Pluribus and Our Age of Hive Minds
The tyranny of online life
We live in an age of hive minds: social media, yes, of course, but so too is an LLM a kind of hive mind, a “blurry jpeg” of all human culture.
The existence of these hive minds is what distinguishes the phenomenology of the 21st century from the 20th. It is the knowledge inside your consciousness that there is a thing much bigger than you, and much more destructive, and you are entertained by it, and love it, and yet you must live to appease it, and so hate it.
You get to know the nature of a hive mind well if you put thoughts out into it regularly, and witness its workings. Like if you’re a newsletter writer. And of course, there are blessings—newsletters, as they are, could not exist without the hive mind of the internet. At the same time, even people who hate you are pressed in so close you can feel their breath and we just have to live like this, breathing each other’s air. It’s hard to imagine, but plenty enjoy living this way: yelling, screaming, breathing, with such closeness, together forever.
But what if our fractious hive mind were… nice? What if it didn’t try to destroy you all the time, but make you happy? Endlessly, ceaselessly, forever happy. This is the driving question of Pluribus, the new sci-fi show by Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad.
The show, which currently has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (although we’re only three episodes in, so that’s all I’ve watched) can’t really be discussed without spoiling the plot setup. But honestly, the trailer does this to some degree anyways, and I’ll leave out as many details as possible.
Still, be forewarned of possible spoilers!
The actual sci-fi events are interesting, and executed well too (I won’t spoil them), although one has a sense for Gilligan they’re peripheral; he cares far less about “Hard Sci-fi” mechanisms and more about the results. But somehow or other, an RNA virus ends up psychically linking everyone on Earth. And so we enter a hive mind world.
A misanthropic famous romantasy author, Carol Sturka, is one of the few unaffected, naturally immune. But the analogy is quite clear: the new world she’s been thrown into is just an exaggerated version of our current world. Pre-virus, at her book signing Carol is already repulsed by the (non-RNA-assisted) hive mind of her own obsessed romantasy fans, and the oppressive idiocy of our modern world is also on display when Carol has to answer on social media who her dreamy corsair main character is based on. She decides to lie and answers “George Clooney” because “it’s safer.”
Once the virus spreads in Pluribus, the egregore is always smiling. Always polite. Our current toxic hive mind riven by different people with different opinions pressed into each other’s faces is transformed. This is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. The noosphere step toward kindly godhood. Suddenly, it’s not our cruel internet, but NiceStack. SmileStack. Somehow that’s almost worse. As Carol is one of the few unaffected after the virus spreads, the entirety of Earth holds Carol in a constant panopticon. Which means that, effectively, Carol is always the “Main Character” on social media. Carol is watched by a reaper drone from 40,000 feet, and watched by its operator, and so is also watched by all of humanity. Outside in the hot sun? Carol, you might have heat exhaustion, and that’s the opinion of every medical doctor on Earth! She is always the #1 trending topic.