[ExI] Severance

[Adrian Tymes]

There are quite a few corporations which in practice act somewhat like
religions in real life.  This series takes such examples and extends
them.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 1:13 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> 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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