Apple TV+ Show 'Severance' Explores the Ethics of an Increasingly Digital Future

Warning: This content contains spoilers for season 1 of Severance.

Severance is a new TV series on Apple TV+ that takes place, according to the show creator, in a “vaguely now-ish” timeline, but with technology that, as of the time of writing this article is, thank god, purely science fiction. In this show, a new procedure called “severance” has been invented, enabling the corporation Lumon Industries to “sever” a person’s consciousness so that they cannot retain memories of their work-self, (referred to as their “innie”) when they are at home and cannot retain memories of their home identity (referred to as their “outtie”) when they are at work. This medical procedure effectively creates two separate consciousnesses that operate within one body. Severance plays on the idea of maintaining a work-life balance and takes it to its logical extremes. While it might sound great in theory to create a separate ego while you’re at work that takes care of all the mundane tediousness that encompasses being employed, this show quickly imbues the sheer horror that a procedure like this would entail. It explores several philosophical concepts, including what it means to be “you”, what we should base our ethics on, what it means to die, and the dehumanization of modern corporate work.

The show opens with a woman named Helly dressed in business attire waking up on a table, unsure of who she is or how she got there. She does, however, acknowledge the existence of the state of Delaware. After being administered a test to determine what she remembers, it’s validated that the severance procedure was successful for her. She now works on the severed floor of Lumon Industries and is spatially condemned to exist within the confines of these walls for the rest of her existence. Well, at least her innie is. Lumon Industries is the embodiment of purgatory for the employees on the severed floor, who never leave. 

When their shift is over for the day, they walk to the elevator and as they go down, the elevator triggers the chip in their brains which switches into their personal life consciousness, nicknamed their outtie, and they go home for the day. However, their innie never experiences this. They don’t experience going home, hanging out with their friends, going out to eat, or even sleeping. They only reap the benefits of feeling rested or full from what their outtie has done when they took over, but there are no retained memories. As a result, everyone they know on the outside, including life-long friends, family members, and even spouses, does not exist to them. Likewise, their outtie is unaware of what happens while they’re at work, which primes them for workplace exploitation and abuse that never gets leaked.

Severance is a lot like The Myth of Sisyphus in that the innies are condemned to a life of laborious tasks. They don’t really understand the meaning of their work - only that they’re condemned to do it for as long as they exist. The characters we’re first introduced to in Severance work in the Macrodata Refinement Division of the company. They sit at their computers and look for numbers to float across the screen until they come across a set of “scary numbers” that they must isolate and delete. Helly is confused about these instructions at first but learns that she’ll know what to look for when she sees it. The entirety of the innies’ lives are spent working, aside from the occasional patronizing work benefits that are used to boost morale and motivate them to meet quota. Some of these rewards include a waffle party, a music dance experience, an office melon party, Chinese finger traps, and a self-portrait glass ornament. This show is great in that it walks a brilliant line of deeply disturbing serious drama and laugh-out-loud irony and satire.

Since the innie consciousness is essentially born after the severance procedure, the implication is that when the outtie decides to retire, the innie symbolically dies, even though the body continues to exist outside the walls of Lumon Industries. The innies have no outside relationships or memories and can be thought of as spacial slaves to the workplace. They don’t even have the freedom to leave. When Helly realizes just how bad things are at Lumon and that she no longer wants to work there, she tries to physically leave but her outtie keeps bringing her back. Then, she tries to write messages on notes or on her body to tell her outtie that she wants to quit, but there are detectors in the elevators that prevent messages from reaching the outside.

Why would anyone in their right mind, ever want to do this? Well, that’s kind of the point – the people who elect to have this procedure performed are not exactly in their right mind. The show takes us on a journey through the protagonist Mark’s (played by Adam Scott) life, where we discover that he has lost his wife in a car accident, and ever since, has suffered from debilitating grief, alcoholism, and depression that interfered with his ability to do his job as a college history professor. The company Lumon Industries preys on vulnerable people, reeking of desperation for something to quell their suffering. However, this company doesn’t need to force anyone into this medical procedure. On the contrary, people volunteer, of their own free will. However, when it comes to the discussion of whether or not these people have consented to this procedure, it depends on which version of the person’s consciousness we’re talking about.

Severance poses some serious ethical questions that we as a society should be thinking about, especially in the face of rapid technological advancement and the birth of artificial intelligence. Parallels can be drawn between the severance procedure and Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip. While that technology is only in the beginning stages, Musk has filed the paperwork with the FDA to move forward with human trials this year. Neuralink is a neurotechnology company that is developing a brain chip that can be implanted into humans to connect them to computers by connecting wires to your neurons. Initially, Neuralink's goals are to help restore brain function in people suffering from brain tumors, brain injuries, amnesia, Parkinson's, and other brain activity disorders. However, if it works, we won’t stop there. Inevitably, it’ll be expanded to improve brain activity in healthy humans and once we reach that point, we’re running into some ethical grey zones. Should you be able to pay to optimize your brain? Why not? Let’s imagine that Neuralink leads us down a road of having the ability to make severance a reality. If people consented, should they be allowed to do it? 

Here’s why a person can’t actually consent to a procedure like severance. The version of Helly (and any other person that received the severance procedure, for that matter) that consented to the severance procedure is not the same person that is condemned to work at Lumon Industries for the rest of their existence. We are the sum of our experiences. Our memories form not only our recollections of the past but also our identity – our sense of self. When Helly has the severance procedure done, she condemns a different version of herself to a hell that she never has to experience. The Helly that wakes up on that corporate office table is much like a newborn baby - thrown into the world without any idea as to who they are or what’s going on, though they can retain specific types of memories that help them continue to function and work efficiently. This is why Helly didn’t know her own name but could recall that Delaware is a state. The innie version of Helly does not recall consenting to the severance procedure, and that’s because she never did. The outtie Helly is a different person entirely. The only thing we can know is real for certain is our conscious experience and Helly’s consciousness has been separated in two. The experiences she lived on the outside are no longer hers. Likewise, outside Helly has no idea what innie Helly goes through, if she even likes working at Lumon, and what it feels like to perceive your work life as a never-ending loop. 

Consciousness is simply sentient experience; I know that I’m conscious because I’m experiencing it. However, if you were to remove all of the memories that I have acquired over my 25 years of conscious life, and I were to emerge into the world as a blank slate, would I still be the same person? No, I wouldn’t be. My experiences are what have informed me as a person. They’ve influenced my beliefs, personality, biases, relationships, and, well, just about everything. To condemn a blank-slate version of yourself to a life of misery is unethical because the only relevant consideration for moral worth is sentience - it’s the ability to experience happiness and suffering. You can think of the innies as copies of their original selves, at least physically. Mentally, however, they’re nothing alike. They have different experiences, beliefs, and values. We should be concerned with minimizing suffering, as a society. Allowing a procedure like severance to not only exist but be promoted as some great technological innovation that is informed by consent is blatant deception. Lumon Industries lures workers into a false sense of security by fooling them into thinking that there’s nothing nefarious going on in their workplace and that the innies are perfectly happy. 

Though most outties have no idea what’s truly going on inside at Lumon – that they have a breakroom that’s used to punish employees for misbehaving and subjects them to psychological torture, Helly made her outtie aware of her suffering. It still didn’t matter. Put bluntly, her outtie didn’t care, because the suffering innie Helly experienced was not of outtie Helly’s concern. After all, she doesn’t have to experience it, so why should she care? After threatening to cut off her fingers if her boss Ms. Cobel doesn’t let her send a resignation request video to her outtie, she is allowed to record and send the video. Helly records herself pleading with her outtie to let her quit. Innie Helly appears hopeful and relieved that she’s finally going to be able to let her outtie know that she doesn’t want to be there. Before stepping into the elevator, Helly says to Mark, “Well, boss. I guess this is the part where I should tell you to go to hell. Except you're already here. I was never sorry.” The next scene cuts to Helly emerging from the elevator as if no time had passed, which to innie Helly, hasn’t. Confused as to why she’s come back to work, she looks at the CD in her hand that’s a response to her resignation request from her outtie. 

As Helly sits looking at the TV playing the video, we hear outtie Helly explain that she’s received her resignation request as well as several previous ones but that she thought the issue would have been resolved. She goes on to say, "I understand that you're unhappy with the life that you've been given, but you know what? At some point, we all have to accept reality. So, here it is.” Outtie Helly chillingly looks into the camera as she states. “I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions. You do not. And if you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to regret that. Your resignation request is denied." The video is ended and Helly is left with the knowledge that she is trapped indefinitely. Take a moment to think about the premise of this sort of suffering being an obtainable weapon that can be inflicted upon you by a soulless corporation. Every abuse is under lock and key, as the innies have no way to pass messages through to the outside. Even when their outties become aware of the horrific existence they must endure, they lack the empathy to do anything about it. 

Feeling helpless, she attempts to kill herself by hanging herself by the neck in the elevator. However, she is rescued before she’s able to succeed and because she switches into her innie in the elevator, she’s aware of the suicide attempt. This scene puts into context that Lumon Industries is truly like hell on earth. For the innie, it feels as if no time has passed at all between the end of a shift and the start of another and you can’t even escape by killing yourself because they won’t let you harm the outtie or cause them to lose a worker (slave). Perceptually, there is no end to the work and they never leave. As we explore implanting brain chips into humans, these are the sort of dystopian horrors we should be wary of. 

Severance explores an important century’s old philosophical debate about what constitutes “you”. That is, what makes up your personal identity and connects the “you” you are at one stage in life to the next. Am I the same person at 7 as I am at 25, and if I am, then what is the condition that must be present for this to be true? Philosophers argued whether it was the consistency of a body that constituted personal identity. However, if it is having the same body that makes one the same person, then does getting an organ transplant or altering your face change who you are? Most would say no. Then how much change to your body must occur before you stop being “you”? We know it can’t be your DNA that makes you “you”, as identical twins share the exact same DNA, yet remain to be separate entities. Take the thought experiment of transplanting someone’s brain into another’s body by a mad scientist. All your memories, values, beliefs, thoughts, and perceptions are now in someone else’s body and vice versa. Now, you have to choose which body is going to be tortured. Which would you choose? Discounting the possibility that someone would want to sacrifice themselves to save someone else the pain, most wouldn’t want to experience the suffering of being tortured which is why they would rather their old body be the receiver of this torture. 

John Locke posited the memory theory of personal identity, which argues that personal identity is about psychological continuity. Instead of a soul or body being the basis of the self, it is based on consciousness and the awareness of previous states of consciousness, known as memory. We instinctively endorse this view as a society, as it has informed our policy-making decisions on moral responsibility. Take the way we punish crimes, for instance. The reason we have the insanity plea is that we reject the notion that someone who is not in the right state of mind or who cannot recall committing a crime due to mental illness, brain damage, or some other brain trauma, should be held responsible for said crime. However, things become murkier when you encounter other thought experiments, such as clones. If I were to clone you and simultaneously, you and your clone were existing in the same space, even running into each other, which one is “you”? The problem we run into here is a semantical one, because it really depends on what we mean when we ask which one is “you”? Are we talking about identity or conscious experience? Perhaps it’s true that the clone is identical to the original version of you in identity, but not in consciousness because they are existing in a different space and body as you, even having separate experiences. 

Even with the looming uncertainty of what precisely our identity is dependent on – whether it’s memory, the body, our brain, our soul, or some combination of these things – Severance makes the case that we should legally consider outties as separate identities from their innies. Because the innie and outtie do not share continuous experience, one should not be able to make decisions for the other. In a world where we’re exploring the potential for brain chips to become a legitimate tool in society and where we will eventually create technology where we are capable of inflicting suffering of the kind that has not previously existed before, finding answers to these questions is crucially important. Severance opens the conversation by asking a lot of questions and allowing the viewer to contemplate their answers. Later in the season, we find out that severance is secretly being expanded beyond just workers on the severed floor of Lumon Industries when Mark’s sister discovers a pregnant woman has severed herself to spare herself from the pain and discomfort of childbirth. Think of all the dark possibilities a procedure of this kind opens up when humans can hand off their suffering to a slave of their own creation. As Ms. Cobel put it, “hell is just the product of a morbid imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine they can usually create."