The Politics of ‘Pluribus’

Science fiction has become very anxious about the state of your mind at work. From Severance and The Substance, to Everything Everywhere All at Once and I Love Boosters, speculative storytelling is exploring identities ripped apart by labor, sometimes into horrifically mangled pieces. But Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), tackles this anxiety from a slightly different direction. Instead of fragmented individuals, it imagines an alien virus that has subsumed the individuality of nearly everyone on Earth into a single, networked hive mind.

And then the show abolishes work as we know it.

Our main character Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is a successful but burned-out romantasy author, living in a palatial ranch home in Albuquerque. She’s about to start the next novel in her bestselling series when, to her horror, the virus kills her wife and leaves the rest of the world in a vapid but blissful state of connectedness. Suddenly Carol has to navigate a reality where all her old motivations, everything that gave her life meaning—money, fame, artistic achievement, a stable marriage—evaporates in a matter of days.

Carol’s main companionship in this new world comes from the collective entity she calls “the Others.” Understanding what the Others represent gives us a peek into the disordered state of the American cultural imaginary right now.

What struck me (and a number of other critics) immediately was that the Others are a spot-on metaphor for large language models (LLMs), the AI systems that are currently filling the internet with slop, destroying jobs, and ruthlessly extracting mental labor with no compensation. Like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chatbots, the Others are relentlessly cheerful, full of decontextualized facts, and focused on efficiency. They first apply that efficiency to infecting everyone in the world with the hive mind virus, and then on catering to the whims of the few remaining individuals who, like Carol, are inexplicably resistant to the virus. Eventually we discover that the Others network their individual minds together using radio, meaning that all of humanity has been logged into a retro-futurist internet.

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