#and in a labour context workers are measured and weighed based on their relationship to numbers | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

communistkenobi · 3 years ago

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the workers in severance seem to frequently situate themselves in reality in reference to numbers - mark tells helly he was asked who he was 19 times when he first woke up in the office, helly says she was made to read out the break room apology 1072 times, dylan is constantly obsessed with being the data refiner for the quarter. their work is literally about sorting numbers. like the logic of quantification structures their lives to such an absurd degree that they come to find meaning in numbers themselves (which is the point of their job). they don’t describe the colour of a room or the clothes they wear when relaying significant events they’ve experienced. sometimes they don’t even talk about how they were feeling. they mostly just talk about numbers

#severance #I’ve read a couple really good papers on calculability and like the modern concept of the state being bound up in numbers #I’m only familiar with the geographic context of it but like the ‘power’ of numbers seems to be such a massive force in modern life #like data being used essentially as a form of currency in the economy #of course its value is tied to dollars but it itself is always viewed as valuable #and the logic of it being that you can use it to make the human experience fungible relative to other similar data points #and in a labour context workers are measured and weighed based on their relationship to numbers #so for a fictional setting where work is literally your entire life that’s like the sole determinant of value #like funnily enough the innies in severance don’t care about income because like why would they #they don’t see that money and they wouldn’t be able to spend it on anything if they did #so then numbers themselves become their primary form of currency #both in an economic and in a social/cultural sense #ANYWAY. very good show

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