The Severance writer and cast on corporate cults, sci-fi, and more

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.

The East India Trading Company definitely had that brand loyalty

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.

HP was pretty iconic as well but aside from calculators and printers, much more about B2B as well.

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.