Google, the Lumon of the real world, put a Severance Easter egg in Search
Google has decided to have a little Severance-themed fun ahead of the Season 2 finale of the hit Apple TV+ show.
Type in the word “Severance” in Google Search, and a tiny party horn icon will appear on the results page. Click it, and your screen will fill up with blue balloons — an unmistakable nod to the unsettling corporate festivities from the fan-favorite Apple series.
It’s a clever touch for fans of Severance, which imagines a world where employees at Lumon Industries undergo a procedure that severs their work and personal memories. Their "innie" selves toil away in the office with no idea who they are outside of it, while their "outie" selves remain blissfully ignorant of what happens inside. The balloons are a callback to the eerie "Music Dance Experience," a moment of manufactured joy for Lumon employees who have little else to celebrate.
However, let’s be honest — if any real-world company were on the fast track to creating a Severance-style dystopia, I think we can all agree it would probably be Google. Which is to say, there's no small degree of irony that Google, as worthy as any company of the designation “the real-world Lumon,” is the one that’s celebrating a TV show about a corporate hellscape.
After all, they already collect enough data to know your sleep habits, shopping impulses, and whether or not you secretly Google symptoms instead of seeing a doctor. The privacy-flouting tech giant has a monopoly on the Internet search market and is currently using AI summations to strange digital publishing and keep as many users as possible inside its own ecosystem, where they can be shown the advertising that pays Google’s bills.
And let’s not forget: Google has its own history of, let’s say, "mysterious and important" corporate experiments. From the ill-fated Google Glass to Project Dragonfly (a proposed censored search engine for China), the company has flirted with the kind of dystopian ideas that make Severance feel a little too real.
The Severance Easter egg, of course, is harmless fun. It’s a well-executed nod to a show that has gripped audiences with its slow-burning mystery and existential horror. But let’s not pretend Google doesn’t already have enough Lumon-style control over our digital lives. Give it time, and they might just add a "Perpetuity Wing" to their employee benefits package.
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Google, the Lumon of the real world, put a Severance Easter egg in Search originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 17 Mar 2025 at 22:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.