Soverance

How progress makes us responsable for our own surveillance

What if we had sold our freedom of choice simply by signing a (virtual) contract?

Every time we accept a website’s terms and conditions, it is as if we step into the Lumon elevator from Severance, Dan Erickson’s TV series: we cross a threshold beyond which we begin serving a master we cannot see. Yet, while in the series a surgical procedure is required to sever employees’ memories, in reality an algorithm is enough to create our “innie” (in the series, the “innie” is the internal version of a person’s identity, existing only within the workplace after undergoing Lumon’s severance procedure). As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), multinational corporations - through the collection and sale of our metadata - create a version of us that extends beyond our own free will. Their goal is not merely to predict what we will do, but to determine it.

Mark S., together with the other members of the Macrodata Refinement department, spends his days sorting through “scary numbers”: incomprehensible figures that must be carefully categorized, one by one. Those numbers are frightening because they represent sensitive data, fragments of our own personalities dissected and exchanged for economic gain. Every action we perform on a device, from a Google search to the amount of time we spend engaging with an Instagram post, reveals something about us: our tastes, opinions, affinities, and preferences. It is through these interactions that governments and Big Tech companies, the macrocosmic equivalents of department supervisors Mr. Milchick and Harmony Cobel, are able to shape our behavior in ways that serve their interests, which only rarely align with our own.

But why, if we are at least somewhat aware of all this, do we choose to accept constant surveillance by an invisible Panopticon?

The main answers are twofold: on the one hand, a lack of digital literacy; on the other, simple convenience. The latter is the hardest truth to accept and the most paradoxical. As users, we are simultaneously Mark and Milchick, both victims and accomplices in the erosion of our own identity sovereignty. We willingly place it behind immediate comfort and gratification. We live in a world disillusioned by the promises of prosperity once guaranteed by American capitalism, yet the bourgeois comfort it has produced remains difficult to abandon. A life without instant gratification, without dopamine hits for their own sake (like the infamous “Waffle Parties”), and without the simplification of everyday tasks has become almost unimaginable.

Like Mark, we accept the compromise: the resolution of problems through shortcuts that ultimately create even greater ones. Unaware - or unwilling to confront - the consequences, we consent to the scanning of our faces, the tracking of our habits, and the sale of our information to American corporations. In the best-case scenario, these companies offer us products we might be interested in buying; in the worst, they use our data to train military drones in identifying human targets.

In a sense, being confronted with this reality by the “Marx of our times” is a bit like entering our own Break Room -except **this time, for our benefit. The confrontation breaks us, but it also allows us to emerge with a new awareness. It is the same awareness we should already possess through the daily news cycle: data scandals, privacy violations by companies such as Meta (to which we entrust a large portion of our lives), and the legal proceedings involving Mark Zuckerberg affect us in much the same way as Helly R., the series’ co-protagonist. Helly desperately tries to send concrete warning signals to her “outie”, her external self, yet never fully succeeds because she is simply ignored.

Our outies, then, metaphorically clock in at Lumon every single day, feeding a snake that continually devours its own tail in an endless vicious cycle. Social media platforms, search engines, and artificial intelligence applications become our endless white hallways, all identical, all relentlessly monitored by a faceless tyrant who decides what we should see today, what we should empathize with, and even what we should vote for tomorrow.

Although this is rarely perceived as a danger, Western democracy is increasingly drifting toward a form of corporate oligarchy, in which the individual struggles to make their authentic voice heard and where the “outies” gradually give way to the “innies,” no longer confined to their time inside Lumon’s digital walls. While in the series the reintegration of the two consciousnesses appears possible, in reality it would require nothing less than the death of our digital identity.

Are we truly willing to sacrifice a part of ourselves in exchange for greater convenience disguised as freedom? Returning to the world before we were “hired” by Lumon seems, in 2026, like a mirage, even an impossibility. Can awareness alone, together with a little more caution, be enough to absolve us, or is a more radical revolution required? It is up to us to decide how much our freedom is worth.