What if your work self didn’t know about your personal life, and your home self had no idea what you did for a living? In Apple TV’s Severance, that’s exactly the deal: a surgical procedure splits the memories of employees into “innies” (who only exist at work) and “outies” (who never recall what they do from nine to five).
On the surface, it sounds like an ideal solution to a growing cybersecurity problem of insider threats, such as leaks or sabotage by employees. After all, if an employee can’t remember what they accessed at work, how can they leak it, sabotage it, or sell it?
As someone who has researched insider threats for the last decade I can’t help but see Severance as a cautionary tale of what happens when we try to eliminate threats without understanding people.
