Stewart Hotston takes a deep dive into one of the key elements of Apple TV+’s new series, Severance…

Spoilers

 

There is a Chinese room at the heart of Severance and the inherent indecipherability and alienation of being inside that experiment is the guiding heart of this deep sci-fi horror show which is also, and perhaps inescapably, a satire on corporate culture and its impact on us as individuals.

If that long first sentence sounds a bit much, let me say it another way.

Severance is the thriller you didn’t know you needed and is one of the most remarkable shows I’ve seen in years. In another life I’m a published sci-fi author and I’d give my right hand to work with the talent that’s brought this to the screen.

For those who don’t know what the Chinese Room Thought Experiment is, it was developed by John Searle to argue that there can’t be what researchers call “Strong AI”, or, to you and me, AI that is intelligent like humans are intelligent (whatever your definition).

Suppose a computer takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. A Chinese speaker receiving the output might well consider that the computer passes the Turing test because it’s completely convincing in speaking Chinese. It mimics being a human perfectly.

The question Searle wanted to answer was: does the machine literally “understand” Chinese or is it only simulating an understanding of Chinese?

Consider an alternative way of looking at the experiment. Supposes you are in a closed room and have a book with an English version of the same computer program above, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. You too could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program’s instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If a computer can pass the Turing test this way then it follows I can too. Despite the fact I don’t speak Chinese and would have no understanding at all of what is being said via my work.

In Severance, the workers, or Severed, work in a secret facility, receiving large pools of symbols whose meanings they don’t understand, which evoke some kind of response which leads to their processing and then are gone. They assume the work they do provides outputs which have meaning to someone else, someone they never meet and someone whose purposes they don’t begin to guess. They assume there is meaning in all this but they have no sense of what the meaning is. Their own meaning is derivative – it comes from that hope that if they do their work then someone else will be satisfied with what they receive. The work they’re given to do has no meaning in and of itself except what hope it provides.

In that sense, Severance suggests that specialisation in the workplace (a central tenant of free market capitalism) renders us nothing more than literal cogs whose meaning is, at its very best, based on hoping someone else has meaning because of what we’re doing. Our own sense of achievement is not just deferred, it is non-existent in the most real sense.

This existential void created by being inside the box in the Chinese Room experiment is the philosophical heart of the show.

It also happens to be the central thesis of how to construct a productive corporation across much of the English-speaking world. Run those two sentences together and you’ll understand why I call Severance a horror show.

How can you demand a fair share of the profits of your labour when you have no understanding of what your labour is producing? For the corporation, often defined as an independent entity in law wherever Free Market ideology is supreme, the idea that its components have wants and needs and interests that don’t align with its own is problematic. Ideally a corporation’s components are perfectly aligned with its goals, perhaps even better, those components need no alignment but are nothing more than mechanical instruments which do as required when required with no downtime.

Humans are, in that sense, messy. We have wants, needs and desires and it is really very rare that those things are the same as the ones our employers wish for us.

Severance’s Chinese Room set up has this distilled to 100% alcohol by volume. The workers in severance have no agency except what’s provided to them, curtailed as it is to getting their work done. They don’t ever leave – since they have no memory of what happens outside their workplace then it follows that they also have no needs, wants or desires outside that workplace.

Actually, to say they don’t ever leave isn’t quite true – they can leave, but that leaving is permanent. If they leave it is because they’re dying – they cannot exist outside the workplace, they cannot take with them what they’ve learned, their relationships, their experiences. Leaving is dying, erasure in the most profound sense imaginable. The corporation will forget them as it moves ever forwards and they themselves will no long exist, not even as a memory. Honestly, this erasure of the individual is the ideal for the corporation – because it achieves the end of each component being thoroughly interchangeable.

If you want dystopian nightmare, then the ideal corporate environment from the point of view of the corporation is exactly that and we have it on screen here in Severance. Honestly, they could be filling cans with tomatoes, stamping papers, or hammering in nails – these repetitive tasks are probably slightly more meaningful than the task given to the workers in the show because there’s a sliver of understanding in the work.

Why? Well, ‘I am filling a can with tomatoes’ is a concrete idea. Measurable even. The work given to the Severed is unknowable. Even thinking about it gives me shivers.

We have a Chinese room problem masquerading as dystopian horror. So what?

The “so what” here is about meaning and, as it should be, about the real world.

Where we have corporations offering to pay for women to freeze their eggs so they can work longer without a family interrupting their careers (I fully support people’s right to choose, but the flipside of a company paying for this? They’re not doing it because it benefits us, they’re doing it because it benefits them), where we have automation slowly sliding into almost every facet of modern work and where we still have company towns (minus the scrip in most cases, thankfully), nothing in Severance is entirely fictional.

It is why it is such good horror.

Except of course the process of Severance.

Here we take the Chinese Room and meld current theories of mind with cold science fiction. If the setting has horror tropes built into it, the telling of the story is an SF mystery. I hesitate to frame it as a who done it because there’s no central murder – except perhaps the killing of individuality which feels a little bit pretentious when the execution of the idea in the show is so smooth as to be seamless.

If, like me, you’ve ever had a run in with HR, you’ll understand that Severance has nailed something central to modern work – that the company wants to protect itself from threats without and within. Threats within are its own employees. It’s why I hate the term Human Resources – because it renders us as no different to iron ore or cattle feed. We are resources to be used in the same way – if the company can get away with it. After all, it’s not companies who enact workers’ rights legislation, its governments and they’re needed because, left to their own devices, companies routinely exploit their employees all the way to death and beyond. It’s why shareholder value driven companies hate unions, it’s why workers can be discouraged from ‘fraternising’ and from building friendships with those outside of their silos.

For sure, not all companies are like this but if you have any doubt that, when people aren’t looking corporations do what makes them the most money regardless of whether it’s good for those around them just check out the idea of employee death bonds where a company gets paid out in the event their workers die.

All of this could leave the show feeling cold and alienated. Instead, watching it, I feel dread in my stomach as I see familiar elements of modern life slung right up there staring back at me. The human element of the show keeps the horror and the high falutin’ philosophy grounded in something meaningful – namely what happens to our heroes as they come to the realisation that the world around them not only doesn’t have their best interests at heart but is presenting a beneficent front as a mask for their self-serving exploitation.

Elements such as the waffle party and the permission to have a team photograph (but obviously taken by an authorised person and displayed in a specific way) highlight just how mealy-mouthed and infantilising corporate life can be.

As the meme says,

“Every Company: We’d like to promote mental health in the workplace

Employees: How about hiring more people so we feel less pressured and increase our pay so we don’t need second jobs to pay the rent

Every Company: No, not like that! Try this one hour yoga class.”

If the people in the show are happy it has to be on company terms. If they’re sad it’s a productivity problem not a personal one. Counselling is provided with the explicit aim, not of making people well, but to ensure they can continue working.

Then there’s the break between these people when at work and their ‘outies’, the ones who are outside of work. In a subtle dig at the reasons why we willingly permit this kind of basic abuse of our persons, each of the show’s characters have different reasons for being Severed. They are each equally uncomfortable and starkly outline just how we can become indentured without ever officially acknowledging that fact.

The show is one long skewering of what meaningless work does to a person.

Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character, outlined how workplaces removed moral choice through policy and rules. Breach of rules is a disciplinary offense not a moral quandary. What behaviour is required is stated in black and white.

There is no room for discretion or moral courage because what is right and wrong is written down. Worse still, Sennett argues, is that this lack of exercise of a moral life within a community leads us to not knowing how to respond to novel situations because we have no experience of applying moral frameworks to new events.

This disarming of the moral self works for the corporation because, as with the show’s department heads, it then gets to define what it considers acceptable behaviour and that is always aligned with making profit.

In a situation like the Chinese Room, where you have no idea how what you are doing contributes to the world around you, the rules are then also unknowable.

As we see in the show, the team are pressured into behaviour like compliant infants – because they never know when one free thought (like going for a walk) will be deemed deviance.

The world becomes small – work, work, work. The horizons of the team are so close that the idea of going to see another department, other employees is radical, almost violent in its implications. Stay within your cubicle and work is the only safe route. Stepping outside puts you at immediate risk of censure.

The pressure this applies is crushing. Worse still is how that pressure is amplified when you realise you cannot escape even when you want to – as Helly learns very rapidly.

If this sounds like an unending horror show designed to leave you reeling…well it is. It’s tight scripted with each major character playing archetypes anyone who’s ever worked for a corporation will recognise.

The one who’s there watching the clock

The one who dreams of getting out

The one who got out but came back and is broken because of it

The higher ups who watch and look for errors

The boss who steals our time, ideas and our value without even acknowledging what they’re doing to us

The pretend jollity that’s a veneer for cruelty and,

The one who got out and discovered it was worse on the outside.

The show weaves each of these characters together in a story about self-discovery, about why humans aren’t the equivalent of a Chinese Room and how we might respond if someone were to treat us that way.

What I find fascinating is that apart from Mark S, we see almost nothing of the lives of the other Severed outside of work. This narrative framing has two elements. The first is this reflects the fact that so many of us have lives that are dominated by work, so much so that being outside is pretty much about sleeping and eating before we return to the office. Life outside is seen as having no intrinsic meaning and nothing to offer. Workplaces draw this line, declaring time outside of work as worthy of sacrificing if work demands it because, after all, having time that’s not work is, by definition, not productive and therefore less valuable.

The second element, as portrayed by Helly is that our lives on the outside are the lives we really want to lead. Our outside lives are the ones with meaning and we work only because we have to in order to make this other life possible.

Between Mark and Helly we have two completely contradictory standpoints – that work is everything and work is only tolerated because of what else it makes possible. While these two represent the extremes of wanting work to be the only thing and wanting it to be nothing, it is Irving and Dylan, the other two team members who bring home what it means it be a normal worker driven to the edge by a company for whom nothing is ever enough.

For Irving it’s the denial of friendship and the erasure of those who don’t fit with what the company wants. For Dylan it’s the intrusion of work into his other life, literally abusing his family and denying him redress.

How does this all tie back into the Chinese Room problem?

If you put meaning making creatures into a space created to deny meaning it will, at best, damage them but at worst they will destroy it no matter how hard you make it for them to act.

Humans will exercise agency one way or another and it may be in the smallest actions, it may be self-destructive and it may burn the world to the ground but when those acts of resistance come they are not the ‘fault’ of those acting them out. They can be laid completely and utterly at the feet of those who denied us meaning in the first place.

Modern free market capitalism has a problem – it wants to sell people goods but it doesn’t want people to make those goods. It does not want its workers to have any meaning except that which it gives them and that will only ever be enough to keep them working tirelessly.

The profound success of this show is that it doesn’t provide a clean answer of rebellion or revolution – instead it watches as each of the characters responds to their own crises in different ways, struggling with the box they find themselves in and trying to figure out what it all means. When they finally act? It’s an issue of justice but a deep one past ideas of right and wrong and focused on the very sense that humans have a right to dignity and dignity is founded on the possibility of meaning.

Deny us agency, deny us space to create meaning and eventually we will act to provide it for ourselves.

Because above it all Severance is asking us a big question – what does it mean to be human? What shape does being human take and can we be more than one type of person depending on where we are and who we’re with without that collapsing into fractured selves as the cognitive dissonance inevitably mounts.

In the Chinese Room experiment no one ever worries that the AI would grow tired of its repetitive tasks – thereby missing the entire point of intelligence as a meaning making process by focusing solely on comprehension.

Severance supposes that people stuck inside Searle’s experiment would eventually tip over the table and set fire to the room.

Rating? 10 out of 10.