#Techgnosticism

[biblioflyer]

Breaching the Severed Floor: Layers of Reality and the Right to Imagine

This is part three of my three part rambling about Severance. Expect spoilers for Seasons One and Two. Part One addresses how Lumon maps to high control groups. Part Two is about Innie humanity, their rights, and an exploration of what we owe to people whose lives are more conditional and contingent than our own. This essay will address physical and informational control in Severance and Severance as a Techgnostic story.

The penultimate mechanism for controlling the Innies is limiting their exposure to ideas and experiences not sanctioned by Lumon.

Keeping their existences physically constrained to the Severed Floor is perhaps the most obvious mechanism by which the Innies are kept "pure." Restricting the possessions that may be taken with them into the Severed Floor also plays a major role.

Control of information is a thing I think a lot about. My day job is one where I have professional commitments to intellectual freedom. As such, the way in which the information environment of the Innies is managed and the apparent functions of different information management strategies is one that draws a lot of attention from me.

Lumon is a business that is also a cult. As a result, it seems to not be able to help but get in its own way because the interests of the business side seem to conflict with the urge to proselytize. Realistically these things probably work in reverse: Lumon proselytizes because the Eagons sincerely believe these various rituals and philosophies aren't just good for the soul, they're wise and effective management techniques.

As a result, Lumon probably doesn't really think of itself as inefficient or incompetent, because the metrics by which outsiders would judge Lumon's productivity simply aren't relevant to the Eagons. In part because they are convinced of their own superiority to those outside of the Kier milieu but also because, at least for the activities centered around Mark S and his cadre of macrodata refiners, conventional metrics for success like profitability are irrelevant: the Mysterious and Important Work is what matters. This also tends to mirror tech startup mentality where a pathway to profitability is assumed to manifest after the product matures so having a plan in place to control costs and deliver a product people actually want to pay for is less important than doing the work.

Because of the nature of the Mysterious and Important Work, the Eagons are only able to rely on a relatively small number of trusted acolytes to manage their most sensitive operations. Anyone who is not 100% bought into the program who comes into contact with the Innies may contaminate them with outside ideas. In my opinion, this is the answer to why security at Lumon is ultimately so lax. The physical and psychological constraints are meant to do the heavy lifting for the handful of acolytes who oversee the Innies which in turn permits the Eagons to hand pick the people who are brought into the inner mysteries.

This is the ouroboros of downsizing and automation. Many a fan has criticized Lumon's poor security, but real companies do this in various forms. While the stakes are less existential, its been widely reported that the pivot to self checkout in big box retail has caused losses from user error and outright theft to skyrocket. Yet this is tolerated because, at least in theory, the savings from a streamlined workforce wherein one inconsistently motivated and trained employee babysits as many as ten checkout stations (source: my local Walmart) where there is rampant error and theft is greater than paying more cashiers to be available for customers.

Lumon clearly isn't directly motivated by profitability nor does anyone really complain about being understaffed. There is a supreme confidence in the capability of their physical and ideological interventions to keep the Innies docile and productive as long as these interventions are competently enacted.

Lumon does undergo a certain amount of introspection after the failures of Season One. Seth Milchik seems to have overall less freedom than Harmony Cobell did after the revelation of her having gone rogue to stalk Mark Scout in the outside world: a sign that the mysterious Board of Directors and the Eagons have realized that even lifelong acolytes cannot fully be trusted to have "mastered their tempers" and faithfully execute its directives. The company also enacts a series of innovative distractions and incentives to try to restore the "buy in" of the Innies long enough to complete Cold Harbor.

At the same time though, all of the sweeteners are obviously designed to keep the Innies from paying attention to the conditionality of their existence and the imbalance of power between themselves and Lumon. Yet the breaches of containment and with it the loss of total control over the Innies' access to information and the outside world are a bell that cannot be unrung.

Ricken's book on self actualization becoming Innie contraband due to a single act of sloppiness on the part of their Lumon captors is worth assessing both from a security standpoint and also from an information control standpoint. On the side of security, it reflects Lumon's overconfidence and the inherent problems on relying on hermetically sealing the information environment that their employees live inside of. The more that Lumon controls the environment of the Innies, the more restrictive it is, the more that it actually creates more failure points.

Because its impossible for any human to maintain a peak level of hyper vigilance day in and day out guarding for wrongthink and outside contamination, much of the security is simply automated. The Outies are searched before they enter the elevator to go down to the Severed Floor first by a security guard and then by a scifi magic system that can detect concealed writing on a person's body. This ensures that the Outies can't bring anything in and the Innies can't smuggle anything out. At least in theory.

Except its unsevered supervising staff that wind up contaminating the floor. Its Lumon's own conditioned acolytes who are the uncontrolled variable because the processes of the Severed Floor work so reliably with so little human intervention that no one in the moment considers the consequences of carelessly leaving a book where Innies might be able to access it. This is the sort of mistake that seems highly improbable on any given day. Yet as with any low probability event, over the long run it becomes inevitable that an unsevered would leave, to use a Dan Carlinism, an "intellectual contagion" somewhere that Innies are unlikely to visit unsupervised on a day where an Innie does just that: visit unsupervised and encounters the contraband.

Which is where we encounter that which has become a major animating force in modern society: the allure of the forbidden. This is not to say that the allure of the forbidden, Dan Carlin's "intellectual contagion", isn't present at all times and places. People have always rebelled. There have always been people who feel an attraction to that which feels mysterious, scandalous, or excessively denounced. At the same time, it doesn't feel controversial to say that we're in the midst of a period where just the aesthetic of something being censored or restricted is enough to generate tremendous energy and interest, even if the "forbidden" nature of the ideas in question is nonsense or at least lacks a nuanced understanding of how information flows through various mediums.

The Techgnosticism of Severence

The notion that we are being lied to and our access to truth mediated for nefarious purposes isn't new. "Orwellian" didn't enter our lexicon by accident. The Matrix is a cyberpunk tribute Gnosticism, a worldview nearly two millennium old that engages critically with the repeated motifs of punitive, capricious, and vain gods in the supernatural realm across belief systems both contemporary to the original Gnostics and predating them. Its almost assuredly also a reaction to the corporeal forces that wielded compliance with assorted rituals, taboos, and theologies as a convenient filter to screen for malcontents. Malcontents who might undermine authorities relying on the divine as the stick to compel obedience where and when legitimacy based on competent and just governance is unavailable.

Severance, the tv show, is in my view another entry into that long tradition of asking why the universe seems to be at best indifferent to human happiness and why so much intellectual effort goes into trying to recontextualize the harms of authorities and deities as justified and for our own good.

In this way, Ricken's book is a lot like Gnosticism being introduced to someone who finds the religious institutions of the Roman Empire oppressive, finds a lot of bothersome contrasts between the behavior of the early Christian church and the minister folk hero at its center, and perhaps has privately questioned the protection racket style of relationship between humans and their gods present in many spiritual frameworks.

I'm going to repeat my disclaimer here that I don't have any issues with people who practice what they preach if what they preach is empathy, charity, and mercy and I'm not unaware of assorted theological explanations for what the Gnostics and other critical observers see as a radical transformation between a wrathful Old Testament God and a New Testament God who is seemingly all about love. The metaphysical reason someone feels compelled to be kind and abstain from cruelty is interesting to me but its not necessary for me to buy into it to accept them as a good person.

In this view, I see Lumon as a sort of Demiurge relative to the Innies. A wrathful, controlling creator god who has interposed itself between its creations and a higher reality of "truth." In Gnosticism freedom and a more benevolent existence is found on the other side of the stern patriarchs and their entourages that humans have bent the knee and sacrificed to since time immemorial.

The literal form of the analogy falls apart here, much as it does in the Matrix, in that the world on the other side of the Severed Floor is one that is largely inhospitable for the Innies. Their survival is contingent on technological infrastructure that is primarily controlled by Lumon. Their survival is conditional on Lumon seeing value in their continued existence. The lives of the Innies are also in the hands of Outies with whom they cannot have meaningful contact with except where mediated by Lumon or through some challenging skullduggery.

On the other hand, if we get a bit less literal with this, the metaphor can be extended. Gnosis is often used as a shorthand for spiritual revelation. In this way, while Neo and the Innies weren't particularly greeted with an ideal world upon awakening in the outer world, they did gain a greater understanding of their selves and their circumstances. With that understanding comes a greater capacity to yearn for, if not true freedom, then at least greater autonomy and to take measures to demand the forces arrayed against them to bend.

The Innies have pierced the boundaries of reality, done an end run around the oppressive god that rules their universe, and come back with tangible proof of a life that could be led outside of Lumon's capriciousness. After the false start of using the Overtime Protocol to awaken in the Outie world and Lumon's "new covenant" with the Innies where it affected greater compassion and genorosity, the Innies reject Lumon's velvet glove and seem poised to lead a general strike.

Their demands are almost certainly going to go beyond merely improving working conditions and into recognition of their personhood. A personhood that a corporation cannot summarily switch off, even though it is their creator and the operator of the infrastructure that gives them consciousness. Phrasing it this way also reminds me of the trials and tribulations of Data to be legally recognized as a citizen of the Federation instead of Starfleet property, although Data's existence was far less conditional.

Additional Severance Discussion:

Lumon, the Eagons, and High Demand Groups

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People: What do we owe artificial life?

[thehillbillyheathen]

Animism: the Techgnostic Parable (Part II - The Gaia System)

     Nature adores systems of complexity. This, with even the briefest period of investigation, proves indisputable. All living things are elaborate systems, and in turn are parts of systems within systems within systems.

In short, we are touching a bit on what James Lovelock called The Gaia Hypothesis only whereas science (when doing its task properly) does not meddle overmuch in the theological, as an animist one does by default.

Thus the foundation of the Techgnostic Parable is quite simply this: the Earth, and thus most likely the universe, is a system, a 'Goddess Machine,' tasked with the express purpose of maintaining  life upon itself.

The question of whether this is a strict automated process or,as was the case with the planet of Chiron in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and the entirety of the system is in fact a facilitation for a sapient, sentient "planet mind" is an intriguing one,but ultimately not relevant to this discourse. The self-awareness of the system pales in significance to the fact of its existence.

What then becomes the nature of instinct, inborn knowledge, and in human case such things as the Collective Subconscious? In the framework of the Parable, what is the Life the Gaia System maintains?

We are the programs and the functions. The meaning of life is life itself.

[biblioflyer]

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People

This is part two of my rambling about Severance. Expect spoilers for seasons one and two. It can be read on its own or in sequence. Part one addresses how Lumon fits as a "high control group" (ie "cults"). Part three is about control and Severance's techgnostic themes.

I want to put my cards on the table as far as a core premise of the show. I am someone who believes that the Innies and Outies are distinct individuals who both have a right to live, at least as a basic deontological principle. As a practical matter, the challenges of sustaining Innie existence definitely bring up valid consequentialist or relativist considerations, but as far as I'm concerned the Innies are people and human lives, whether created through natural reproduction or through the severance procedure, have a minimum baseline value that is very high.

The Innies present a problem of original sin. They were created through morally dubious processes and their lives are empirically fragile, dependent upon technology to maintain, geographically limited, and its been speculated, although (as of Season Two) not definitively proven, that the much smaller footprint of their accumulated experiences could very trivially be swept away by the inertia of an Outie persona which has orders of magnitude more memories. I do want to emphasize that this of course untested on screen, just theory, and assumes that cumulative memory is more important than the potency of memory in shaping a personality.

Like a wrathful creator god or demiurge, Lumon created these fragile lives under the belief that it had a right to do whatever it wanted to those lives up to and including snuffing them out when no longer needed.

Based on Lumon's intent, the creation of the Innies - under these circumstances - is something I think is deeply, profoundly morally wrong.

However!

Severance does not include time travel. The past cannot be erased, we only control the present.

Lumon's casual cruelty and disregard for the lives it creates and destroys is not something that can be undone and the climax of Season Two leaves us with a moral challenge: regardless of how and why these lives came into existence, these lives now exist and as thinking, feeling, reasoning beings the Innies are owed compassion, dignity, and the means to continue existing if these are things that can be provided. That they should not have been created is not relevant to whether they should continue to exist, you can't undo that now without ending the lives of beings that think, feel, and dream as we on the outside do.

There is a very real power imbalance here between Innie and Outie and yet again, the peculiar circumstances of the lives of the Innies create a lot of practical problems. Those practical problems do raise the question of what about the Outies and their rights? What can be expected of them to maintain the lives of their Innies? Can the Outies truly, really have given informed consent when agreeing to become severed?

Could the Outies ever truly understand what it meant to partition their lives and that they would functionally be creating a whole new person? No doubt Lumon obfuscated this and de-emphasized the moral implications. They were in essence, tricked into this new existence without being properly educated on the larger questions. Although the degree of ignorance ought not to be overstated either: while relatively few people have experienced severance and seemingly no Innie outside the control of a handler had shared testimony, severance as a concept is hardly a secret and everyone from Outie Burt's spouse to the people at Devon and Ricken's dinner parties have opinions they are very eager to share.

I think we can argue that some of the more morally imaginative Outie characters can set aside all of the incentives to center themselves: convenience, cognitive dissonance, moral outrage at having demands made of them etc. in order to understand their Innies as real human beings with agency and rights. Other characters like Mark Scout and Helena Eagon are caught in thickets of incentives and obligations that make swerving around inconvenient moral revelations the safer path.

And of course when it comes to thinking about how each Outie arrives at their relationship with their Innie, it also helps that not all of them were tricked: Irving may have had some brushes with the broader existential questions that prompted him to become severed in the hopes that something might leak across the barrier that would benefit his search for answers. Burt is implied to at least be adjacent to the Kier cult at the heart of Lumon and indeed, his partner was very much invested in the idea that a pure new soul, free of Outie Burt's sins would be created by severance.

Its unclear what Helena Eagon truly believes about severance in existentialist terms. If we take the recording she made for her Innie after Helly's suicide attempt at face value, Helena doesn't believe the Innies are real people or that there is any particular moral significance to their creation and elimination as people, they are tools to be taken up and discarded in service to the mysterious and important work.

Yet if Helly is just an instrument in service of Lumon's will in Helena's eyes, then Helena's behavior in Season 2 feels off. It sure seems like she took a particular kind of joy in harming Helly's relationships and, after she was found out, contrition did not seem to be among the rare emotions Helena displayed. Its possible everything is just an elaborate game of dolls for Helena or that she overstepped in trying to sell Helly R's rebellious spirit as part of her undercover mission, but the spitefulness seems noteworthy and of a kind that feels very much fueled by anger and a desire for vengeance.

Helena is the product of a cult though. It would be easy to wave away her moral judgments as a consequence of her upbringing and indoctrination. Still I would hesitate to absolve her fully because she is close enough to the heart of the inner mysteries that the pieces are there for her to assemble a moral framework that favors the Innies and their reality and opposes Lumon doctrine.

This is obviously an incredibly sensitive issue and I would not want to trivialize the challenges involved in breaking out of a high control ideological or religious system that one was born into. Helena, like so many people in contexts like this, is both perpetrator and victim. I suspect that the Innies, at the moment of creation, are close approximations of the "default" personality of their Outies would be if not for assorted cares and traumas. Helly R is rebellious and spirited and it is this "fire of Kier" that Helena showed as a youth that the Eagon ideology forced her to deny in order to conform.

Ultimately I do return to this core moral conviction: regardless of the circumstances of their creation and whether that creation was ethical, the Innies exist and that existence is worthy of protection. It does not follow that "switching off" the Innies rights the wrong of their creation. I'm not opposed to creating artificial life, I'm opposed to creating artificial life that can experience suffering and then degrading and abusing that life. The conditionality of Innie life is quite problematic, but the deed is done and there isn't an ethical way to undo it.

What We Owe to Each Other

Innie existence is no less valid than that of their Outies and if that existence infringes upon that of their Outies, that infringement is not unreasonable. Members of a society are expected to make reasonable sacrifices to respect the rights and existence of other people in that society. Even in the most individualistic societies it is understood that people's rights and needs might come into conflict and therefore at some point, someone is going to have their scope of freedom limited so that another can enjoy equality. As unfair as it may be to ask the Outies to give up some measure of their lives, ending the lives of the Innies for the explicit purpose of not encumbering the Outies is unacceptable.

I am already running high on word count but as a person who in real life has professional obligations to think about the accessibility of physical spaces and intellectual materials, I would be remiss if didn't at least gesture towards the conditional existence of the Innies as a possible metaphor for disability. The world is full of people who need accommodations from the rest to live the fullest lives possible. Sometimes those accommodations are hard because they require extensive modification of the material world or a radical reevaluation of the habits and assumptions of people who normally don't have to spend much time thinking critically about how they experience the world.

I work in a library that was built without consideration of recent evolutions in disability accommodations. Our shelves were spaced such that a traditional wheelchair ought to be able to fit through them, but a modern power chair would not likely fit. A person using crutches for mobility also would have serious difficulty accessing the bottom shelves and perhaps even navigating the aisles, which again are rather narrow.

Now as reasonable people who want everyone to be able to make use of our resources, we are happy to provide assistance grabbing books for people who can't do it for themselves.

And yet.

This places patrons with disabilities in a position of dependence on our good will. As much as we try to be welcoming and eager to demonstrate how we are not even a little resentful or put upon by helping, sometimes its just not about being considerate, its about other people being able to enjoy full agency. Especially in libraries, people can be sensitive about what they select to read and may be more reticent to tackle topics that make them feel self conscious if they have to ask someone for help.

Plus not being able to do your own browsing takes away the serendipity that comes with finding your own books. As I often tell my patrons, if you use the catalog to find one book relevant to your interests, once you arrive at the book's physical location you'll likely also find other materials that the fickle gods of key word searches chose not to show you. There are so many other ways that autonomy is power for people who are outside the median for physical capacity, but this is close to my heart because my professional ethics are centered around maximizing access to information for the most people.

If we come into a big pot of money for a remodel, hard choices will need to be made. We could have our aisles widened for greater access and respect for the autonomy of patrons with different mobility profiles. There would be a cost and not just money, but also in how we utilize our space. On net it would probably mean fewer books overall but probably not so many fewer that even a very serious culling couldn't still protect quality when paired with resource sharing agreements with other libraries. And the books that are deselected that are in decent condition can always be donated to charity.

Then there's people with chronic illness who require life assisting equipment. We don't hold the air tank against the person with chronic respiratory illness against them. Even ardent degrowthers would probably be appalled at the idea that a patient in a barometric chamber would be unplugged to satisfy their desire to wind down civilization's carbon footprint.

Oh sure there's a mix of edgy sadists, eugenicists, and penny pinchers who think that preserving someone else's life shouldn't infringe on someone else who doesn't opt in and apparently anti-natalist terrorism is maybe a thing now, but when push comes to shove most people seem to make the accommodations they can. A lot comes down to imagining ways to make accommodations as unobtrusive and minimally burdensome as possible.

Surely some kind of accommodation that respects the dignity and right to exist of both Innie and Outie could be conceived of in a world that made a choice to value the dignity and existence of Innies?

Additional Severance Discussion:

Lumon, the Eagons, and High Demand Groups

Techgnosticism and Control of Imagination

[biblioflyer]

Severance: Control the Imagination, Control the Human

This is the introduction post to my three part rambling. Expect spoilers for Seasons One and Two. Part two is about the ethics of how the Innies were created and maintaining their existence (spoiler: Innie lives matter), and Part three is about controlling information, environments, and Severance as an entry into the Techgnostic canon.

There are so many jumping off points for exploring the universe of Severance. Its a heavy meal for someone who is continually fascinated by ethics and the big, existential questions. Someone is going to write an epic thesis on the implications of severed individuals making sexual decisions that their other selves can't consent to and in at least one instance, probably wouldn't consent to. The two threads I'm most interested in here though are Gnostic truth seeking and how we construct our understanding of our own value and rights. Because of the nature of the setting, I think these are too closely wedded together and it would be a lot less fun for me to separate them out and focus entirely on Gnostic layered reality or phenomenal reality labor rights.

Lumon and the Eagons are a Four Letter Word that Starts with C.

Before we get started, I do want to address one editorial choice I don't want to belabor later on. I am going to periodically refer to Lumon as a cult. I want to make it clear I'm not being flippant when I use the term. I think people are often a bit too cavalier in how they use the term, but like many things "cult" exists on a spectrum.

By their very definition mainstream religious and ideological identity groups use a variety of litmus tests, codes of conduct, and other socializing mechanics to create a group identity, one they definitionally think is desirable and good, from their perspective. That could be thought of as "cultish" but again, think in terms of spectrums.

I've got no beef with anyone whose routine includes hanging out with like minded folks who expect members to perform acts of charity and extend grace to others out of proportion to how deserving a person presents themselves as being. Indeed, my biggest problem with mainstream "cults" (whether religious, political, secular or supernaturally oriented) is that their "demands" are frequently anything but high when it comes to mercy and the control is very high when it comes to expressions of hate and disgust.

What's clear to me is that Lumon is a high control group with a very tight and insular inner circle of people who are read into deeper "mysteries": projects and dogma, and that there is a set of symbols and a scriptural canon that is held in extreme reverence and even employees whose roles don't see to have much of anything to do with the "church" side of the company are expected to endure sermons, rituals, and expected to conduct themselves according to this intricate moral code. Fraternization is not merely a problematic activity (from the perspective of HR) that exposes the company to legal liability if a relationship goes sour or those with authority exploit it to compel sexual favors; it is regarded as a form of sin.

So yes, I feel comfortable calling Lumon a cult.

More than that, I feel very comfortable calling it a Mystery Cult. A capital C Conspiracy is the modern form of Mystery Cult. In either instance, what you have is an extremely hierarchical structure where the closer to the bottom you are, the more "need to know" things are kept. The closer to the top, the more fully revealed the dogma and plans are. Hypothetical New World Order conspiracies like the Syndicate of X-Files fame or the Illuminati are assumed to have a similar organization to ensure the entire thing cannot be unraveled (except by one dedicated crank who senses the bigger picture.) Successful criminal syndicates follow similar logic.

Radicalization pipelines also have a similar, albeit less formal structure. One end of the pipeline is directed at "normies" and tells a story about why the world is the way it is and your role in it that conforms closely with mainstream narratives but with minor twists that flatter what the recruiter assumes your biases are and is meant to intrigue you deeper into the pipeline. Each step further into the pipeline is taken when the subject has had their resistance to ideas that seem too foreign, illogical, or socially unacceptable worn down until eventually the subject exits the other side as a fully invested member of whatever group or ideology is on the other side.

We tend to speak of radicalization pipelines in the negative sense, i.e. dragging people towards an ethos that is extremely hierarchical: often on racial or religious grounds, and is dismissive if not murderous towards those who are labeled as undeserving of being part of the political process, having affirmative rights that must be respected, or perhaps even existing. However, this same process works the other way too: expanding definitions of who is truly human, what do humans deserve in the way of survival needs and social affirmations, and eroding reflexive tribalism.

Those attuned to the civil and labor rights subtext of Severance may recognize this process in the Innies as they decide they are people and as people, they have rights regardless of the liminal nature of their lives.

If you or anyone you know are dealing with a cult and/or high demand belief system, some comfort and resources may come from the Conspirituality and Straight White American Jesus podcasts. While they have news cycle informed episodes, there's also a lot of deeper analysis of how language is deployed, mechanisms of control, and dissections of specific dogmas and practices that can inflict psychological and physical harm if taken too far.

Additional Severance discussion:

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People (and the complicated web of rights and duties that allow human beings to live together)

Techgnosticism and Control Via Control of Imagination

[thehillbillyheathen]

Animism: The Techgnostic Parable (Part I - Introductions)

     Here, gentle reader, is where I begin to get a bit heavy. I identify myself as a shaman if someone asks, and though the term is somewhat loaded and leaning more toward my Cherokee ancestry than the Druidism of my Celtic forefathers and foremothers, but both these "source systems" share a number of striking similarities, particularly at the level of their foundations - Earth, fire, water,sustenance, as I once heard from one of the few pureblooded Cherokee I have had the honor of speaking with. At their heart there is a sense of harmony and unity beyond the individual - and this is also seen in much of Eastern thought and mysticism as well.

     Ultimately a core of Animism tends to sit at the center of many sch belief systems, but to those from a thoroughly Westernized, sterilized background Animism can be a strange duck indeed, something rather far from the typical modern Westerner's context or in many cases even their otherworldly frame of reference. This before one can begin to expound on higher principles and more-advanced theories one must establish a foundation on which to build.

Thus in my first multi-part essay here on The Hillbilly Heathen I will be presenting something I have come to call The Techgnostic Parable.