Hello, Welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. A few days ago,
my friend Rob McKenzie, who's been a frequent guest on this show, suggested
I watched the TV show Severance and that I might have a few things to
say about it. It might be worth recording on it. My partner and
I sat down at about four o'clock in the afternoon and thought, let's watch
an episode, then we'll go back to the video game we're playing, because
we've been playing the Last of Us Part two getting ready for that next TV
show. Well, nine hours we finished the series and I texted Rob and
when we're definitely recording on this because it is a show that brings up so
much. So whether you've seen this show, whether you haven't seen the show,
we're not going to do really a review. Were really He's going to
dive into it is a science fiction show that raises questions and the best tradition
of science fiction, and we're going to dive into them. And I hope
you're going to join us. Thank you so much, and we will talk
to you right after this commercial break that's probably from the Looming Corporation. Welcome,
Mac and Matthew, your host Rob, I don't know if my microphone
picked it up, and so if the listeners can hear it or if you
could hear it. But literally right after I said the words loom in Corporation,
there was a loud crack of thunder. So clearly our weather here in
Minneapolis is trying to help me be atmospheric. I could not hear it,
but it would not surprise me because I'm getting the same thing here. So
yes, I recorded people from all around the world. Rob lives about six
miles from me, so this is a little bit easier in that regard.
Well, Rob, let me just start by, I can't even summarize the
show, and I think we're not going to, as those who know the
show will understand, I'm going to take all the parts of me that likes
to talk about the acting and the dialogue and the writing and all that and
kind of sever that away, and I'm only going to leave the parts of
my brain that like to look at the ethical questions that are raised by a
TV show. I don't know if we'll have perfect severance. That's an interesting
thing that we're not technological yet yet, but we're gonna try. And for
those you have no idea what I'm talking about. I promise we could explain
what the world of this show is all about. And there will be lots
of spoilers for it. So if you haven't seen it, I'm gonna recommend
you hit stop and go watch it. Like I said, it can basically
take like you can do it like you know, one or two episodes week.
I think the best way to do it is to just binge the whole
thing. So I I got to the show because I was rewatching. I
was I was rewatching a different show and I was looking through the actors and
actresses and I saw that the actress from it from um Dollhouse was on this
show and I was like, oh, I haven't seen her in a while.
What she was on Severance? Okay, this sounds kind of interesting.
I'm gonna watch it. And I sat down to watch an episode and then
I like couldn't do anything else well watching the episode, it just absorbed me
and it was electric. I was like, yeah. I was like I
planned to just watch an episode here and there for a little while, and
someone has I'll pick up and put down shows and I'm very good about finishing
them. I was wrapped for this and I could not. Like I finished
it over the course of I think three days because I did not have the
time. Every moment was filled with it. And Ruth watched, My wife
watched about watched about five minutes over my shoulder with my headphones on, and
she's like, what is this. I need to watch this show. And
then so she had the same thing and she watched it about two days.
I know, I'm not going to start the old binge abole versus episodic debate
because I understand both sides and that the whole can of worms. It's it's
technically possible to watch this once a week. Well I know that that's the
things I know it came out originally once a week. I have no idea
how people sustained that. I would have gone crazy because I write like I
said, oh yeah, no it but it dragged me forward because the pacing
and like we didn't want to talk about review. So yeah, just the
thing is that it asks big questions. The big spoiler for the show,
and they introduced this really early, is you have the ability to sever yourself
so that your memories you build, you take a part of your mind and
when you are they put a chip in your brain, and while that chip
is active, you lose all of your personal continuity memories, all of your
history. You start fresh, you remember things like They ask questions like what's
the first state that you can remember? And the person says Delaware, which
is the first state? It's I think, I assume that this is a
joke. But she doesn't remember anything. They ask her, what's your name?
I don't know what was your Do you remember your mother? No?
Right, And they they get into the fact that the severed people, because
they're physically in an office, right, they consider their work so highly secure
that they can't carry any memory of their work outside of it, right,
And so they're separate away and those people have only the continuity of their work
time. The elevator closes and the elevator opens, and they don't remember going
home or sleeping or anything. It's just continuous time in an office. And
the only guiding principle you have is your HR manual. And it's set up
in a very interesting way because you know, the first question would be,
well, why would anyone want to do this? And they really suggest that
there are two kind of big reasons why a person would want to do this
going from either direction, because the point of the show is that we spend
most of the time with these four people who have all been severed. They're
all working in this loomit office in a incredibly like nineteen eighty four as told
by minimalist dystopianism. So is these four people, they're in this kind of
dystopian nineteen eighty four meets it's kind of nineteen eighty four meets Dolbert without other
horrible things the Gilbert author we now no believed in. But I would just
office cubicable hell. And the idea is that people would get severed for either
direction. That it might be that you accept that you have to work in
office cubicable office cubicle hell, and you just don't want to have to do
that. And it apparently started in part with a quote that was made I
think by one of the writers or the writer found this, but where they're
talking about like working somebody'd been working in an office like that and they said,
sometimes I wish I could just disassociate for eight hours and not have to
remember those eight hours. I just do office drudgery. Yeah, So that's
one reason why someone might want to do it. The other reason might be
that you had some horrible thing in your life outside of work that you just
want to have some period in your life where you're not thinking about it.
And one of our main characters is someone who, over the course of the
show, we find out his wife died a tragic accident. It was a
driving thing. He feels partly responsible, and so during those eight hours of
work he doesn't know that happen and he gets that freedom from it. Well,
but he doesn't though. That's the thing that gets me is that logically
it makes it worse. Yeah, because the other half of this is if
you are the outside they call them the innies, the people who live inside
the building, and the audies, the people who live outside within the same
head, the same body as an outie. You get in the elevator to
go down, and it closes and it opens, and your whole eight hour
days gone by. You don't have any memories. And the thing that allows
you to get get separation from pain from your history is your memories. You
build up a continuity of experience that rubs the edges off of it, so
it means you're like fifty percent of your awake time is lost to work,
Yeah, and so it makes the recovery take longer. It longer, and
it's also that each time you have to remember it all over again. I
mean, I think one of the core ideas of the show is that there's
all these promises that are made about how good this can be, but that
once we see the people who have actually done it, it's actually quite horrific.
Yeah. But then of course none of them remember how horrific it is.
And so one of the running storylines is that a couple of them are
trying to find ways to let the people outside no, and there's a lot
of sort of stuff that happens around that, and we also find out more
about how awful the corporation itself is. And I think it's a way of
kind of structuring this conversation. I want to first kind of talk about this
idea in the abstract and then talk about how it goes in in the actual
way it's presented. Does that work for you before another kind of part of
the sets So first before we go into like how it actually happens in the
show from a science fiction perspective, like, I think this is the kind
of exactly the kind of thing science fiction loves to explore, like, what
if we had a technology that could do some thing weird that that would would
it help? What do you think of a technology that would say, when
you get to work those eight hours, it's going to be someone else doing
the work and then you just you go and you're back. And basically all
humans have a sixteen hour day where you don't have to think about what you
did to make the sixteen hour the rest of the other sixteen hours the day
possible, and it's it's a logical conclusion of NDA's right. It is what
what big companies, a lot of them would optimally love, is your work
time belongs entirely to them, and that is that is what they what they
philosophically say a lot of the time anyways, Right, anything produced on work
time and work hours is theirs, and that is their time. And so
it's somebody taking the logical, the logical next step on that, Right,
The logical argument is if that's their time, well, that's their time.
You don't even remember that time, right, Yeah, And somebody's saying,
well, what if there's a technology that let a company do this, they
do it like in a heartbeat, right, the Googles and the facebooks and
the NSA. Right, they would be all over this. The lockeed Martins
of the world would love nothing more than not let you know about their rocket
designs when you're at home. And on some level I get that, like
in like, I think part of what makes this so powerful and also it's
kind of so scary? Is that so much? Like, Yeah, there's
a kernel of Yeah, I understand why that would be wanted. Yeah.
And this is just a very limited example, but both you and I have,
in different ways, are involved in the magic the gathering community, and
we spend our time with lots of people who have lots of thoughts about what's
happening with magic. Both you and I, because of different professional relationships,
have at times had more information than most of the people we were talking to
and not been allowed to share that information, yes, or not been allowed
to comment on for example for me. And I'm fine with this, but
like, part of the thing I signed is that for a certain amount of
time after I left, I wouldn't be openly critical of the company standards experiment
clause right. Yeah, And so when all this stuff happened around dungeons and
dragons, that Wizards are trying to do. I had a lot of thoughts
on that that I wanted to jump into as a content creator, yep,
but that a I had knowledge that I couldn't share and shouldn't share, but
also just I'd signed this thing, and so like, yeah, there's a
part of me that think it would be great to cut all that off.
But of course there's all kinds of problems. Yeah. The the high level
problem that they talk about in the show Will a Lot is that continuity of
experience that any it starts at the time that you wake up after your severing,
right, right, And so are they a person? They have all
They're like an amnesiac, right, a classic classic you know, film trope
amnesiac that doesn't remember their previous life, and so they have nothing. Right,
they don't remember their name they're giving they're told a name, and that
name happens to match up to their to their audi name, but it doesn't
have to. They can be anything there were They're given the first name plus
last initial. Yeah, first name plus last initial, and it's not all
and it's demonstrated that it's not accurate for one of the characters, right,
And so that they they got an abbreviated version of the name, right,
And it's actually possible that you that they all have that. Like Mark,
the protagonist, he could be Marcus and go by Mark. And so like
I joke about at my work that I have a work sona right, my
my name and active directory at work is Robert. And so I know when
somebody calls me Robert that they are somebody that knows me through work, because
that's what my close work people, the ones that I work with absolutely every
day right next to me, call me rob But like the people that I
talked to all over throughout the company call me Robert. And that's what this
is. This is the ultimate work zona, right when they shed they shed
this this skin of their outside world and go inside the machine, and they
talk about how that this that person has continuity of experienced right for the time
that they're working, and they they are only alive when they're at work.
Yeah, and there's even again I try to make that separation. It can
be so hard to talk about it, but I think that it helps to
illustrate these things in one. In one situation that we'll get into in a
bit, one of the characters wants to quit and wants to stop being severed.
And one of the points that's made against it is are you murdering you're
any Yeah, because yeah, then this other person with all these experiences will
cease to exist. Yeah, it's it's kind of a two vic situation for
anyone who remembers stoptrack voyager of like this new life that's been created? But
is it? And I think in many ways what what drew me most to
it is how much what they're doing is. It's really kind of a great
commentary on the sort of again like the anonymisation of work, Yes in this
country, you know, because um, part of the point of it is,
Yeah, it's that instead of saying, how do we make work better,
it's how do we just so thoroughly accept that work is going to be
so meaningless and pointless and terrible that will allow you to just forget it?
Yeah, it seems like it's it's And some of the things that are so
brilliant about it is that they do the like, you know, the the
joke that that's in a lot of especially labor organizing circles, is like,
you know, when the company knows that you know, instead of offering you
a raise or worker safety, they'll offer you a pizza party. And here
in this they have those things. It's like you get, you know,
a melon party, a waffle party, an egg party, a waffle which
turns out in a waffle party about a lot more than waffles. Oh man,
that waffle party is a weird, weird thing. I was not expecting.
Get Like, I was expecting more of the melon party, right,
yeah. And then it's like a like a cultic sex dance. What it
like? So I actually read an analysis that we'll get to that and say,
yeah, but just here's a way of framing it that I wanted to
throw out at you. Is this show positing basically the exact polar opposite idea
of the work future that Star Wars Next Generation does, Star Trek the next
generation, Star Trek the regeneration again, thank you, I make those up
all the time. Could you follow him here? Yeah? In Star Trek,
the whole idea is that technology will have gotten to the point that basically
drudge work is no longer needed, that no one has to work for survival.
That and so therefore everyone can pursue the interests that they really love without
worrying about is this going to be profitable enough or not? Here this is
the exact opposite. This is you are so divorced from any possibility of any
career fulfillment, any personal fulfillment at work, any degree of the relationships you
build that work mattering in any way. Yeah, that you're just going to
be seting like did you see what I mean there? At will and especially
considering that the only thing that you are giving when you were severed, the
absolute only thing that you give up is time because when you sever and your
personal continuity of experience is broken. Skills that you build on the outside and
skills that you build on the inside do not transfer. One of the things
that it's notable like in a normal work world is I have a work skill
set, right that I do for my day job, and then I've got
like we talked about magic judging, that's a different skill set, and I
can use those to compliment each other to go apply for a new job,
and I can say I have these skills from working, these skills from my
job, and I've built these two sets of skills, and I can combine
them together and you can take you can pick and choose and what things right
everybody's a lot more complicated than one set of skills in the real world.
But in a real world, not only are they transferable about jobs, but
you can transform them to other parts. You know, Robin, you and
your partner organize a gaming weekend retreat for our friends every weekend. Yep.
And you have a great organizational approach to those that I'm sharing part was shaped
by the organization of work you do from work and stuff like that, right,
and so like her spreadsheet skills because Ruth's an accountant, is like is
leveraged in that sheet that we build, right And in severance, it's saying
you are we do not care about your skills, which genuine it does not
matter, right, And what we care about is your time. The only
thing you are giving up when you were severed is time. And like in
Star Trek, you do the work that you need to do. Right there
they are a post scarcity society. There you only do work that you feel
is meaningful, that you feel like fulfills you in some way, right And
where in this the work is like you're saying, completely divorced from any sense
of purpose or fulfillment, and you are obligated to give your time to the
machine. It does not matter if it's good time, bad time, anything
else. And the job, like they I'll talk about on the outside,
they're like, well, I the work there must be meaningful. I do
something in records, right, And it's so it's so um, it's so
important that they can't let me know anything about it. And meanwhile, on
the inside they have an unfalsifiable job and they don't realize it like nobody nobody.
So they're sorting numbers, right, They're looking at this big field of
numbers, and when some numbers feel scary, they box them and put them
in a They collect them and put them in a box. Right. If
the computer knew what the right numbers to take were, they would be entirely
obsolete, right, right, So the computer can't double check them. It
doesn't know what's right or wrong, which means that their work can't be can't
be double checked by anybody but themselves. And so what they could do is
just pick arbitrary on. Their whole schema is based on them having some kind
of super supernatural knowledge about which numbers are important when it's literally just a field
of random numbers. Yeah, And in the one scene, where the one
where the one new where the one new worker is learning about this. They
all stand over her shoulder. She's like, I can see it. I
can box these numbers. She boxes them, She collects them, like,
circles them and puts them in this box. And no one comments if she's
right or wrong. No one says perfect, No one says exactly those.
Nobody says you grab too many right the first time that you do something,
you're never going to do it perfectly. But no one says a thing.
Yeah, her job is unfalsifiable, right. Unfalsifiable means no one can say
you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. In science, falsification is the ability to
disprove a hypothesis right if I say it, like Galileo says that two objects
that are that are different ways faul At the same time you can check that
that hypot this is falsifiab right. And they can't say if their work is
right or wrong. There's no double check on them right, and it is
wild. The job is inherently meaningless. Nobody questions it because they don't know
to question it, because it's their entire life. And then again, as
I think, such a great metaphor, because here. Well, as far
as we can tell, there is no actual thing. There's no thing that's
happening as a correlation to what they're doing. But they all but there is
some theory that there is and I'm going to get into that some writers of
great analysis what it can be. But in extent, like they all start
to wonder about that, and they wonder like, are we It's kind of
they have an Enders game kind of a question where you know, like an
Enders game. The whole point is to get these kids to play the game
where they don't realize that they are actually doing the war, because the human
brain would just like, like, the human brain is going to have trouble
pushing the button that means the extinction of another species. So you get someone
to do it without knowing, and so there's all they start having, all
these theories kick around, and I think it's another thing. It's a great
commentary off is that not only do most of us, you know, carry
the stuff from our work back into our normal lives. Hopefully if you do
things that you really feel fulfilled by, that's a positive thing, right,
But in our fairly dystopian society and economy, and I feel very privileged that
I've not had this happened much, but I know many others do. You
know, many people work for corporations that they don't really like what they're doing,
and they know that they might be just pushing paper, but the paper
they're pushing is helping to build you know, pipelines across tribal lands, or
is helping to fund build you know, weapons for of war. Right,
you go to work for an arms manufacturer because their benefits are very good,
right? Or is just you know, you're just the data pusher that you
realize the data that you're doing is what allows Amazon to figure out how to
make it worker you know, what other benefits they can cut to get their
workers to be even more efficient. You know, it's all this stuff,
and we know that like a lot of mental illness, a lot of people
harming themselves and un aliving themselves can be traced to you know, guilt,
either lack of satisfaction with work all the way up to feeling really deeply guilty
about the work that they're doing. And again, so much of this feels
like a surrender, you know, it feels like the perfect capitalist win of
if the problem is that the human emotion if the human emotion cannot tolerate the
capitalist like being a cog in the system, you know, because at the
whole point, like, yeah, as a person, you don't want to
be a cog. The way to do that is to utterly remove human emotion,
to just make humanity a cog, because yeah, the cog doesn't care
that the when it's slamming down on metal, the metal is going to be
shaped into a gun or into a cooking pot. It doesn't get there.
And this like the idea of who is responsible then, right, Like I
volunteered my myself to be severed, right, and I do that eight hours
a day working for making you know, as a cog making guns. Right,
and then that or or it makes something that is you know, we
make something that turns out to harm, to accidentally harm people, and we
could have caught it. You know, it's a cook it's a cooking pot,
and it turns out that the metal was impure and it leaches in and
it poisons people. Right, And so then they come back and they say
who's responsible. They put you on trial for for you know, not catching
this. You you're criminally negligent, Like normally you can put a person on
trial for criminal negligence, right, you you did this thing that is that
you you should have known better, and you had training to tell you to
know better, and you knew what the con quinces were for. You're not
doing it. And then you just didn't check the metal content. You just
you just blew it off. You're like, whatever, I don't care.
I'm lazy today, it's not worth it. And so you get pulled up
and put on trial, right, and then you get sent to prison.
How is prison any different? Right? Yeah? And because you're probably now
right back into some kind of prison industrial labor thing, right, something that's
just as awful. Well. And also, who's responsible? I volunteered?
I'm the Audie, Right, I volunteered to be severed? Any am I
responsible for their actions? Right? Right? They blew off the they blew
off the safety checks. Now do I go to jail? Actually, because
one of them I think most interesting moments And this comes at the very end
again here this is big spoilers. Yeah, you realize that one of the
major characters, Henny actually is like her Audie is horrid. Her Audi is
one of the people who is She's the daughter of the founder of this whole
thing. Yeah, Hallie, thank you. Yeah, we're gonna get to
her character in a second. Let me just close on the kind of purely
theoretical part by asking you this, is there an ethical way to do this
correct technology? Because I like one thing that I both love but I'm sometimes
frustrated by with science fiction is when you should you show me a technology with
the idea of this could be good, this could be bad, but then
you tell me that there's a nefarious corporation that has evil motivations behind why they're
doing this this technology, which is great and makes it a great story.
And maybe that's the point of the story, is that you couldn't have a
technology like this without it being driven by some horrible, corrupt corporation. But
like to try, you know, to try the problemant to get that question
the absject could this technology be ethically neutral? Yeah? So I could,
Like you could easily come up with a story where they severed themselves because they
work with something that they don't want to leak out. Right, Let's say
that that you are concerned about things man is not meant to know right either,
because you're working with you know, Elder God and you're afraid that the
madness will leak out, or you are concerned that you will discover some secret
of the universe that you want to be able to compartmentalize. Right, I
mean, I'll give you a perfect example. The people who have to the
people at like Facebook and Twitter and things like that who spend all day looking
at the horrible, horrible posts to get reported. Sure, yeah, moderators,
and so like the people who, yeah, the people who look at
the people who submit you know, torture, porn and whatever, right and
into Facebook, those moderators might want to never remember that the ethical question there
is a different one, which is you've created a new being. Right that
they talk about this in the show that that person is a separate distinct because
there are a separate set of experience that are separate personality. They're separate person
from the way that everybody treats them. Well, you've created them and then
subject them to this constantly, right, Right, And that's a good like
the the you're looking at horrible images that destroy your mind eight hours a day.
You've created a separate part of yourself to manage that. But then you've
created that other person and subjected it to them without their volunteering, Like,
right, and you've done it in such a way that you not only will
you never have to know how horrible images were, but you'll never have to
know how much that person's in pain, right exactly, and so like unless
they like do something physically to themselves, because that's the other thing is physical
things will carry up. You get you get a banged knuckle, you get
a cut on your hand, you whatever that passes up or down, right,
and like, but you you could phrase it as a purely good thing,
right, not just like you're subjecting them to these ethical problems, but
you're like, um, you're working on you're working on something something else that'll
that'll screw up your mind. You volunteered for it. And then you train
in the other half of the mind and let them volunteer for it as well,
and say that, hey, if we discover things that man was not
meant to know, we can be unplugged and we won't know and nobody will
know. You could create this as a story and make these ethically like good
people that are doing this is a good thing. The volunteer problem is a
volunteer problem. Right. You have to be able to that that severed part
of your mind has to be able to say no. Everything is based on
consent and whether or not they're a person, which they cannot refuse in the
show, which is I think the biggest ethical problem that the show has,
or that from the show from the shortest person, this is good. There
is a good tension thing, and the corporation says that legally in these aren't
people, they cannot make the decision about whether or not to work. And
here I think we can start getting into the show itself and the characters,
because I think ye to me that they're all phenomenal. Yeah. The one
I find the most ethically interesting is Henny Hellyeah, Helly. Thank Anyway,
I think her, she's the one. I think you're talking about her nickname.
I want to say her full name is hell Vedica. It's not that
it's like it is it is Helen something hell. Then I maybe to it
is um Helena, right, Helena, okay um, I go to hell
Edica. But you know, anyway, the point being she's the one who
is uh, she's kind of are the news, you know, the new
character. There's a name for this trope. But where like a new person
gets introduced, so you can have lots of exposition as they're learning everything,
and she just cannot adjust, and she's really fighting against it, and to
the point where she makes numerous attempts to tell her Audi that she wants to
quit, even at one point trying to because basically, like I mean,
if he any dies, the Audie dies. If the Anie gets its fingers
cut off, the AUDI gets his fingers cut off, And so she tries
to literally do those things, and in each case the Audie come back and
says, no, you cannot do that and threatens her ands as if you
try to do that again, you know, I'm going to make sure these
terrible things happen to you. Well, she doesn't say I'm going to make
sure these terrible things happen to you. Her threat is I will keep you
alive for a very long time. Yeah, and that's when you know that
you're any does not want to be alive. That is a that is a
powerful thing to say to them, right, Yes, especially because what we
see in the office is that again, because the nies aren't technically alive and
therefore they have no rights. I mean, they are literally torture. It
is psychological, not physical torture. Yes, again, the audies won't.
Like, I guess here's the thing where I'm kind of curious about because everything
I know about brain chemistry says this would be almost impossible. But basically you're
triggering a situation where the inny will have severe PTSD but the audie won't.
Um Yeah, which is that's a whole chemistry thing that's fascinating that physiology,
like the severing severing doesn't work on a physical perspective because of the way that
our memories are sort of anyways, our short term memories are sort of electrically,
in our long term restored chemically, you would need the severing process is
surgery only makes loose sense. You're what they had to be turning on as
a decoder that writes encrypted RNA, right, And that actually means that the
that the rejoined process that they talk about can't work, that that you can't
join ever join the two because what it is, it's an encryption chip that
actually encrypts your RNA. That it's that's long term memory storage, right,
that's the but like you would also lose all of your other non nonlinear memories
if you if you couldn't access the language. You forget how to walk if
you write, and so yeah, like in all science fiction, there's a
level of you just have to accept the scientific leaf that's been created. And
the show is very good, so you don't have any trouble with that.
That's kind of an aside. But yet, let's talk about her character more,
because I think this is the one where it's not coincidentally. I think
it's brilliant writing that the ny is fighting against it the most. And then
as we find out the Audie is could we find out is that the Audi
is the daughter of this and she volunteered specifically as a way to be like,
look, I did it. It's not so bad. Yeah, as
a public relations campaign. And that's the one of the things that they that
the show tries to demonstrate is the thing that leaks back and forth is strength
of character, right, is the foundational bedrock of who you are as a
person. And so she is an arrogant social climber on the outside, right,
and on the inside she's not allowed to do that. There's no prospects
for advancement, right, and she does not want to be constrained by this
artificial world where she will only ever meet seven people, right, And so
she wants the only the only control she wants to take is the one control
that she can't have, which is to end what's going on. And so
she's a she's a control freak in both in both places, right, And
so she I would say that any control freak seems pretty strong for what I
think is a very like natural desire to have any control. But I get
your point that her, well, her desire took her frustration at not being
able to control her situation. It makes sense that would be worse for her
than it's for everyone else, right, And she doesn't have a Gandhi esque
work stoppage kind of like brain. She thinks that the only way to have
control of the situation is to actively engage with it and control it. Right.
So she could sit at the computer and refuse to work, right,
But she doesn't. She could just do nothing, right, And what are
they going to do? They can't there's no physical punishment that they can do
to her, right, because it would leak up to the outside. And
she would just say, all right, I'm just gonna sit and there to
waal freight hours. And she doesn't, and said she learns the job and
learns to work in part because the other people in the department, the other
three people. That's what they do, and that's what humans do, is
they kind of go along with the social morays of the group that they're in,
right, nobody see like they all have to get together in order to
be revolutionary. And again play on this and again there's incredibly well done.
You sort of you know, screwing in someone's mind that the punishment they do
is basically taking them to this dark room where they have to read an apology
about how sorry they are that they let down everyone. You know, it's
very much this like it's communalism in the most abusive, disturbing way, where
it's you're gonna want to conform because everyone else is doing this thing and if
you get out of line, we're gonna make you feel guilty. Yeah,
well, it's religious and like a lot of it has strong religious overtones.
You were going to say the Rosary until you believe it. It's how that
felt money, right, and it's and the like, No, you must
say the exact words. You can't actually talk about the depth of feeling that
you have. You must say these exact words until you believe these exact words,
or until I feel confident that you believe these exact words. It's not
even them again with the technology, they have them hooked up to a lie
detector kind of thing that in theory can test their sincerity. Yeah, and
she claims to have kind of beaten it by lying. But but let's get
too so so that's her any we then jump back and we learned that her
Audie is doing all these horrible things. And let's kind of look at because
my understanding is that the audi, like it's one thing if you tell yourself
that I honestly believe that this technology is ethical and right, and it's then
that the Indias have a great time. And I'm going to show that.
But one thing that we know, and like the show doesn't make this explicitly
clear, but the pieces are all there for you to put this together,
is that we know that the Audie knew how much the Indie was suffering.
The Audie had like dealt with having a bruise on her neck from when the
and he tried to alive herself with rope. It will not just that she
felt it, because the way that the like warning for warning for self harm
here. The actual process that she uses is she do she takes a computer
power cord and attempts to hang herself in the elevator right on the way up
to turn back into her audie. Right, So she turns back in the
middle of it happening, right, so her Audie gets to feel that process.
It isn't just she wakes up with the bruise. Yeah, it's she
wakes up being hung So so we know. But yet we get to the
point where they're at this gala, so the audie is fully ready to say
that it's not a big deal, it's not a problem. She is the
one person among all the people she's working with who knows absolutely that's a lie.
Yeah, they viscerally, right, She's gotten notes and videos and like
physical threats of self harm and then actual attempts to self harm. And then
her response is what they did is they took all of their panopticon surveillance and
then showed only the good bits, right, Yeah, the bits where she
is being happy or finding what kind of happiness she can in the situation.
Right, And it is it's one of those you can edit if you have
if you have six months of someone's life, you can edit them to look
like whatever you want. Right. It's the trick of reality TV. You
can you can build a plot from nowhere just from people talking in a house,
even if they're really bad at having any kind of structure or coherence or
anything. Right. You can make anyone in the villain, and you can
make anyone to hear what you do and don't show right exactly, And so
that's what they do. They're just we're going to edit this, and it
is appalling right now that like knowing what you do from the perspective of having
built all this time building empathy for the any Helly and then seeing what her
Audie actually wants out of the situation is like it is when you get to
that bit in the in the ninth episode, you're like, oh, you
are You are the villain. And I think it's really powerful because so much
of what the show is about is about compassion. Yeah, when it doesn't
doesn't happen, and how the Any's build compassion for each other, and so
much of what they're trying to do is based on an idea of if you
knew how much I was suffering, you would have sympathy and make it stop.
Yes. And as someone who's a polit political organizer and an activist and
social justice an activist, I've been so for twenty five years. This is
often one of the hardest things for people to recognize is I think often there's
a sense of like, if we just help people how much this oppressed group
is suffering, then they're going to want to make it stop, because compassion
is always going to win out, and I think that it should. But
I think the lessons of history are that often we it is very easy for
the human mind and even more so for human community is when they're in this
kind of like let's all go along to get along kind of a way to
find ways to either rationalize it a way that owner they're not really suffering that
or to say that you know, oh they are suffering, but it's their
own choices. If they didn't make those choices, they would suffer, or
that they're suffering is acceptable towards this larger good. Yeah, and you know,
I am. We're gonna be talking about the show, but like I'm
saying this all on trans Day of Remembrance at a time when like all those
things are happening in that particular community. But you can apply that today community.
You know, I think and in some ways I think what the show
is doing is just saying it about office workers in general. You know,
if you just listen to all the conversations that happened around you know, the
great resignation in twenty nineteen, or you know, the why can't I find
anyone to work? It often feels like there's just such a fundamental lack of
compassion that people have of not understanding why all this is going on, right,
And like the large media is some of them are okay, but many
of them are complicit in doing this to office workers. And like, like
you said, this is marginalized groups in general. They're using office workers because
everybody can kind of like get it right, Yeah, but this is not
This isn't a show about office workers. You could call this a workplace drama,
right if you wanted to interaccurately describe a show to somebody. This is
a workplace drama about people that sort numbers. Which I will just say when
you first suggested it, I've heard people talk about severance. I've much more
heard people talk about succession. Oh and I got two mixed up, But
I was like, that seems like an odd thing for the science fiction friend
of mine who want to talk about Sure, Yeah, I haven't gotten enough
seaun to rhymes in my life. I'm ready at this. It's fine.
I've heard really good things about Secession. I haven't watched it, but like,
I watched this show and I was like this, this was like a
bolt of lightning in my spot. And it was like, either Matthew was
going to say this show is is it me? Or is going to be
in the same mode. And so here's here's a meta thing that I think
is fascinating is that so much of the show is it is about that sort
of horrible part of corporate America and corporate in general, but especially here in
America where where it is everything is very anonymous and scrubbed clean, and the
aesthetic is super and a number of people have pointed out like this aesthetic will
look very familiar if you've walked into an Apple store yep. And also that
there's a huge cult of personality that I think none of its borders on religion,
but is quite religious. It is religious towards the Sounds Company. Yeah,
one of the people has a little shrine to him. Yeah, Kier
Egan, which the last person I'm remember where that really happened was was a
guy named Steve Jobs. Yeah, so my question is, why the hell
is this on Apple TV? Well, that's a bit. There are so
many There are so many shows that are like that, Like why is The
Boys on Amazon? Right? Yeah? That's like, yeah, that's actually
that's another good one. Yeah, or or Invincible, like both of those
are on Amazon? Why, like and so boys who haven't seen it,
By the way, it's basically about the amazonification of superhero superheroes. Yeah,
and so like these because these companies they aren't guided by a principle of like
doing things that make them look good or self preservation. They're guided by what
makes the lmighty dollar. Right. Well, and so here I have two
stories, two theories, one cynical, one a little bit happy. The
happy theory is that again, like because we can't sever workers yet, some
of the people involved are kind of like, look, how much can we
critique our bosses without our bosses noticing, you know, and like that's been
going on, I mean for all time. Or they have some boss that's
also on the same page and shields them, right, yeah, exactly,
exactly, And that again, like you wish you could sever that boss,
but you can't, and that's why this boss will let them do it.
Or but the flip side of it being like propaganda has often always involved like,
oh, hey, yeah, we'll we'll take some punches, like we'll
put out something that's critical of us so that you think that you don't notice
all the other things that we're suppressing. That I'm we were critical about ourselves
here. That means you can trust us over there, right exactly. So
that's a whole other kind of dystopian thinking that in our own world, right,
And I'd be curious to hear people speculations of which side is happening here.
But it was just the degree to which it was not only like big
corporate business in general, but Apple specific that was so baffling till The design
mites of the show, to get back into review territory are top notch.
The I'm a mechanical keyboards geek and when they when they panned over to the
keyboards for the first time on their terminals, I paused it and I was
like, I recognized this keyboard. Yeah right. This is modeled on the
the Dasher, which is a famous terminal keyboard from the nineteen seventies and eighties,
and I was like, I wonder did they use off the shelf key
caps, because you can buy key caps nowadays that match it. And I
went and looked, and as it turns out, so the funniest part of
the first episode was when I get to the end of the episode and it
says directed by Ben Stiller and all the tension from this tight like episode.
I just laughed and laughed and laughed. I was like, ben Stiller directed
this. Well, turns out he knows how to run a show. And
then people tweeted it ben Stiller. They're like, hey, these key caps
don't match the commercial ones that are made that are that are from the Dasher
And he goes, oh, we made our own custom keycaps and you cannot
buy them. Yeah, and so and like they understand these details right and
so much. And they say at one point that the technology is this way
to sort of comfort people, but yeah, it's it's like cathode ray monitors.
They're not flat screen. The technology is not really windows. It's like
a mouse over just text on a screen. No one has cell phones or
kind of devices like that. It's all very old school, and let's talk
more about the founder. And again here I'm yeah, yeah, because it's
not just review. But I think this is important again because going to what's
the show saying about religions and cults? You talked about how it um didn't
all it didn't on the surface, it does not listen to make sense until
you really do some deep digging as to what they're doing with the data.
Yeah, it's still not explained. But and you may have picked up on
this, but let me just share it with the readers, with the listeners,
because I didn't pick up on this until I read this incredible article.
It's called twenty burning severance Questions we have after that finale. It's by Nicole
Gallucci. I think it's on ummashable dot com. Share it. It looks
very much like it's just a like, you know, click at right.
Yeah, but it actually but it draws some great connections that I hadn't realized.
I'm just gonna read from it. Um. So, first of all,
one of the things that we find I'm gonna read some parts, but
I almost gonna paraphrase here. So one of the things we've learned about Kayer
Egan is that his statue explains that there are four tempers that define human beings.
They're woe, frolic, dread, and malice. Yes, um,
and this was all like from eagle eyed read people who like posted and found
it in that computer thing. They're dropping the numbers into four boxes which have
the numbers which have the letters on them. WO for woe, FC for
frolic, d R for dread, and m a form malice. So already
that's part of the connection. And then here I'm just going to read this
paragraph about the waffle party that you described. Yes, as known above,
the party features people in masks that resemble the four tempers that Burton Ivy meet.
Cute painting. So there's a two other characters who are these two older
men who are it turns are inured. Yes, I don't know they're gay
or bibe, but they're inchuring in each other and they have a budding romance
which are comment on a second. But they kind of meet over a painting
that has these same four and it's two women, a jester and a horned
goat slash ram. Going back to reading, They dance in front of the
refiner of the quarter, who also wears a mask of Kier and sits on
Ker's bed with a cat of nine tails whip that has nine core principles painted
on each tail. Vision, verve, wit, cheer, humility, benevolence,
nimbless, property, and wiles. And to me, that's when a
show truly becomes incredible when it seems like a lot of the show is incredibly
absurd, but instead of like everything that seems absurdest has a point, yes,
you know. And when I when I put all that together from reading
it and people we put it together from watching it or their own research,
I was just like, okay, so we're going so deep here on everything
is pointing towards this religious ideology that this guy has. He's pulling everyone into.
Yeah, and the kere he like, they have hymns to him,
right, And when they go up the manual that's on the wall, they
have it in a little nook, right, and he pulls it off the
wall and it's printed on the same paper that you get from a Bible,
right, that's super thin like. And so they they're working hard to make
it clear that they have constructed a religion inside of this this building. And
the priests do not believe and that's clear because so there's the managers are not
severed, right, and they know the outside and they know the inside.
But the question is Milchick, what is he? Right, he's he takes
those you don't know, he's the he's the kind of supervisor of them.
But really, as you, we're not. He never looks at their work.
He's just looking at how well they're interacting with each other. Right.
He rewards them, He gives them like the waffle party is the jazz dance
party. He does. He never reviews their work. He is a manager
in what like a corporate setting, would be the optimal manager, a manager
who knows nothing about what you do and reviews you as a person and keeps
you happy and healthy and safe. Right. I'm not even sure what his
title is, right, because he's not chief of security. Somebody else's chief
of security. Their actual direct manager is Um Corbell right, Right, Milchick
is just the hand of Egan, right, Yeah, and the Um.
I don't know if you caught this. He's got a tattoo on the back
of his hand that shows up under black light. Oh I didn't see that.
Oh, it's when when he's bandaging, when he when he's bandaging,
um, Helli's arm right when it's covered with blood. He is black light
to see whether or not there's blood around, right, Oh on a tattoo
and a glowing tattoo under black light is on the back of his hand.
This is one of the shows that I'm sure it is gonna get so much
better when you rewatch it a third, fourth, and fifth. Yeah,
I did a rewatch and ruth that I caught that. We're like, what
is he a construct? Because he's perfect right, not a hair out of
place ever, and he's always smiling except when he is called on to be
angry. Right. And we do know that there's another character who for most
of the show we only know as Gemma. She also looks perfect. She's
kind of like like the hr hired therapist who's very like she's there to help
you, but she's also there to report on you. It's kind of freaky.
And we find out that she, as she understands it, she has
also been severed, but that she only exists in this stage, and she
describes herself that she's been alive for like less than fifty hours at the end,
one hundred and seven hours and eight of them were on a single day
where she was called to directly oversee them, right, and that was long
time she was awake, So this guy might be another person like her.
Of course, at the very end we also find out that as far as
we can tell, she looks exactly like Mark's wife who we were told was
killed, who by the way, it's dropped that she was she went to
a Loomin owned hospital. Yes, so all these things tied together, But
just on the religion point, there is one person who we know does believe,
which is Kobel, who's who's to the nies. This is the person
who's in charge of everything. Yes, but we also know that as an
Audi, they live next to Mark as an Audi, who Mark of course
doesn't realize this, and she literally has a shrine to him. And so
I think supposed to think that to some extent this religion exists outside And again
we're getting into theory, but like you, we can talk about the religion
side of it. I think I think we're supposed to think is that the
daughter, at least Hellie, that her Autie very much believes in this as
well. Because that's that's because you have to sort of wonder what's the reason
for this, Like it can't just be for money, but that if there's
some sort of religious overtoned why they are willing to let these anies suffer,
right, and they like, we don't know what the ultimate goal of what
they do there is. There's different departments that do different things, but they're
all deliberately mysterious, right and running a counter principles and they they prepare things
for big gatherings up top, and they like they make art and they place
art around the halls for you know, the enrichment of the severed. There's
there's someone who's raising baby goats and that's never explained, right, which I
will say, by the way, and I don't know if this is just
a little thing that's slipped by the writing or it's going to be even more
resolved. What we learn from that is that there are severalle people doing work
at least as far as we know, does seem falsifiable. Like if you're
supposed to be keeping baby goats and the baby goats die, yeah, yeah,
yeah, your jobs some jobs that they have there are not bullshit jobs.
Raising goats is a job where you can see the direct consequences of your
actions. Um. Sorry, I don't know how much I'm allowed to swear,
but I will just beat you out of there. As some types of
jobs that are there are that are bulls right, their nonsense jobs they do
in the real world, they exist, right, there's all sorts of people
that do paper, pushy jobs that like the their jobs that exist for purposes
that aren't about productivity, that aren't about producing a contangible thing at the end,
or even a good social thing at the end, right, and or
where you're so far separated from the actual thing you're like that you are not
able to see any value. And it might be that right the highest look,
you'll see a tiny flavor of value in a bureaucratic nonsense, but as
the person doing the work, you have no tangible sense of what's the value
on the right. And so it'll be somebody like um, there, there'll
be somebody at a corporate level that wants a particular report to exist, and
so they assign this task out to a team, and the manager that team
assigns that to a person and that's that person's whole job is compiling this report.
Takes so much time. They put all sorts of data they have to
do all this stuff from all these different sources, and they produce this report
and they send it off and they never see what the consequences, so they
have no feedback on whether or not they did well or poorly. Just this
report existed. The corporate person gets it and they reviewed it for a little
while, and then that that sea level person rotates up for a new sea
level. Right they get they get up and outed, or they move to
a different company. Somebody else comes into the position, and the report continues
to be produced. Right, A sea level person asked for this and put
no en date on it, and the new sea level person never looks at
the report. They don't know what it's for. They think it's for some
department underneath them. Right, it's obviously an important report. Somebody's spending time
on it, but they never review it because they're too busy. They don't
know what it's for, they don't need it, and so this report goes
into the void. Somebody is spending forty hours every week to produce nothing.
Yeah, because no one ever looks at this. And that is common in
large companies that you have, You'll have things like this that are that are
you know what would you say you do here, right? And so,
But then next to them, in the same department, they have somebody who
is literally just compiling the quarterly forecast reports and they need those, right,
or who is doing accounts receivable collecting money from that's coming in from there from
the people that are the money. They're sitting next to each other. They
have the same job title, and one of them is doing really productive,
useful work for the company that has real, real end states, and they're
doing something that looks like work but is not real work. It's nothing.
Yeah, and so some of the jobs and you can't tell from the inside
which is which, right, this sea level reads their reports, this one
doesn't. The two people next to each other, like do the same work,
and those are gonna be those aren't fixed, you know, those are
gonna change. Like the report that got ignored for five people, Maybe next
person's gonna pay or maybe the next person's gonna say, hey, I wish
we had this report because no one realizes they do have the report. Yeah.
Yeah, and so it's it's commentary on all that. Like you said,
there's the question that gets asked about, like what do you do all
day? It's another part of this and they comment on and at first they
do this in a way that seems like it's being sympathetic to the severed.
Because you see Mark at dinner parties, you know, where people ask,
well, what do you do all day? He's like and he can't answer,
right, And that is something that I really feel, because I think
that's a like. I'm someone who's gone through unemployment at various points in my
life. I was in disability for a while. I'm now in a position
where I'm trying to build a number of consulting type things, so I'm not
working anybody else. At least now I can say, like, here's the
tangible things I'm doing. Right, I was unemployed, I couldn't and it
made me really aware of how much like what do I say? How do
I People have been taught that that's how we make small talk, is that
we all are defined by our jobs in some way, right, And it's
helped people judge your worth right, right, It's like, oh, what
do you do? And the worth is judged by, well, hey,
what what biases can I make based on the kind of work you do?
And also how interesting is it is this somebody I want to talk about,
you know, and that like in spy school and stuff like that, you're
often taught like one of the best ways to blend in is to have a
job that is that makes sense as a job, but that no one's going
to want to ask about. Yeah, it's unremarkable. You know, I
am an ac count receivable person. Nobody wants to talk about a count receivable
never ever. There's literally there was a meme that was going around for a
long time that was started by an actor who hated talking about being a struggling
actor, but then got adopted by the sex work community, and there's a
whole song about it that says, you know, when someone asks, I
say that I'm an accountant, what do you do? I do what an
accountant does. Where do you work? I work where an accountant does.
Because no one's interested and it's boring. Um, you know, even though
you're married to an accountanto, I think her work is quite interesting. But
that's all the story. Well, but that's also specifically because of where she
works. If she was if she was an accountant for a large firm,
right, that was just like all they do is crunch numbers all day for
target or whatever. Nobody cares about targets accounting department like they are they are
abstract and boring. But she does work for a nonprofit that's nationwide, like
and so she'll talk about the fact that her that her company does actual tangible
good work out in the world, and that she pays tutors to be in
schools, right, and so there's a direct consequence to her work as an
accountant, as a nonprofit accountant, right, Yeah, and so but pulling
it back, so totally agree with all that. But there again, you
know it's there, Like I do wonder how many people can get to that
part in the conversation because again, like the accountant, yeah, which put
it back to the religion side of things. I think it's also really brilliant
and how much this is a commentary not just on regular work. But I
know, if this is a direction in a lot of Silicon Valley type of
thing, a lot of tech jobs are going. As someone who used to
live in Madison, both my partner and a lot both of my partners ironically,
although they didn't know each other at the time, but my spouse and
my longness in relationship, but also a number of my friends all worked for
a company called Epic, and Epic has been trying very hard to be the
Google of the Midwest. And it's if you ever used one chart, if
you ever use my chart or anything like that. Epic is the company that
creates that if you have gone to a hospital in the United States, you
are something like ninety percent likely to have interacted with an EPIC. If they
have a very strong lock on the technology. It's out and it's great technology,
but it's also like they very intentionally recruit people straight out of college and
pay them a huge amount of money and then intentionally like they have food on
campus. They have like magic, the gathering and dungeons and dragons and poetry
and religion and all these things that happen on the campus because they want you
to never leave the campus and you are not allowed to live too far away
from them. They actually will tell you that there's limits on how far you
can travel to get to work every day. During during COVID, they were
the ones who were there were some of the first to insist people come back
to the office and not allow because yeah, and when I interviewed for them,
as someone who had fifteen years of job experience, it felt like a
cult. And I actually said said to someone who was interviewing me, like,
I have to say, this feels kind of like a cult, what's
your response to that? And literally they said that quote word for word.
I have to be honest, I bleed epic and it was just like like,
and that's I thought about that all the time while watching Severance and hearing
these stories about people who, yeah, they get paid very well, but
they're working eighty or ninety hours a week. I mean, even as I
say it, I think it's very hard to have sympathy for it. And
I'm not trying to say that I think these people are often very privileged,
but also that it's it's creating's idea of work that now we're saying, Okay,
well, if we can do this to people who are paying huge amounts
of money, why can't we do that with everybody down the line, you
know you're making far less money. And it's it's the pizza parties, it's
the recognition, it's that everything. They want everything to be corporately managed and
corporate so that you're never looking for outside validation. Yeah, there's a um
a term that I remember from neuromancer which talks about this. So there's salary
men in Japan that are the same way, right, but that those all
in one. Cradle to grave companies are Zaibatsu's in Japan in Japan, and
that is what they want to be. They want to be cradle to grave
that they want you to be a company a company person from you start,
you start the company, start at the college, and you're at that company
until you die. There's promotion prospects in the company. There's everything that you
need, Like, there's also things that I wish that my company would do
that they kind of they kind of are in a similar kind of boat.
The guy who works next to me that's trying to retire this year has worked
at this company for thirty five, if thirty eight years now, and he's
he's a company dude, right. He believes in what the company does,
and he gets he does. I don't like, I like the company that
I work for, but frankly, like I'm not right, Like in comes
long and offers you a thirty percent raise for the same work. You're not
going to be like, oh, I can't possibly leave my company right exactly,
and so the the um but epic like Epic the I have another good
friend that works there and I've gone down there, and he made it a
big point if he wanted to take us to tour the Epic campus, which
I mean, to be fair, it's very impressive. But they like they
have a a mess haul where you can get all sorts of varieties of different
food, you don't have to leave during the course of the day. They
don't want people going up for lunch, right, They want you to be
to be there and focused on what they're doing all the time. And they
they've removed all the distractions. Right because I knew to live very close to
there, I used to like say, like, why aren't there a bunch
of restaurants around here? They very intentionally work with the zoning board can not
allow lots of They don't want people going on campus, and we're getting way
to it. But but but it's it's the the company severs people because they
want total commitment to the job. Right. They want people the only thing
they know, the only thing they care about is the job. And the
only people you meet over the course of the job are the people in your
department. Right, So they comment, they walk into a room with fifteen
people in it, right, which you'd consider this to be like a like
an adequate assembly line kind of a situation, right, And this is somebody
comments, this is more people that I've seen in my entire life. Yeah,
right, because all they know the only thing they have is the bonds
of the people that they have. They're right around them. And again another
thing that showed it brilliantly, which we have to review some time extent.
Yeah, yeah, because it's so central to the point of it is they
are so dedicated to not having people from different parts of the company meet that
there's all these like artwork and stuff that makes people think that there were like
wars that like they could for the company. That's the biggest weapons. Yeah,
they have. They have. Yeah, they have these murals of one
they're like, we've never like, here's a group of people. The key
card color that they have is the only differentiator between two departments, and they
have a they have these murals that are the same, but one of them
is one department fighting like coming in and killing, and the other one is
the other department coming in and killing, just based on the key card colors.
And it's wild. You have to question, did it happen. Yeah,
and it's brilliant, again, a brilliant metaphor. You have two people
from each of these two departments wind up connecting and basically, I don't know
if they'd say in love, but they basically are developing romantic emotional feelings for
each other and have a little bit of like an intimate touch with each other.
And they're played by John Toro and Christopher Walker. And the fact that
it's two men is never commented on in the slightest no, no, but
it's clearly supposed to be horribly taboo that they do it. But it's not
taboo because they're men. It's taboo because they're from different departments exactly. And
I think it wanted to be a wonderful commentary of like in the same way
the Key Cards, it's like this is also arbitrary, you know, the
idea that like that it is someone's just deciding, like these people should be
with these people, but not these people. And as a small aside,
I just will also say there's a big push in the last like twenty years
or so to really push for when characters are from particular groups, especially minority
groups and oppress groups, that it should be actors from those communities playing those
people. And for the most part, I am very much agreement with that,
especially when it comes to queer actors. But as more and more of
the actors who were defining masculine figures of my childhood play gig like there's a
character, there's an actor in the Last of Us that I'm not gonna spoil
for people who haven't seen it, but it's incredibly powerful. And again also
seeing John Tureau and Christopher Walkin, who are these like pillars of masculinity um
play not only gay men but like kind of like adorable. It's like your
your great uncle who yeah, you know, they're in their sixties or seventies
and they're forming these relationships and it's beautiful and romantic and right. So I
love that those actors are willing to do that and I and I played it
brilliantly. But also it's just one more beautiful piece of the metaphor of how
incredibly arbitrary all these divisions are, right, and I like, I don't
know if Christopher Walkins a pillar of masculinity, like Christopher Walkin is a pillar
of doing whatever he wants with no concern for anybody else that's an act And
I always say, I've assumed that John tuttunks for walking or straight. It's
entirely possible. I'm wrong on that. Yeah, it's it's none of my
concern. I don't care. They're they're both phenomenal actors and well as a
review point, there's not like there's not a single person who drops anything acting
wise in this The acting is. Yeah, there are people who are very
well known, like those folks, and they're people who've never seen before in
my life. You can tell me that any of these people are gonna be
in a show, and I'd immediately watch it. Yeah, my favorite performance
might actually be the person who plays Dylan, because he like, he's you
can tell he cares, right. That's the other thing is he does the
thing where he puts up a shield of cynicism and then the only thing that
breaks it, the thing that makes him angry is when he finds out that
his Audi has a son and he can't find out the name. Yeah,
that he's like, I care so much that this is the only thing,
and he like and he makes the argument, that's my son too. Right,
I'm doing the work to put the food on his plate, right,
these questions of who is the Audie, who is the India? Where are
the lines? And it's yeah, he was the one who's the most into
the corporate parties and stuff like that. And in one of the he's he's
the performer, right, Yeah, and one I think one of those important
character growth moments, like someways I think he has the most growth someone I
rely on them do. But like everything he's done is he cares about the
egg party and then there's the waffle party that's the big thing. And we
find the Wamba party is like, like I said, it's an orgy quite
literally, but he walks away from the orgy party to put himself at risk
so that the other people, like he's not going to meet his son through
doing this, but that the other Indies can can live their outie life.
Yeah, he tells. He tells them, I got the chance to meet
see my audi's life. It was four twelve seconds, right, he answered
one question and had and like his son charged into the room and said daddy
and he went oh and Milchick said goodbye and turn him back off, and
he goes, I got that. You all should get the chance to see
Rudy's lives as well. So so let me take it back to the what
kind of one the biggest kind of ethical question that can really restle with it.
And there's so much more we can say about the show we can probably
start wrapping up. But is because again, like we talked a lot about
who's responsible for what? Yep, So we have this character in Helle who
we now know that her Audie is a monster who's done these horrible things.
And again, I mean, she's the daughter of the head of the religion,
and so I may well have a lot of like not letting her off
the hook, but kind of like how much has she even brainwashed in all
of this and is it someone? But like O, we know that she
is actively aware that her Enny is suffering in these horrible ways, and she's
doing it. We know that she is fully prepared to lie to the general
public to get them to be to get them to go through this process that
she knows is horrific and terrible and makes people want to end their lives.
But at the end we see it is it is literally her own any who
reports her, she like is supposed to give the speech and she's like starts
saying like, oh, this is also terrible, So what do you do?
Does the legal system punish her autie and just end the severance and her
any dies? Do you allow her any to take over and then basically say
that you're you're Any didn't commit these crimes and so you're basically free to go
because you're in. If let you're any totally take over, then I would
killed your autie, Like, is either one of those government executions? He's
like, what isn't this person? Right, that's the question? Like they
they retire Christopher Walking, right, so he's he's severed, and they they
take him and they make the point. He gets a retirement party. He
wins he's been working there for seven years and he's he's Christopher Walking, he's
old, and they they he's retiring, and John Taturo's character Irving says,
well, what the hell you're killing him? This is this an execution.
We're celebrating this man dying, and um, like, HELLI the any would
probably say, what I want is to not exist. That is the thing
that I wanted, right, Like, it's no hardship to me if you
make me not exist and then punish the audie, right, right, but
that isn't going to be the case for all of them, right. Irving
wants to hold onto life. He likes it like he's a he's a true
believer right in the in the system. As an even though you know,
as the Audie, he's this like tortured artist, Yeah, who is constantly
painting these things representative of like one of the worst parts of the of the
company that we don't really know much about yet. Yeah, well know,
the question is things things are leaking through for him, and he he is,
I think, very deliberately trying to break a break down the severance of
the hard way by not sleeping, Yeah, and and then painting the same
thing over and over to hammer something into is subconscious, right, it is
as an Any, he's now starting to have these hallucinations, like hallucinations became
of like dreams, sort of visiony things. Yeah, but about the painting
about it, His Enny has experienced these horrible things. His Audie is kind
of aware of those, and it's doing them as paintings. And now as
Any is having is being affected by his Audi's understandings of what is any.
I mean, it's this whole cycle of yeah, it is it is.
It is beautiful and the thing is like, would Irving argue that he should
be ended? Would Mark argue that he should be ended? Right? Right?
And what about all the people in the other departments? Right? And
so are The core question that they have is the one that that that Helly's
Audie Helena has, which is, Helly, you aren't a person. You
can't make the decision whether or not to live or die? Right, And
uh, I don't know if that's presented to other people. Mark talks about
retire, about getting a new job, and he doesn't think about it as
killing is any because he's never met his any. He doesn't know anything about
his any. Yeah, I mean one thing I think is fascinating. Mark
is our primary point of view character. And he has a sister, he
has friends, He has his brother in law who there's a whole hilarious thing
about his how his brother in law is this pompous buffoon who writes this ridiculous
self help book. But somehow the self help book gets to the any is
and it's the only thing they have, And so it seems like we're like,
right, it's right, it's it is the most trite thing imaginable right.
It is literally written to be observations that are so trite that you wouldn't
even make them right, And but to them it's the words of a prophet.
Right. It literally inspires the revolution. Right. And the thing is
that, like the relationships on the outside are all written to be they feel
good, right. He loves his sister, he's there for her and yeah,
and where it's going there with though? Is that that the two other
characters who don't really see their outie life at all until the very end.
One is Dylan, as he said, who he has this family and then
Irving seems like he's all alone. But um, Christopher Watkins character Bert,
we see that when he's retired he has a family and he has a male
partner who he is with. Yeah, and you know that there's a whole
other question that that raises, is like, so was Bert cheating on him
with this thing that he was going his relationship he had with Irving. They
make off hand reference to how someone was severed and then all of a sudden
was pregnant and like they don't like you know, so it's like, so
it's just there's all sorts of questions. I think we haven't gotten into in
season two that hope we're gonna go into in season two, and I hope
actually he's gonna come out fairly soon. I might actually hold this recording if
there's if in like a week or two there's no notice about season two coming,
I'm just going to post it. If we do get news of season
two coming, I may hold this and then post it like two weeks before
season two comes out or something like. Yeah, that's that's very reasonable.
We'll see that where that goes. Um. But yeah, I think there's
just so much to go into here. We're not even getting any of the
theories that we can have about what all this stuff means. Yeah, but
is there any the kind of last big questions or points you wanted to make
before we start to wrap up the the The questions that this raises are basically
like, it also raises questions of parenthood. Is the other half of it
right because they mentioned that you brought this life into the world and you didn't
ask permission. Well, that's literally what having a child is, right,
Yeah, And so can you view your any as your child as opposed to
another you? And that's that's a different wild perspective about it right because they're
they're young, they have they have very little perspective. They have you know,
two years of constant time or whatever, and so and they talk about
reintegration, Well they might would you want to merge with your parents? Right?
And I mean in the kind of like young millennial gen z nihilism that
makes so much great content. You know. One of the memes that's going
around a lot now is like, what the hell twenty three years ago two
people had a good night and now I've got to pay taxes? What it's
about right now? And like, yeah, it's that's that like, um,
you know, I I remember when I was in a very depressed place,
like I was mad at my father, Like you know how broken the
world is, Why would you inflict another life onto this world? Why would
you antenatalism? Right? Yeah, And I think that's I'm in a much
better place with my depression, but I still hold some of those ideas,
you know, and like yeah, like and I'm but yeah, but like,
yeah, we have kids, and there's no way to ask a kid
if they want to consent, right. The movie's soul notwithstanding, um,
but um, but yeah, it's it's there is so much that it brings
up and it's it's not necessary. It says it's not necessarily unethical to bring
a life in being, right, right, I would argue that bringing a
life into being has to be morally about neutral, like round up a round
down, it's going to round down to about zero, right, And so
bringing them into being without their permission isn't necessarily wrong. The question is,
but keeping them in being in a position they cannot control, the lack of
agency and control when you know that they can consent and don't ask their consent
is I think where the ethics like really the rubber meets the road, right,
And that's a place where I wonder if they're going to get into a
whole other set of very interesting and dark questions. And I'm I'm again gonna
with content warning now being they're going to say something fairly controversial about a topic.
They can be very triggering self harm, and very clear that I'm not
in anyone encouraging anyone to any we do anything to themselves. You know,
if you're thinking about those things, please you know, seek help, etc.
With that atside, I think that there is something fundamentally evil about because
you're right, people don't get to choose to be alive. Yes, but
a world that then makes suicide so fundamentally wrong to me, life only has
meaning if we get to consent to it, and that I am very much
pro euthanasia and pro with at you know, not like everyone gets to do
it tomorrow, but like that there be for people who just decide, Like
I've gone through all the mental care, I've done, all the work I
want to do, I'm not sure I want to continue. I think at
least mortally there should be considered. Yeah, not even a route, but
I think we shouldn't look at that like we look at that person's a failure,
whereas we look at that as they quit. They why would you give
up when when in reality everyone dies eventually. Being able to choose the time
at which you die isn't Again, I believe that's probably morally neutral, right,
and being able to to make the decision about where the destination will end.
The journey is more important. The time that you're alive is more important.
The consent is more important, But the journey does end. There is
a destination at the end of it, the journey, but not being able
to make decisions about that destination is Yes, I agree, I'll give him
more easy to swallow. A kind of example of this, my mother passed
away at the age of seventy from cancer that was basically caused by her smoke,
the way she smoked and ate, and you know, I miss her
every day. It was heartbreaking when she passed away, but I was pretty
aware at least five or ten years beforehand that she was in essence. I
don't want to call it a slow version of self of aliving, but she
basically made a conscious decision I could live twenty five more years by denying myself
all of the things that make my life enjoyable. Yeah. She chose to
trade time for pleasure, right. Yeah, And I'm not trying There are
lots of ways to eat healthy and enjoy it. Like, you know,
I'm not pro smoking, Like I'm not I'm not trying to say anything that,
but I think that there there was a calculus made of that extending life
for the longest period of time possible is not the only valuable goal in deciding
how you're going to live your life. Yeah, And I don't know if
it's going to go there because it's such a different question, but I think
you're right that that in some ways you can't not get into that question a
little bit with the show, and I'll begin here's where it goes in a
season. Well, and once again, the thing that they are trading is
always time. Whenever you're severing, you are trading time before something. There's
a suggestion that someone is deliberately severed. Well they're pregnant, right, that
they have that they have a severed they didn't want to go through the hardship
of of being. This is not the one we mentioned earlier. If she'd
be camera. This is someone she basically goes through labor severed. Yeah,
it might be labor, it might be pregnancy. It's unclear, right,
we don't know. Yeah, point, but yeah, but they decide that
there's something uncomfortable or unhappy. They decided that they will trade some of their
life away, right, some of their time, and then at the end
they will get the result that they want, which is a child. Right,
And so they've traded time from their life for for pain. Right.
And it's the same it's the same calculus right where we talk about time is
money, and so you trade money to try to do things if you if
you have money, you can solve most problems. Right, That's that's what
we do out in the world, right, is we trade trade time for
money to solve other problems. And this is just being reduced to a raw
calculus of trading time directly for the thing you want, which is is that
what we want life to be? I guess it's the other question. And
here's where I think it is science fiction that's best because what I love when
science fiction does if this is like my mother taught me watching Star Trek,
because I think the original series of Star Trek especially did this so well.
All Star Trek has, but especially the original series is say, let's take
an issue in our own world and take it to the logical extreme, yes,
and push it all the way. And I'll use that kind of transition
into what was I think the one more interesting question that the show is only
scratch the surface of, but that I really wanted to explore further, which
is what is the connection or separation between the mind and the body? Yes,
my boy. Yeah. One thing the show is very clear on is
that you're creating these two severed minds, but it's not two bodies. If
one body gets sick, they both get sick. If one body gets injured,
they both get injured. If one body gets pregnant, they both get
pregnant. And to me at rate, like you know what if you're you're
outie is just living its life and all of a sudden realizes you're starting to
get pain in your wrists all the time. You don't know that you're working
under conditions that are giving you repetitive stress injuries in your wrists or carpal tunnel.
But but you start to like you know, workers all the time or
complaining about workplace conditions that do damage their bodies. Yes, what if damages
happened to your body but you don't know it. But if you're having these
wonderful experiences with your like you know again we draw you know, romantic ideas
or off very connected to you can only do certain things with your body with
certain people. Well, if your body is doing those things, but it's
a different mind that or a different part of your mind that's that's steering your
body. Is that infidelity? Is it not? Is it like it's just
all these great questions, like you said, well, the mind body duality
that this is explore that this is ready to explore that it is. Scratch
the surface of that. I really hope we go deeper on. Yeah,
there's a lot of these, a lot of these questions, right, like
that the is is somebody responsible up or down for the decisions of the other
half, And if they aren't responsible for the negative consequences, are they do
they get the positive consequences? Um? A question that I have is Mark
gets promoted right at the onset PD, like offscreen, like the very opening,
is PD doesn't show up on the on the day, on the first
day that you see, and Mark's surprise promoted to be head of the department.
And he's promoted, right, does that mean that his audie gets more
money? Right? His hours change? Right because he has to show up
first down? So do you get a note saying you're any was promoted and
now you must show up forty five minutes earlier to do prep at the beginning
of the day, right we are? And what about what about vice versa?
If the audi is like, you know what, my Audie is going
to have a child, I need a raise, yeah, or I need
my any to get maternity care or something like yeah, you know yeah,
and so like, um, you don't have contact with the outside world,
um all the time. Like this is just normal that you get calls that
are urgent. Like we rail against this in the real world when Amazon makes
people turn off their phones on the warehouse floor and so you're like, okay,
uh, if there's an emergency, say that you know, your your
partner gets injured and you need to rush to their side, your your child
is sick and you need to go pick them up from school, right that
these are things that happen out in the world. Well, when you're severed,
you can't have that, right, Like, is what is it?
What's gonna happen? Is milchick going to come into the room and he's going
to say, hey, uh, you're you're any needs you to leave work
today early? Like they they're fine with sick days, right. Mark calls
in sick one day, right, and everybody's like, oh, he was
sick, all right, and that's fine. But like interrupted days is very
normal, right, That's just the nature of life and work, right where
you might have to leave early for whatever reason. You have a doctor's appointment,
you have a haircut, you like, there's all sorts of things,
your school play, your kids school play, whatever. Yeah, exactly you
need to leave early. If your only option is day or not day,
that's fine, but you can't always anticipate that you need to take the whole
day at the start of the day. I am hoping. I don't want
to get too far into this because there's just so much that Like, I
didn't predict anything in the show, so I don't, you know, but
I I would love it if a lot of the next season is about the
Audies. We get to see more of how the outside world works, Like
I want to see Bert's husband and how he feels about all this, you
know, I want to see Dylan's kid, Like yes, I gotta be
like you know, um anyway, Yeah, so yeah, incredible show,
Rob, thank you so much. Recommend You're welcome. We're gonna have a
Rob is a font of science fiction knowledge, and so in the bonus content
section for Patreons, I'm going to ask Rob about other recommendations that delve into
similar questions in the science fiction world. Definitely sign up to be patron if
you want to hear that. It's only a couple of bucks a month and
you get access to all sorts of great things. All the information will be
on the website or sorry, we will be in the show notes as well
as the website. The Ethical Panda dot com. That's also where you can
find all the ways to find us because we love we love feedback, we
love discussions. This is one that's led to some great conversations. Would love
to continue those with people. Let us know what you think. The Ethical
Panda dot Com. Find me on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, all the
places. But Rob is also well. Rob is sort of a hermit in
most parts of the Internet, but then pops up in various ones. So
Rob for people who want to have more of the not the Robert experience,
experience, where can people find that. I do a bunch of stuff right
now with Good Luck High Five, which is a magic podcast in vidcast.
We're actually doing Depending on how late you've delayed this, this may not be
relevant anymore, but we just did a big oathbreaker play that is gonna that
It's gonna be up on YouTube. I recorded them for new Magic sets.
Um I just do a bunch of things with MEGANA Maria. They're really great.
Um I. As soon as the Geek Bracket gets kicks back off,
I'm on an episode of the Keek Bracket whenever, because I prerecorded one of
those, so I'm going to be out there on those things. Awesome,
providing some content and being a being a talking head for for folks. Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Rob, really apreci sure you've got
to say thank you for introducing this whole topic to me. And as I
said, as a court Larry, now we're watching ted Lasso and loving it.
Record a number of things with ted Lasso and positive masculinity because the show
is just it lives up to that, yeah, which is amazing. Um.
But of course you can find all this stuff about these podcasts on the
Ethical Panda dot com And most importantly, though I hope you have a good
day. We have spoken on y'all. Say what are you up? Mm hm