"Forget about everything else and concentrate on your job." This has been the mantra of bullying bosses right back to Egyptian slavedrivers.
The Sci Fi black comedy "Severance" imagines a world in which this has been taken one step further by corporate America.
Employees are surgically prevented from thinking about the outside world by the implantation of chips. You can imagine the likes of Elon Musk salivating about the very idea.
The TV series explores many of the implications of this. The "innies" have completely separate lives from their "outies" and the conflicts between the two are sometimes tragic. sometimes comic and sometimes both. In one episode an "outie" is tempted back to working as an "innie" with a pineapple!
The lives of the innies are Hell. Any deviation is punished in the "break room" where employees are "broken" by psychological torture.
The break room also makes use of the discredited "science" of the lie-detector. The Sci Fi author Frank Herbert explained fifty years ago that a lie-detector can be circumvented by anyone who genuinely believes the lie to be the truth!
The founder of the company is worshipped as a God. You can imagine that Bezos and Gates would love that idea.
The acting is superb and has won awards for all the main characters.
Socialists will enjoy this series.
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