Back to the future

Loki, Severance, Silo, and ‘70s technology as a 21st century metaphor

[Spoilers for Loki (2021), Severance (2022) and Silo (2023)] 

The story goes that George Orwell arrived at the title 1984 simply by reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he finished writing. This gave him — almost incidentally — a setting forty years in the future. (Like many stories, this might not be true but equally it’s too good to disbelieve.)  But while the specific year might have been an accident, Orwell’s dystopian one-party-state Britain was recognisably placed in an as-yet unrealised future: it is full of futuristic technology, including two-way televisions and clocks that strike thirteen.

When Terry Gilliam was making Brazil (1985) — his dystopian metaphor set in a fantastical one-party-state Britain — it had the working title 1984½; but this didn’t work, because Orwell’s imagined future had become (at least in the literal sense) our present. Nor did Gilliam explicitly set the film at some glamorously distant future point like — say — 2024. Instead, he reversed Orwell’s reversal and went forty years backwards, and set Brazil in something like a Britain of 1948. It is full of the costumes and manners of the ‘40s, all wide-brimmed trilbys and clipped cricketing metaphors.

Brazil is emphatically not set in the real post-War British ‘40s, though. It’s something much weirder, a queasily futuristic vision of an alternative ‘80s refracted through a dusty memory of the ‘40s. Gilliam wanted to create a vision of the future as it might have been imagined by a ‘40s filmmaker. As well as ‘40s manners and dialogue and hats, the film uses realistic ‘80s architecture and settings that would have seemed outlandishly futuristic to George Orwell in 1948. Brazil goes forwards and backwards at the same time.

This mixture of styles is not just visually striking; it also plays a role in the story. Brazil tells the story of Sam Lowry, a minor functionary in a monolithic government who becomes accidentally involved in a revolution. The ‘40s fashions call to mind the post-War welfare state and all the inevitable bureaucracy and data-gathering and form-filling that required. The ‘80s architecture shows where that bureaucracy led (in Gilliam’s view, at least): monolithic and alienating public structures, and the disappearance of the individual in the apparatus of the system.

Fantastical quasi-retro ‘40s technology features prominently in all of this. The computers rattle and click like clockwork. Pneumatic telegraphs suck and plop with hideous biological sounds. All the screens are like ancient televisions, tiny phosphorescent squares at which characters peer through magnifying lenses, their faces distorted and monstrous, as they try to puzzle out what distorted and monstrous things computer says they must do. The computer system becomes a metaphor for the entire dehumanising bureaucracy. Indeed, the whole plot of Brazil hinges on a computer malfunction, when an errant insect causes the mistyping of a name resulting in a cascade of bureaucratic mistakes. (Incidentally, this reflects the actual root of the term ‘computer bug’: insects would get into the early punch-card-driven systems and cause errors. The etymology is, pleasingly, entomology.) 

Now, a bunch of twenty-first century sci-fi shows are employing Gilliam’s trick of turning back the clock to create fantastical futures, and his use of technology as a metaphor for dehumanisation. Loki (2021), Severance (2022) and Silo (2023) all deal with overweening bureaucracies, and they all use retro-technology to dramatise it. And by falling back 40 years from now with their ‘70s/‘80s aesthetic, they are — consciously or otherwise — precisely mimicking Gilliam’s timeslip. 

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Loki is a TV spin-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, featuring Tom Hiddleston playing a… well, a version of the Norse trickster god he plays in the films. The whole thing has to do with parallel universes and gets absurdly, and somewhat incomprehensibly, complicated. His antagonists, the Time Variance Authority, keep trying to get the branching plot under control, without much success (the MCU could really do with an editor). 

Despite being a hugely powerful otherworldly force, the Time Variance Authority uses resolutely old-fashioned mid-century technology. Its headquarters is a warren of warm-toned carpets and bold graphics, a lot like London’s Barbican Centre. Its computers are simple LED terminals; its screens are rounded CRTs; its processes revolve around paper forms and plastic tape. This design is a neat way of creating a bizarre and unsettling environment while keeping everything recognisable and relatable. It also, it should be noted, looks beautiful. But more importantly, it embodies the core theme of the show. The clunkiness and fussiness of the technology is there to emphasise the stifling nature of the bureaucracy. Its inability to adapt and change contrasts with Loki’s mercurial¹ nature. Themes of free will and determinism, rebellion and authority, are dramatised through the relationship between the independent individual and the controlling bureaucracy.

Severance is another big, clunking late-stage capitalism metaphor made concrete. It tells the story of workers for the mysterious Lumon Corporation, who can opt to have their work selves severed from their non-work selves. While in the office they know nothing about their actual lives outside of the company; while at home they know nothing about what they do for a living.

Although Severance appears to be set in the US in the 2020s, the severed office is a clearly ‘80s open-plan world, all neutral tone carpets, white foam tiling and wipe-clean desktops. The office technology — moulded plastic work stations with plain monochrome graphics — is equally antiquated. As with Loki, this retro-technology has an alien quality. Compared with the smartphones and personal computers its characters have on the outside, the severed office has a strange, uncanny feel. But as with Brazil and Loki, this retro-technology isn’t just stylish: it’s a metaphor.

Just as the characters’ outside selves don’t know what they do at work, their work selves are kept in the dark. The severed workers are like children; they have no past, and no knowledge of the wider context of their world. Their childlike status is emphasised by patronising work rituals: Music Dance Experiences and Waffle Parties and vaguely threatening Wellness Sessions. They spend their days ‘refining macrodata’ and playing a strange game on their terminals, with no understanding of the meaning or purpose of their activity. The workplace is an engine of infantilisation in which simplified computing and limited technology play crucial parts. 

It is a dramatisation not only of the separation between work self and ‘real’ self but also of the stripping away of adult autonomy and self-determination that the corporate world requires. It refers to the demanding childishness of SMART goals, and ‘personal development’ in meaningless skills; the ritual humiliation of actual adult humans being required to sit in airless rooms and discuss ‘salience’ or ‘mouthfeel’; the gibberish corporate language of ‘throughput’ and ‘verticals’; the kabbalistic acronyms of EBITDA and YoY ROIs.

In Apple TV’s Silo the use of technology to dehumanise and control is even more literal. Silo is a puzzle-box mystery, like Lost: it revolves around a high-concept set-up that is not fully explained to the audience until the last possible moment. In this case the puzzle box is a, well, puzzle silo; a massive underground bunker containing 10,000 people who live in a self-sustaining community, completely sealed off from the world. In line with the necessary self-sufficiency of the Silo, the aesthetic of the show is very mung-bean ‘70s, all homeweave and ham-fisted craft projects.  Like Loki the palette is relentlessly brown and orange, the architecture is brutalist, and the tech is ancient. 

Again, the retro-technology is playing an important dramatic role. As the opening narration insistently tells us, the Silo’s inhabitants do not know who built the Silo, or why it was thought necessary. They only know that they’re not allowed to ask questions about it. The retro technology isn’t just styling: it’s an explicit plot point. Innovation in the Silo was deliberately limited in the laws laid down by the mysterious founder-builders. The inhabitants are not allowed to have telephones or cameras or motorised transport, and computer access is restricted. Technology is the means by which the system is controlled: its absence makes the occupants busy and powerless, while the secret, more complex technology hidden around them allows the bad guy to control them. The accidental discovery of a camcorder and a memory card that hint at more developed civilisations sets the plot in motion.

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1984 was used as the title of a TV ad for Apple computers (directed by Ridley Scott) which ran during the 1984 Super Bowl. It features a young woman smashing a giant TV screen on which a monochrome head is lecturing a group of downtrodden workers. It ends with the declaration: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.’ The Macintosh was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, a mouse, and what we used to call ‘user-friendliness’. It was a double revolution: a computer that could sit in the home, freeing the consumer from the office mainframe; and also one that you didn’t need to be a programmer to use. Brazil was made just as personal computers entered the arena as the champions of heroic individualism, enabling their owners to control their own data, discover their own information and create their own meaning. This symbolism has only been intensified by the smartphone. Nestled in our clothing, cradled in our hands and sleeping by our beds, it’s our indispensable sidekick in the adventure of being a self-determining economic unit.

All of these programmes use pre-PC and smartphone technology as a symbol of control. (This isn’t a novel idea: the old-style mainframe and ‘dumb terminal’ networks of the ‘80s were, after all, referred to as ‘master and slave’ systems before we all began to feel justly uncomfortable about it.) They see old forms of technology as symbols of bureaucracy and paternalism and restriction; they are metaphors for centrally planned economies. Personal computing, though, symbolises liberation. 

The irony is that the expulsion of modern technology from these shows is —in the real world — liberating, for both the writers and the viewers. The plots of Loki, Severance and Silo would be upended if any of their characters could send a quick WhatsApp. You can almost hear the writers’ relief that they can make their characters talk in actual dialogue, just like the old days; they can inflict misunderstandings, put together puzzles, build dramatic irony and not have it all fall apart as a result of a cursory Google. For the viewers — the older ones at least — there is the cosy, nostalgic warmth of a world without updates, as well as the technology and interior design of our childhoods. It’s a world in which you can concentrate without interruption on the story most important to you: your own. Retro-technology promises the desperate relief of autocracy: you can stop worrying and leave everything to someone — or something — that knows better.

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Oh, you were expecting a piece about the movie ‘Back To The Future’? Here you go:

1. Ok, the god Mercury was more often correlated with Odin, as the Norse god of magic (sort of), but the Marvel Loki is more of a wizard, so give me a break here.