The Severance writer and cast on corporate cults, sci-fi, and more
54 comments
·February 1, 2025yapyap
drdec
I'm not sure Natalie has. She knows she needs to give the appearance in order to keep her position. IMHO she was coaching Seth as to what the right response was.
gHA5
So you got the impression he didn't like the paintings? He seemed to be moved by them to me.
iamkonstantin
It’s also kind of ironic - is Apple the first corporation to succeed in applying the “corporate cult” strategy to consumers at such a scale?
graemep
At global scale, to such effect, probably.
There are many businesses with cult following: sports "teams", car brands, etc.
I know many people who buy the same marque of car for decades. There are huge numbers of people who are supporters of companies like Manchester United,which is a listed company again: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/manu - and for many it is part of their identity.
yurishimo
Is that really a problem if the companies are providing a service that consumers are happy with? Cars I think is actually a great example. Toyota (and Honda, though to a lesser extent) have a reputation for a reason. If they screw up too much, that goodwill is eroded. Volkswagen is perhaps the poster child for corporate fuckup-ery.
Humans are at the end of the day all creatures of habit. This applies equally to purchasing habits. When applied to expensive consumer goods, brand loyalty makes sense. Why would I want to spend a year’s salary on an unproven product?
Now, personally, I think the identity piece is pretty cringe, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense. Humans are also not great at living with inconsistencies in their worldview and decision making because many take it as a personal attack on their character instead of recognizing it only as a bad decision that they have learned from.
graemep
That is a huge and complex matter for debate.
IMO it is one of many things that undermines the notion that we live in an economy that has efficient markets and is genuinely competitive.
> When applied to expensive consumer goods, brand loyalty makes sense. Why would I want to spend a year’s salary on an unproven product?
Except that the brands know this and know they can drop quality and it can take many years for it to damage sales, so strong brand loyalty actually undermines the incentives to sell a good product.
> . Toyota (and Honda, though to a lesser extent) have a reputation for a reason.
yes, and they probably deserve it, on the other hand every car brand has loyal customers, and so do many other brands, including lifestyle branding for cheap (but high margin!) products.
defrost
Scale changes as population grows and usage deepens.
At "Apple scale"? You can make that case, sure.
But the first? IBM was a cult to it's customers back in the day "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", etc.
Other earlier brands had their dedicated followers.
dbspin
That was B2B - it was a golf course brag for executives. Customers camping outside Apple stores was something different. That's personal identity defined by not merely consumption, but parasocial relationship to a brand.
defrost
> Scale changes as population grows and usage deepens.
^ IBM was the brand in a time when no computing products existed for the Man on the Clapham omnibus.
Earlier examples of consumers having a parasocial relationship with a branded identity exist, just not particularly in the computing tech field.
Dresses, artworks, perfumes, performers have famously had cult like followings in times past - Lisztomania had fans camping out for a glimpse and prime seats.
fingerlocks
Apple isn’t unique. There’s all sorts of products like that. Concert tickets, sports events, recreation permits, and especially video game stuff.
People camped out when the Nvidia RTX 30xx series launched a few years back. There was a massive line of people, a real wtf moment. That’s just a graphics card.
fmbb
Isn’t that just because apple was the first computer brand people liked?
Surely there were other product launches people queued for before?
People queue for films and sneakers and consoles and graphics cards and cars. I’m sure freaks queue for CPU architecture launches.
JKCalhoun
I'm reminded of teenagers chasing the Beatles from their limos to the hotel entrance.
"Customers"? "Brand"?
GaelFG
Funny, I always thought that phrase was ironic and actually a joke against IBM bad quality/pricing ratio but abundant and aggressive marketing targeted at non technical managers. ( I actually have no idea of IBM quality/pricing ratio, I don't work on fields in wich they are present)
defrost
I dare say it became ironic .. but I lived through the zenith of IBM in business sales and they had a cult following with many and a solid stranglehold on federal, state, and local Governments (and various corporate sectors) in a great many countries.
That lessened with the rise of PC's in the office and the spread of non-IBM PC clones. It's a dim memory today and has been for three decades and more.
ghaff
IBM was more known as a sales-oriented company rather than marketing. Although, of course, they spent (and spend) a lot on marketing/advertising as well. IBM 2024 revenues were >$62B.
ghaff
HP was pretty iconic as well but aside from calculators and printers, much more about B2B as well.
scyzoryk_xyz
The East India Trading Company definitely had that brand loyalty
defrost
More instilled than earned.
Not a cult you could easily break from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun
yffh86g
There is a big diff between Education and Entertainment. It just leads to confusion and misunderstandings when both are mixed up.
If you are interested in how orgs work visit any top b-school site and read their research output.
nonameiguess
From watching Severance, the closest parallel to me for a company I ever actually worked for is Disney. Disneyland performer was one of my first jobs, and the orientation is a lot like Lumon's. Video history of the company's reach and achievements. Tremendence reverence for the founder. Disneyland has a statue of Walt holding hands with Mickey at the junction between Main Street and Fantasyland and Main Street itself is a reproduction of Walt's hometown as it was when he was a kid.
And there is absolutely a cult of devoted followers. Even I personally had literal groupies from this job. There were women annual pass holders who'd be there every day to watch me and try to become friends with me. The memorabilia auctions were among the most insane things I've ever seen. Comers from everywhere in the world paying tens if not hundreds of thousands for the slightest piece of something authentic the same way someone will drop a cool mil for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. There were people who collected annually released pins who'd been doing it for 70 years.
For the fans, it starts in childhood, too. The relationship is so deep that Disney fanatics love the company more than they love their own friends and family sometimes. Even for me, my very first favorite film was The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon from the 60s about King Arthur. I don't even remember it, but my mom tells me I was rewatching it like teenage girls of the 90s rewatched Titanic when I was 4 years old. Disney imprinted itself into me before I even formed permanent memories.
They had global reach, too. Disney perfected this kind of thing way before Apple did.
There is another element to Lumon that I don't think Apple has, too. That's the company town. They own almost everything. Virtually everyone works there or is related to someone who does. Disney kind of had this with the City of Anaheim for a long time, but the city has probably outgrown it at this point. But at one point, they owned most of the land, employed most of the people. Disney owned both of Anaheim's pro sports franchises at one point. One of them was even named after a Disney movie! They had deals with the city to restrict airspace visible from within the park and never to build anything that could be seen to preserve the illusion that you're in an entirely self-contained world separate from the real world. Cal State Fullerton was called "Cal State Disney" at one point because so many of the students were employed there.
bsenftner
Having worked on Disney Animation productions, you ought to meet these life long fanatics that actually manage to become Disney animators - their ultimate fantasy is realized, and then after a year or three the glow has dimmed, their figurines decorating their office acquire dust, and they become nonanimated, heads down, and just work, without the glow anymore. Disney corporate is rough.
MrMcCall
Sick people make others sick.
And few people know how to be healthy, so they are utterly unprotected.
That is how the callously cruel and ungrateful spread their misery around, however unconsciously.
Waking up is not a bogeyman to be feared but a urgent need for survival. No human being can survive their first years without compassion; we need to realize that compassion is essential for the survival of our entire world society.
The only other possibility is to let the brutally selfish and callous control the world.
tonyedgecombe
Doesn't that apply to all of us when we enter the world of work.
xerox13ster
The real parallel is Walmart, Sam Walton and Bentonville Arkansas.
Walmart corporation owns half the land in Bentonville and anybody who lives in Bentonville or Centerton, which is the bedroom community for Bentonville, either works for Walmart or knows someone who does.
When I worked at the Walmart corporate office in DGTC, they gave us an orientation, covering the company’s history and the founder and his family and all of the CEOs since, and in the most recent episode, I experienced a similar experience with my family when they came for lunch.
thrance
There's a case to be made for cigarette companies as well. People were known to never change who they bought their poison from, despite all of them providing the exact same product.
crazygringo
They're not the exact same product.
Different brands and versions of cigarettes can taste very different. And of course they look very different too. Different lengths as well.
There are certainly brand connotations as well, but once you find the cigarette you like best, why would you change? It's not like a dozen new competitors with better flavor are coming out each year. You stick with the one you like best because it continues to be the one you like best. Zero cult explanation needed.
47282847
Sounds like you never smoked. The difference in taste is vast, much more than say the difference between Coca Cola and Peps or between different brands of ketchups.
fallous
Not really. In the corporate realm there was the well-known phrase "no one ever got fired by buying IBM." Such was the aura of IBM at the time.
TheOtherHobbes
And it was deliberately created - based on the concept of the "IBM way", staffed by (mostly) men who dressed a certain way and had certain attitudes, which distilled the essence of conformist corporate America.
There was even a company song book.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...
ghaff
In the computer industry, everyone (more or less) dressed in suits--though not necessarily white shirts--at industry trade shows. Then, one year at one of the big conferences, the IBM squad showed up in polo shirts and most companies more or less collectively decided that if IBM wasn't wearing suits any longer, they didn't have to either. This was around the time of "casual Fridays" and a general growth of casual business attire in companies more broadly.
MrMcCall
I don't know about the first, but slavery in America was certainly a cult of ignorance (and huge profit) that Black folks weren't human beings deserving of dignity and compassion.
You missed the big one, though: personal gas-powered vehicles (over mass transit). They chose profit (and waste and pollution) over mass transit systems, and we are all (the entire world) paying the price for their selfish "business sensibilities".
ndsipa_pomu
These kinds of shows remind me a lot of The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan - I am not a number!) which was very much ahead of its time.
SubGenius
There's an Iron Maiden song inspired by that show and features a voice clip from it. It's called The Prisoner.
ndsipa_pomu
There's a whole village in North Wales that's Prisoner themed
woleium
The other way round, it predates the show and was used as the set.
euroderf
It's a pretty amazing piece of architectural work.
JKCalhoun
I think that's an apt comparison. And, perhaps like The Prisoner, there may not really ben an "answer" that is revealed in the end.
I somewhat worry that the show is all atmosphere, no story. Like, is the writer really winging it at this point? We've certainly seen enough shows where that was the case. Premise with no payoff.
But perhaps I should just give up looking for various threads to be tied up — even stop looking for clear metaphors and just enjoy the ... vibe?
gloflo
I wish it was clearly communicated if a series was fully planned and with a final ending, or not. The best series I know are selfcontained, single season series with a clear overall story telling.
ndsipa_pomu
How about Babylon 5?
J. Michael Straczynski had a a storyline designed to last 5 seasons (and apparently with several "trap-doors" for when actors left the show etc.), but the studio then let him know that they were going to cancel it at the end of season 4, so he had to tie up the main plots quickly. However, the studio then decided to produce a fifth season, so Straczynski had to string together a whole season that he hadn't planned for.
tonyedgecombe
I did read somewhere that they have plan for all the series. It won’t end up like Lost.
ndsipa_pomu
McGoohan had a definite plot in mind for The Prisoner and he initially planned it to be a 7 episode series. They ended up making 17 episodes and there's some disagreement about which the "McGoohan's Seven" actually are. To be fair, there's a lot of disagreement about many aspects of The Prisoner, including the best order to watch the episodes as they were broadcast out of order.
laidoffamazon
Another fantastic show (on Netflix) that explores the concept of corporate cults is Pantheon
comrade_dang
The worst example of corporate cult I ever experienced was in Goldman Sachs. You were expected to know every partner's and every higher up's biography. It was absolutely insane.
goldmaner
Agree! Other strange things:
multiple people on team showcasing their bottle of anti-depressants on their office table, like a prize
everyone looks miserable, more than any other company i have seen
people unable to talk about their personal lives because they had none. "what did you I do this weekend? Not sure, just recuperating from last week."
No mission statement except money
Man I love Severance, the black Kier thing in the most recent episode was hilarious but also gave a good insight into Seth ad a character. It showed me that he hadn’t fully given his life to Lumon, in the way that he was still able to dislike decisions they made. As opposed to Natalie.