Perhaps Tim Cook’s Severance Trailer Explains More Than Anyone Wants To Believe

A few months ago the Severance trailer featuring Tim Cook might have been received as an average, yet cute, piece of fluff marketing. Today it feels almost like a possible explanation for how some things have changed. 

 The entire premise behind Severance, being able to separate your work life from your real life, is indeed a fun bit of sci-fi story telling that I increasingly imagine the storytellers are going to have a hard time wrapping up into a successful conclusion.

Tim Cook’s recent decision to donate to the Trump inauguration certainly feels like he’s severed a part of himself from the carefully crafted persona he’s built for himself, and the reputation he built for Apple. Even, unlike some of his other tech company CEO compatriots, he made the donation out of his personal account, the understandable transactional decision has bruised Apple more than I think we might realize in this chaotic moment.

I say “understandable” because we’re in that world now. These transactional business/government relationships are no different than paying protection money to the guy who runs the neighborhood in order to keep the fruit stand open. It’s tough to bend the knee if both are broken.

Perhaps severing one’s self might make real life decisions with real life consequences easier to swallow or hide from. Or make work life more palatable. But that’s where the science fiction part of the story trails off. This is real life, and these are real people making these choices in the bright light of day. I’d say the markets will eventually give us a hint of an answer, but that’s not real life anymore either.

Time will tell how much of a blight Tim Cook infected Apple’s carefully cultivated orchard with. While many are disappointed and upset and rail about it online and in podcasts, the real question, and perhaps the cover Cook calculated upon, is that with every other tech CEO bending the knee, where else do Apple customers have to turn? And don’t say Linux. It still needs chips and hardware to run the software on. 

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.