[ExI] Severance

[Darin Sunley]

It's not about corporate anything, any more than "Truman Show" was about
reality television. It's a religious allegory, and a very good one.

Which might not be your cup of tea either, and that's fair, but the surface
corporate imagery absolutely must not be confused for the substance, which
is significant.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 10:23 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I'd never heard of the series.  After looking it up, the premise loses
> me very quickly.  I can see some corporate overlords wanting such a
> system, sure, but reality does not work that way - well beyond my
> "willing suspension of disbelief" levels.
>
> To take just one example: without going too much into things I
> shouldn't talk about much in public, let's just say I've worked in a
> place that attempted a lesser version of this, and it was trivial to
> smuggle messages past management.  I was hired to do things they
> couldn't figure out (otherwise, they'd have done it themselves), and
> this same knowledge involved means of interacting with the outside
> world (if it didn't, there would have been no work worth doing) that
> inherently opened up means of passing information that management did
> not know how to scan for.  From what I've read of the scanning systems
> in Severance, the exact same practice would have worked as-is in that
> setting too.  If management was able to set up a system to scan for
> this sort of thing, they'd have little to no need for technically
> competent employees in the first place.
>
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 1:29 AM Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Any fans here?  I have just watched the first three episodes (one dvd)
> > of «Severance», whose premise may well be known to you even if you have
> > not watched any.
> >
> > I did not imagine the ramifications of the partition; I imagined it
> > shallower, though I cannot now say how.  Still, though innie-Mark asks
> > Petey (in one of his flashbacks) how he could know what "cubist" means,
> > there are plenty of signs that innies would not be lost in their home
> > culture; for example, in one scene Irving speaks of "gold, silver and
> > bronze" awards.
> >
> > Is the use of retro equipment (Seventies computer terminals, cassette
> > tape recording) meant to suggest that severance has been going on far
> > longer than we'd otherwise suppose?
> >
> > --
> > *\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org
> >
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