Severance Terrifies Me… in a Good Way

Is it just me or is the line between science and fiction blurring a little too quickly? Because this show severance took me for a trip right through the uncanny valley of design like feeling that you know this aesthetic. Oh, that's retro. No, it's futuristic. No, wait. You actually don't know what the hell is going on. Well, I'll tell you why this whole design and aesthetic and story frightens the hell out of me. But before we proceed, beware that there are some spoilers ahead. Lumen is the center of this show, a big bad seemingly evil company. Their employees live in this company town. Identical houses living really simple lives driving these retro Volvos and Volkswagens from the 80s and '9s or even an older Lincoln Continental from the '60s. Why though? Such an advanced company, advanced society, but such old aesthetics. All of it so you would feel kind of out of time, confused about when and where this is all happening. Hell, even the plate numbers don't match anything you've ever seen. But there are hints that you're still somewhere in the United States. Everything else in the show looks super outdated and still super advanced, too. Like halfway through the first or second episode, I'm asking myself if this is set in the 1980s or 1990s. But then there's a mobile phone. The phones surprisingly are not iPhones, but more like alternate reality Android phones. Oh, welcome back, Sony Xperia 1. Is that a hecking headphone jack I see there? And the UI looks very similar to some Android phones, too. But it's actually not. It's more like Android drawn from memory. very stripped of features and only basic necessary functions, which is normal in fictional UIs. It's so you would focus on the most important information and not overthink the UI like I'm doing right now. But this all isn't the real focus of the show when it comes to design. It's this computer you've probably seen everywhere. And this all goes back to the story of Lumen. Long story short, the characters go to work at Lumen in the morning, get in the elevator, switch to their work self, who doesn't know anything about their outside life. work till 5:00, get back in the elevator, switch to their life self, and come out of the elevator with no memory of work, and go right back home with their whole day ahead of them to enjoy another juxtaposed video. How does it all work? By getting a chip in your brain through a process called severance. And being severed is a true definition of work life balance for the characters. But we the viewers see that underlying this is actually a huge case of work life imbalance because your work selves or innies are suffering. Okay, that's irrelevant right now. What are they doing in there on the severed floor of this company? Well, different things. Some of them create artistic stuff. The others take care of goats. And our main characters refine data in an office like this on a computer like this. This is where all the horror lies. The macro data refining department. There are several questions about this whole picture. One, why does it look like this? Two, what is the work? Three, what data are they refining? And four, what's the purpose of all this? I could just tell you about the UI as the design commentator that I am. I mean, yeah, I love the aesthetic. It's so retro, but don't let that distract you from the fact that this computer right here and what's happening inside could potentially, and I mean in a science fiction kind of way, of course, change everything about design as we know it today and almost everything else. So, let's dig in. First question, why does it all look like this? The office itself looks like a 1960s style office. And if you want to overthink the fact that it's an Apple TV show, then you might connect it to early Apple promotional videos. Everything is designed in such a minimal way. From food packaging to other utilities, making sure you don't feel any strong emotions toward anything. It's just your average sterile corporate office that's emphasizing the soullessness a little too much. But when it comes to work, you have the computer, the terminal, the console, whatever. It might remind you or the main actors of early Apple computers, but it's actually inspired by a data general dasher computer. Yeah, inspired. A fun little fact here is that data general later on gets obliterated by Apple and IBM in the ultimate battle for a personal computer because each of them came up with something more userfriendly and popular, but ultimately was acquired by Dell. So yeah, interesting stuff. Anyway, when you look at the terminal, you notice a couple of interesting details. First, the track ball, which is an awesome little thing to keep you entertained if you're bored off your mind as a refiner. Then you notice that there is no escape button. And I find that particularly eerie. It kind of is just something deep within me like something isn't right. The innies can't escape this place. And similarly, they can't escape these numbers on the screen. Like they can't take a break from work and play a quick and harmless game on the side or browse YouTube. I don't know if that scares me most or the stuff I'm going to talk about next. Another detail is the addition of this camera that's only there for a surveillance. Imagine if your boss could see what you're doing all day, and that's exactly what's so screwed up with Lumen. You'd think with an old hardware like this and a UI like this, there are about as many features as an old computer on it. But that's not true. According to the macroata refining handbook, if you look at the bootup screen of the terminal, you can see some details about the device. So, it has a GPU or a graphical processing unit. Unlike computers that look like it from back in the 70s, 80s, and early '90s. Little side note here, even though this computers had a graphical UI, the graphical rendering wasn't handled by a GPU, but a CPU. So, seeing this computer from Lumen with a GPU means that it is actually advanced to the point that it can support animations like this. So, this whole UI and all the limitations and design are a deliberate choice. One reason is so that the severed workers won't know what time or era they live in, and the other has to do with the work. So, second question, what is the work? The work is mysterious and important. The refiners need to turn on their terminal, choose a certain file from a list of files, go through the numbers in the file, and really focus on them until they feel a certain emotion while staring at a bunch of them, and then drag that set of numbers into one of these bins where the numbers get sorted based on their emotion. Woe, frolic, dread, or malice. Wait, that's it? That's so simple. I could do that, too, and have my Audi get paid four times my current salary. That's great and all until the existential dread kicks in and you start asking questions. What is the data being refined? In the macro data refining handbook, it says, "Knowing the true meaning behind the numbers could inhibit your natural intuition." Intuition. I heard this word all the time studying linguistics in school. We were told to never rely on our intuition for answering questions, but our knowledge, but more often than not, my intuition would be correct the first time. But when I tried to remember the answer based on my knowledge, it would be wrong. It's funny, but it all lies in a theory that says you have two ways of decision-making. One, your gut feeling or your intuition, and two, your slower analytical, conscious thinking. And if you try to overthink a response too much, you'll lose it. I'm pretty sure you've experienced it before. So, the refiners not only need to be severed and kept away from the world and all the internet drama and stuff, but also need to not know what they're doing. That's not always the case, though, because accidents happen. And a separate employee in the show learns that the numbers, the emotions are each a gateway to a consciousness. And each file completed finishes crafting the consciousness of a new innie. Which takes us back to the previous question. What is the work? Before refining macro data and all the other jobs at Lumen, they praise Kier. Kier Egan was the first CEO of Lumen. He was a doctor during the 19th century and he created Lumen to sell medical salves. And now Lumen sells severance chips. A famous quote from Kier goes, "Woe, frolic, dread, malice. Each man's character is defined by the precise ratio that resides in him. I walked into the cave of my own mind and there I tamed them. Should you tame the tempers as I did mine, then the world shall become but your appendage. This this right here, it's literally the whole job of lumen. Woe, frolic, dread, and malice labeled with colors green, yellow, red, and blue. A gateway to a person's mind is through their brains, their brain activity, their consciousness. So let's say the data files are a person's consciousness encrypted into numbers. And the characters feel certain emotions to different parts of this file thanks to the chip in their own brain. Then they decrypt the file, fine-tune this consciousness, and categorize exactly which parts of it mean what, crafting a perfect synthetic personality. And that's where the word macro comes in. taking a big picture of everybody's consciousness data and continuing to craft a formula for synthesizing these new personalities. Which brings us to the fourth question. What is the purpose of all this? Sinister things, evil stuff, whatever the hell they want. What wouldn't you do if you possess the power of creating a new person from scratch that will listen to your every word? It's world changing. But the technology scares me more. Think of a puzzle. If I give you the soft puzzle, you can tell if it's done correctly. But solving it yourself could take a long time depending on how big the puzzle is. In today's world, every secret thing is encrypted. Passwords, databases, your finances, and if you have a key, you can decrypt it. Without a key though, it would take the fastest computers millions of euros to solve the puzzle and break into your bank account. But as we make faster and faster computers, like quantum computers, the keys will be too easy to find and no puzzle will be left unsolved. But what Lumin is doing could be using the raw extreme human emotions to encrypt and decrypt secret files and through that do their evil stuff quick and clean. Another thing they could do is a lot more related to our world today. If Lumen could craft a new personality from a database of human emotions and experiences, then what stops it from training AI models with it? These AI models wouldn't be able to feel, but they would know the response to different situations based on their trainings. Not that I'm very excited about all of this, though. It's terrifying. Part of me does love a good dystopian story with a minimal design, and the other part loves color, maximalism, and choice. But at the end of the day, I prefer the dystopian story to remain a story. Maybe I'm just overthinking this. Maybe I went too far from my intuition. Initially, I just wanted to make a cool mobile and desktop OS based on Lumen's terminal aesthetic. I wanted to make them to be as corporate and soulless as possible. But the more I thought about it, the more horrifying this whole world became. And I do not like how these fictional stories are bordering reality in a creepy way recently. I mean, aren't we all just moving symbols around on our screens all day, producing content, crafting experiences, or refining data that targets thousands or millions of people around the world, influencing them to think in a certain way, engage in a certain way, just like the characters in the show. Again, I'm just overthinking. But I guess being human has its perks, and it's that I can overthink and I can try to comprehend the man-made horrors unfolding around me. And so can you. Well, that's all for this video. If you liked it, make sure you do your magic down below and see you on the next one.