🚨🚨🚨 Spoilers ahead for Season 1 of “Severance”.

Season 2 of Severance will premiere on January 17, 2025.

The World of “Severance”

Employees on the ‘severed’ floor of Lumon Industries consent to having their personal lives cut off from their working lives. A neural implant ensures their memories and identities are spatially dictated: when ‘severed’ Lumonites clock into work and descend the elevator to the severed floor, their ‘outies’ – their non-work selves – are shut off, giving way for their ‘innies’ to take over their physical bodies. Upon clocking out, the outies regain consciousness, feeling as though no time has passed.

Mark Scout, protagonist.

Alienation, Industry, and the Digital Revolution

"Severance" is, among other things, a dramatization of the alienating nature of the modern workplace. Its themes closely echo the ideas of Karl Marx, the controversial 19th century German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary socialist. In his "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", Marx argues that capitalism, the economic system based on private ownership and free markets, creates working conditions that alienate the working class. Alienation, in this sense, is a problematic separation between a subject and an object. Marx says the objects from which capitalism severs workers are:

1. The products of their labor

2. The act of production itself

3. Their own human nature AKA their "species-being"

4. Other human beings

How exactly does capitalism breed alienation along these axes? Think of an employee in a shoe factory. As soon as the worker completes their hyper-specialized task on the production line, the finished product is swiftly whisked away, never to be seen by them again. The worker toils away creating products which they can’t afford and which belong not to them, but to their bosses, the capitalists, who sell those products for profit. The shoemaker does not, perhaps cannot, feel a sense of connection to the shoes he makes, for they are not really his.

This model of production, says Marx, alienates us not only from the products of our labor but also from the act of laboring. The process of shoemaking becomes a monotonous chore rather than a creative, fulfilling activity.

In this way, it also alienates workers from their essential human nature—a human nature that Marx believes craves meaningful and important work. When work is perceived as purely transactional, we feel little connection to it and thus do not quite feel like ourselves during working hours.

Finally, capitalism alienates us from our fellow workers, whom we tend to see mostly as competitors in a contest for a bigger slice of the pie. This dynamic is encouraged by a tiny minority of the ruling elite, who benefit from redirecting our attention away from them and fostering division among workers rather than promoting a sense of community.

Conceived as it was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, we might wonder how Marx’s account of alienation under capitalism fares today. After all, while in the past the majority of the workforce engaged in physical labor, modern employees increasingly perform knowledge-based tasks. Factory work has, in just the last half-century, undergone what we might call a ‘digital revolution’ in which work has become increasingly computerized and abstract. The majority of workers today are found not in assembly lines at factories but in office or cubicles. These so-called “knowledge workers” (a term coined by author Peter Drucker to describe employees whose job consists primarily of using and producing knowledge to create value) spend their workdays at desks, usually in front of computer screens.

Knowledge work is quite different from the industrial labor that Marx set out to critique. At the end of a workday, the knowledge worker rarely has a concrete object she can point to when asked what she has been working on all day. Moreover, unlike factory work, modern knowledge work often involves complex tasks that can be difficult to quantify and measure. But while modern work might be more abstract and less physically demanding and dangerous than that of its industrial forbears, there are some acute resonances between the alienating conditions of the industrial era and those of the digital age, from long hours and dismal job security to micromanagement and a lack of autonomy.

How does Marx's critique of capitalism hold up now, nearly 200 years after it was conceived and in a totally new work environment? If we accept that his cultural diagnosis held merit then, is work today just as alienating as it was in the heyday of industry? Or has the digital age simply uncovered new depths of alienation?

I think it’s the latter. I think the alienation that occurs in the modern workplace, if it occurs, simply manifests itself more insidiously than it used to. While we certainly can’t blame a man of the 18th century for not entirely anticipating the direction of technological change, I actually think these new dimensions of alienation can in fact be understood in terms of Marx’s original four axes.

“Severance” is, in my view, an only slightly dramatized account of alienation in today’s workplace. Aside from being an incredible show, it’s a perfect case study with which to examine the nature of modern alienation. It magnifies and clarifies some of the ways in which the modern knowledge work economy—no pun intended—severs us from ourselves, from others, from the tangible products of our toil, and even from the simple but fundamental human drive to do work worth doing.

Alienation from Act and Products of Labor

“The work is mysterious and important.”

As part of the “Macrodata Refinement Team”, protagonist Mark and the other innies on his floor spend their days moving their cursors across a Matrix-esque wall of numbers, encircling and binning all those numbers that pop out to them as ‘scary’. No one is quite sure what purpose this serves, but Lumon higher-ups assure the Macrodata Refiners that their work is “mysterious and important”.

The desk of a Macrodata Refiner.

The Macrodata Refiners are twice removed from the products of their labor: first in the sense that they never come into contact with the physical objects or concrete circumstances in the world their labor brings about, and also in the sense that the objects they do interact with are digital abstractions obscured through layers of security filters. So not only do the products of their labor not belong to them, but they are also thoroughly intangible and unintelligible to them.

This uncovers a new depth of alienation that Marx might not have foreseen: in the digital age, workers are often unsure what the product of their labor even is. The software engineer who makes piecemeal contributions to sprawling codebases, the financial analyst who crunches numbers for a business conglomerate, the way that in bureaucratic organizations individual contributions get lost in the shuffle of rigid hierarchies — the increasing obscurity and specialization of modern work means that workers today are less connected than ever to the products of their labor and from the activity of laboring itself.

Alienation from Species-Being

“I am a person. You are not.”

Printed on Lumon’s severance chip is the phrase, “Don’t live to work. Work to live”. Lumon promises ‘work-life balance’ to its severed employees through a wholesale work-life segregation. This contemporary notion of a work-life balance treats the symptom but not the disease. The problem it seeks to solve – work ‘encroaching’ on one’s non-work life – is unique to our present economic system, under which work is nothing other than a means to sustain life: it therefore exists outside of life, as something apart from it.

By contrast, in a world where work is not alienated, where it is done freely and feels intrinsically valuable apart from the salary and earnings it provides, there is no need to ‘balance’ work and life, for work is an expression of life. This kind of not just life-sustaining but life-giving work is, for Marx, an expression of our essential nature, our “species-being”. It is a “spontaneous, free activity,” whereas under capitalism work is merely “a means to his physical existence” (p.77).

This instrumentalization of labor is partly why Marx writes in the Manuscripts that “The worker … only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.” In “Severance” this is true in a literal sense, as severed workers have no memory of their innie lives when in outie mode and vice versa. If we identify their ‘real’ selves with their outies, then the employees are only themselves outside of work: in Marx’s words, ‘[h]e is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.”

And what is left of the worker once their work has squeezed them dry? For Marx, it is not a whole, creative, fulfilled human being, but an empty vessel reduced to only the most basic animal functions of eating, sleeping etc. When he is at home, he evidently only has energy for the most basic functions necessary for survival. In innie mode workers are barred from fulfilling basic human needs like sleep. When newly severed employee Helly finds herself back at work on Monday, feeling as though no time had passed since clocking out on Friday, she asks Mark if they ever get to sleep. He responds cheekily, “I find it helps to focus on the effects of sleep since we don’t actually get to experience it.”

Alienation from Others

“A handshake is available upon request.”

While workers cannot see themselves in their work, they also struggle to lead full and fulfilling lives outside of their work. Workers are thus robbed both of life-affirming work and, it seems, of the energy to cultivate meaningful lives outside of the office.

Outie Mark.

Mark’s outie comes home and drinks on the couch while watching mindless television programs. He also appears socially isolated, interacting with others only when forced to by his sister or his oddball neighbor. He exhibits a resigned weariness as he goes through the motions, and we don’t see him pursuing any hobbies.

His life, like that of so many working-class individuals, revolves around his job. But, as we’ve seen, his job is solely a means of survival, not a source of purpose or identity. This hollowed-out existence, where the self is worn away by the grinding demands of survival, is contrary to our human nature, to our species-being.

Nevertheless, throughout the show we do see poignant moments of resistance to alienation by innies and outies alike. Quintessential company-man Irving is a devoted employee on the inside, but cracks in his piety to Lumon start to form when he falls in love with Burt from another department: O&D (Optics and Design). This forbidden connection, born of genuine emotion and a desire for intimacy, represents a rebellious assertion of Irving's humanity in the face of Lumon's dehumanizing culture.

Irving and Burt bonding over a piece of artwork.

While for Marx a condition of capitalism is that it alienates man from man, Irving’s story suggests that even in the most alienating circumstances, the drive to connect with others and forge meaningful relationships persists. Of course, echoing the fact that real-life companies want to squash any hints of camaraderie or solidarity among employees out of fear they will form a union, Lumon strictly forbids such inter-departmental relations.

Moreover, Lumon nefariously breeds animosity between departments. We learn through Irving’s fellow Refiner Dylan that O&D and Macrodata Refinement are longtime rivals. Though no one knows the exact origins of this rivalry, pictures are spread around the departments of violent ‘coups’ taking place. The Refiners possess images of O&D staging one of these coups against them, represented by ludicrously terror-filled images of O&D cannibalizing their department. Despite the utter lunacy of this story and the unanswered questions it raises (why did O&D ‘revolt’? What on Earth would they have to revolt against?), Dylan fully buys into it and is thus furious with Irving when he learns of Irving’s budding romance with Burt.

The painting “The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design” depicts the O&D department engaged in a violent coup against the Macrodata Refiners. It is meant to breed animosity between the departments.

Dylan blindly accepts this condition of estrangement from others until a similar moment of connection forces him to confront his essential human drive to connect. A work emergency forces management to briefly wake him up in his outie form, and he discovers his outie has a son. Torn away from his outie form before getting a chance to find out more, Dylan is furious with Lumon management for robbing him of any knowledge of his son and his wider family.

The bond between parent and child is another example of a primal, visceral connection – an essential aspect of our species-being that even Lumon’s extreme compartmentalization cannot wholly extinguish. Dylan’s subsequent outrage underscores the deeply dehumanizing effects of severance. The alienation suffered by severed Lumon employees is, unfortunately, only a few steps away from the reality of many modern knowledge workers. Workers are in many cases cut off not just from their work and their sense of self, but from the basic social bonds that make them human. Dylan’s fury is more than personal; it is an assertion of his basic humanity in the face of a system that would relegate him to a mere cog in a machine.

Liberation Through Collective Action

“It's too bad nobody told you guys that everything here is bulls**t.”

As the characters’ individual acts of resistance accumulate, they begin to coalesce into something more powerful, staging a collective revolt against Lumon. Irving and Burt’s forbidden love, Dylan’s outrage at not getting to know his son – these personal rebellions lay the groundwork for a broader awakening among our characters. Crucially, this awakening hinges on solidarity. It hinges on the characters overcoming their forced estrangement from one another and forming bonds of mutual support and understanding.

We see this in the way Irving and Dylan eventually reconcile, with Dylan’s fury towards Lumon management overpowering his petty hatred of O&D. Marx believed in the revolutionary potential of the working class. For him, the antidote to the alienating effects of capitalism lies in collective action, in workers uniting to assert their common interests. Severance is a story of how collective action is possible even in the most alienating of circumstances. And the severed employees sow seeds of resistance even in the face of powerful technologically driven systems of surveillance and control.

The Macrodata Refiners.

Severance offers us a searing indictment of the modern knowledge work sector, through which the alienation of the industrial age has taken an even more nefarious turn. Yet even amidst these seemingly impossible circumstances, Severance offers a glimpse of a remedy. Through the characters’ acts of resistance and solidarity, the show points to the transformative potential of collective action in the face of the most alienating conditions. It is a powerful reminder that a more humane and fulfilling future is possible – if we have the courage to fight for it.