Lumon

Lumon is a fictional multinational corporation that appears in the television series Severance. The company is depicted as a large, secretive conglomerate with a tightly controlled corporate culture and a campus-like facility. Its operations are portrayed as focused on advanced technology, data management, and governance, with a heavy emphasis on hierarchical structure and internal secrecy.

A central element of Lumon’s fiction is a memory-altering procedure that the company uses to separate employees’ work lives from their personal lives. The process creates an innie, a person who exists only within the workplace and retains memory of work tasks, and an outie, who continues life outside of work with different memories. The severance procedure is presented as a means to maximize productivity and remove personal distractions, but it raises significant ethical questions about autonomy, consent, and the rights of workers.

Lumon’s governance is depicted as opaque and centralized, with a board and executives who oversee operations and enforce strict controls. The company maintains restricted access, surveillance, and a strong emphasis on obedience, contributing to a climate of secrecy and tension within the narrative.

In broader discourse, Lumon serves as a fictional framework for exploring themes of memory, labor, power, and the boundaries between private life and professional duty. It is frequently cited in discussions about workplace surveillance, corporate ethics, and the potential social implications of speculative neurotechnology.