reminds me of the trials and tribulations of Data to be legally recognized as a citizen of the Federation instead of Starfleet property, although Data's existence was far less conditional.
Additional Severance Discussion:
Lumon, the Eagons, and High Demand Groups
On This Floor We Believe Innies are People: What do we owe artificial life?
