Dehumanizing technology in Possessor

"Nothing personal, it's just business." We've all heard some variation of this apocryphal quote from the 1930s mob accountant Otto Berman. Very often we hear it in connection to so-called legitimate businesses, both in fiction and in real life. Whether it's the infamous pioneer of scumbaggery, Jack Welch, poisoning the Hudson River as CEO of General Electric, or Jimmy the Squirrel putting Johnny the Rat in cement shoes, the phrase "it's just business" is used to excuse all sorts of nasty behavior. It is never, so far as I'm aware, used in conjunction with any acts of kindness or generosity, or anything approaching virtue. Business, it would seem, is synonymous with immorality and amorality.

Trematon, the fictitious company in Brandon Cronenberg's 2020 horror film, Possessor, is equal parts Jack Welch and Jimmy the Squirrel. They operate out of an edifice of glass and metal that looks like any other corporate office building. Their business model is never clearly defined in the film, but it seems to involve mergers and acquisitions facilitated by high-tech assassinations.

The film follows one of Trematon's assassins, a woman named Tasya Vos, played by the criminally under-recognized Andrea Riseborough. Tasya does her work with a technology that allows her to possess the body of someone who can get near a target. Unlike a lot of movies about assassins, Possessor doesn't portray the work as a glamorous profession. We first see Tasya as she disconnects from a host body, coughing and vomiting. Instead of wearing a fancy party dress and talking into an earpiece, she's wearing a hospital gown and looks almost like a cancer patient.

Tasya suffers for her occupation. The device that lets her steal the free will of the possessed is slowly stripping her of her own humanity and identity in the process. She is separated from her husband and son, and when she visits them she has to practice having a normal personality for a while before knocking on their door. She is also becoming concerned that she's enjoying her work a little too much and might become a danger to them.

This is all done in service of a faceless corporation, helping it further consolidate its power with each kill. Tasya's next target is a wealthy heiress named Ava and her fiancé named Colin, who Trematon wants to eliminate in order to get control over Zoothroo, the big data company Ava stands to inherit. Zoothroo is also in the business of dehumanizing its employees, as exemplified by Colin's job there.

Ava convinced her father to give Colin a job, but because Colin comes from poverty her father doesn't like him much and gives him the most menial job he can. His work involves watching videos captured (likely without permission) by smart devices inside people's homes and identifying and categorizing any curtains he sees. This effectively turns Colin into a machine, or at the least the servant of a machine. You might think that this is the sort of task we would just turn over to AI; you should know that there are jobs similar to Colin's in reality, only they are even worse.

None of this is personal. It's just business.

Meanwhile, Tasya's boss, Girder, is grooming her as an eventual replacement. She sees Tasya's attachments to her family, frayed as they have become, as an impediment to Tasya's work. She discourages Tasya's feeble attempts to maintain her relationships but tolerates them, likely because she knows from her own experience that it's only a matter of time before her favorite assassin stops caring about anything but her work.

And Girder is ultimately proven correct. Tasya sheds her last remaining attachments in the most hard-core way you could imagine and becomes what her employer wants: an emotionless automaton dedicated only to her work. Isn't this what every corporate elite really wants, deep in the stygian depths of their cold, dead hearts?

Do you think I'm being too hard on the C-suite? Maybe. But let's do a little thought experiment. Imagine a business designed a device that makes everyone who uses it angry. For convenience, let's call it the HateMaker 2000. You might think that not very many people would want to use the HateMaker 2000, but you'd be surprised. It turns out a lot of people, most of them even, seem to enjoy being angry. Anger is addictive. Imagine people like it so much that people all over the world use it every day. Even on Sundays! That's how much people like being angry.

Before you know it, the very fabric of civilization begins to unravel as more and more people are angry all the time, and the manufacturer of the HateMaker 2000 becomes the most powerful business in human history. They can sway elections, foment or hinder rebellions, and conduct mass surveillance. As one of the few decent human beings on the planet, you might think that such a company is evil. But what if I told you, it's just business?

If you are literate enough to have read this far, you've probably already guessed that the HateMaker 2000 is a pretty thin metaphor for social media. Or rather, social media powered by capitalism. The behavior of these companies demonstrates just how amoral the corporate elite are here in the real world. They are happy to dehumanize their users for a buck.

It's hard to imagine the tech in Possessor being used for anything good. But this is not a problem inherent in technology. One can imagine a social media built for the public good, that would not reward the most inflammatory behavior, that would not feed our addiction to outrage just to keep eyes on screens. But a social media built to make money does just that. We can see the results all around us. Technology doesn't have to dehumanize its users, but The HateMaker 2000 does. There's money to be made after all. As they say, it's just business.