Lately, i've been learning french for work purposes, and i want to get into the french stuff, i've been watching podcast, content in french but it is kinda hard because it is not my thing, so i want to try movies or series, if you have any suggestions please mention it, i like sci-fi and i watched intouchables i really liked it, if there is something like it or near it it would be great. Thanks in advance.
I like sci-fi shows i watched silo (apple tv) and after that severance and also westworld, and i remember how sci-fi used to be sci-fi and far away from reality, now i feel like it is close to reality than sci-fi.
Obviously we don’t literally split our brains into an “innie” and an “outie,” but in a lot of ways, work already asks us to become a different person. You wake up, put on the work version of yourself, give 8 hours of your day to a company, follow rules you didn’t create, use language you don’t naturally use, smile when you don’t feel like smiling, and then go home trying to become yourself again.
That’s basically a softer version of severance.
The show is disturbing because it makes the transaction visible. The innies don’t own their time. They exist to work. But isn’t that also how a lot of modern life feels? We sell time. Everyone has a price for their hours. Some people sell 8 hours a day, some sell 12, some sell their weekends, some sell their health, their attention, their personality, their patience. And the weirdest part is that we accept it as normal because that’s just “having a job.”
The severed workers are treated like separate people, but I think that’s what a lot of us already do mentally. Work me is not home me. Corporate me is not real me. The version of me answering emails, sitting in meetings, pretending to care about company values, and watching the clock is almost a separate character I perform to survive.
So the question is: if severance existed right now, would you take it?
Would you let your work self suffer through the day so your outside self never has to remember it? And if your answer is no, then what would the price have to be? Double your salary? A house? No debt? Early retirement? Because I think that’s the uncomfortable part. Most people would say they’d never do it, but almost everyone has a number.
I’ve been thinking about Westworld lately, not literally in the “robots in a park” way, but more in the sense that the real world is starting to feel like its own version of it.
We have data centers everywhere, companies training bigger and bigger models, platforms collecting behavior, preferences, habits, locations, clicks, searches, purchases — basically everything. At some point, it starts to feel like we’re not just users anymore. We’re products, data points, probabilities.
And the weird part is that we still feel like we’re making choices.
But are we?
You can say, “I don’t want to buy from big companies,” but somehow you still end up buying from Amazon, using Google, watching something owned by a huge media company, messaging through Meta, working on Microsoft software, drinking Coca-Cola or Pepsi, eating something connected to Nestlé. Even when you try to escape the loop, the loop is already around you.
That’s what feels very Westworld to me. Not that someone is directly controlling every action, but that the environment is designed so well that your “choices” are already predicted, shaped, and monetized before you even make them.
In Westworld, the hosts think they are free because they don’t see the code behind their decisions. In real life, we think we are free because we don’t see the systems shaping ours: algorithms, ads, subscriptions, recommendations, social pressure, convenience, pricing, dependency.
Maybe the scary future isn’t companies controlling us like robots. Maybe it’s softer than that. Maybe it’s companies knowing us so well that they don’t need to force us to do anything. They just guide us with options, feeds, prices, trends, and habits until we choose exactly what they expected.
like lately i found out that amazon changes prices depends on the person and data that they have on you, and walmart are doing the same with the new electronic price tags.
At that point, are we still free? Or are we just numbers and probabilities moving through a system that already knows where we’ll probably go next?
I don’t think we’re fully in Westworld yet, but sometimes it feels like the foundation is already there. The loop just looks more comfortable.