The Maniacally Altruistic Gene

Or, Why everyone should make the time to really savor Pluribus

[Note: This post is spoiler-free for the first few paragraphs, which give my case for why you should watch the show. I clearly warn readers when spoilers begin.]

When I first heard about Pluribus, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I am happy to hand Vince Gilligan a blank check of my time for anything he creates. And like all right-thinking people, I recognize that Rhea Seehorn deserves to be more than the breakout character in a weird prequel show. On the other hand, I worried that the premise was—as with so many science fiction concepts, including that of (sorry/not-sorry) Severance—an interesting idea that did not obviously issue in an interesting story. Even factoring in that Gilligan cut his teeth as a major contributor to The X-Files, the idea that all of humanity has been absorbed into a hive mind except for one miserable curmudgeon sounds like fodder for a single Twilight Zone episode, definitely not a story that lasts a full season of TV (or the two that have already been confirmed, or the four that Gilligan reportedly wants).

But after finishing the first season, I am happy to report that my concerns were unfounded. Gilligan and his team managed to take this seemingly very limited idea—focused, for the most part, on only two characters, the curmudgeon and whatever host representing the hive mind is talking to her at the moment—and transform it into a genuinely compelling story that, like all the best science fiction, raises profound questions.

And it does so using the unique affordances of episodic television. Even though it is running on a streaming network, it does not indulge in any of the tired clichés of streaming-era storytelling—pointless non-chronological fragmentation, arbitrarily withheld information, endlessly delayed revelation of how the show’s status quo first arose (usually in the penultimate episode). We start off seeing the origin of the hive mind problem when scientists discover and decode an alien signal that turns out to be a DNA sequence. This then turns out to be a virus that links all human minds into a single shared consciousness—except for a handful of oddballs, most notably Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), whose perspective serves to introduce us to this brave new world. Throughout, all exposition is organic, and each episode has a clearly defined dilemma or theme. In other words, the idea and the story fit each other like a glove, and the weekly release schedule gives the viewer just enough time to chew on the new revelations before the next episode further complicates what we thought we knew. The schedule is so perfect, in fact, that I felt sad to watch the final two episodes in the same day (since we missed one while traveling). I highly recommend limiting yourself to one episode a day, even if you choose to watch more quickly than the original airing.

The conceptual motor of the show is the question of why the hive mind should be bad—which entails questions of how different it really is from everyday experience and whether the aspects of normal human life it excludes are actually desirable. Doubtless there are thinkpieces out there that read the show as a reflection on the internet, or AI, or whatever other contemporary hot-button issue, and those interpretations have their justification. But I think that Gilligan has bigger fish to fry than a “ripped from the headlines” allegory about how we shouldn’t let AI steal our humanity. At the end of the day, this is a show about how we cope with the fact that what we think of as our “selves” are the emergent property of a thousand layers of Rube Goldberg machines assembled by an impersonal selection mechanism that seeks only to perpetuate itself.

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And with that, I hereby give myself permission to begin sharing spoilers. This is not to say that I intend to summarize every episode. Instead, I want to focus on key characters and moments and the philosophical questions they raise.

As this is a science fiction story, I must begin with concept rather than character if anything is going to make sense. As I note above, the hive mind results from an alien virus—but conveys no information about its creators or its purpose. Instead, it connects all human minds (in an event known as The Joining) into a single consciousness that is implanted with several imperatives that initially seem very appealing. All conflict ends, because all humans are acting with a shared purpose. All knowledge and skills are pooled, so that every human can in principle do whatever any human can do. A handful of humans (15 out of billions) are somehow immune to the Joining, and the hive tries everything it can to figure out how to include them—but in the meantime, they do everything they can to serve the non-Joined individuals. Indeed, they cannot refuse any request or tell a lie, except when the topic is how the Joining could be reversed. The Joining seems to flood all humans with sensations of pleasure, so that everyone is perfectly happy—but they are incredibly sensitive to any negative emotion (perhaps like the Talosians from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage”) and at one point establish a cordon sanitaire around Carol when it is clear that her anger is dangerous. The main representative of the hive that we meet is Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who is selected because she physically resembles Carol’s ideal woman.

Aside from the hive mind itself, which speaks and acts through nearly every human being who appears on screen, there are essentially three main characters. The first is Carol Sturka, a very popular author of trash fantasy novels who resents her mindless fans and the constraints her success have placed on her art and her life. In the moment of the Joining (which causes everyone to faint simultaneously), her partner and manager, Helen, is unfortunately killed—but not before the hive mind has time to absorb her memories. Carol’s grief over Helen (which thankfully does not dominate the season—another streaming cliché averted!) causes her to alternate between forbidding the hive to ever use or mention her memories and giving in to the nearly irresistible temptation to probe an intimate partner’s unfiltered thoughts. Carol is determined throughout to hold onto her individuality, but her separateness from others seems to take the form of cynical alienation rather than a healthy self-possession. Hence she is not a great advertisement for “normal” humanity, and in fact most of her fellow non-joined humans wind up refusing to engage with her.

The other two main individuals are Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) and Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), who represent further forms of unattractive individualism. Diabaté is a pure hedonist who takes full advantage of the situation by demanding endless luxury and sex—which the hive is all too happy to provide. He is the primary counterpoint to Carol in the first half of the season, whereas Manousos emerges as a main character in the second half. For his part, Manousos represents possessive individualism. He refuses all help from any member of the hive because he believes they have “stolen” everything belonging to all humans. As he makes an arduous journey from his native Paraguay to Carol’s home in Albuquerque (I guess Gilligan has connections there), he insists on doing everything himself and on leaving cash for all the resources he appropriates—presumably so that accounts will be squared when the Joining is undone. Like Diabaté, he is not above instrumentalizing victims of the Joining, as he uses first Zosia and then another random drone to experiment with how to break the hive connection—with no regard to how much pain he is causing them. Carol is repelled by both men, but ultimately winds up joining forces with Manousos when it is revealed that the hive is close to uncovering the “cure” for her immunity to the Joining.

These are the only non-Joined individuals we spend much time with, because interestingly, the others all maintain their status quo. The hive play-acts at being their family and community, and they are all content to live that way until they are joined. At one point, we witness one of them being joined—Kusimayu (Darinka Arones), a young Native American woman who is clearly very excited at the prospect. As her community enacts cultural rituals and sings songs, she receives the modified virus, briefly collapses, and then wakes up as a drone. Instantaneously, the ritual halts and everyone begins packing up the village. Gut-wrenchingly for a pet owner, she even abandons the baby goat she was tenderly caring for just prior to the Joining, leaving it bleating in despair. Everything that Kusimayu was, everything she cared about, was erased when she was Joined—and so in a sense, she and all the other drones are dead, even though their zombie bodies live on.

The moment is perfectly timed for late in the season, just as we are beginning to suspect that Carol and Manousos should give up. It reminds us how sinister and destructive the process is—and the use of a Native American subject in particular surely serves to suggest comparisons with human colonialism. As Carol learns, the process is also physically destructive. A turning point in the middle of the season is when she discover that they are eating corpses—a revelation that she rushes to share with the hedonist Diabaté, only to learn that they have already told him and he (characteristically) doesn’t care. As it turns out, they are incapable of intentionally harming any living thing, even a plant, and hence have to scavenge their food from any natural or accidental deaths that occur. Unfortunately, this constraint means that humanity will slowly starve to death before going extinct within approximately a decade. (One weird aspect of the show to me is that Carol seems too fixated on the cannibalism and insufficiently concerned about mass extinction.) Here I would also draw a comparison to capitalism, which induces everyone to serve its drive for accumulation even though everyone is aware that it is undercutting the conditions of long-term human survival.

This is not to say that the Joining “is” colonialism or (no matter how much I would like for it to be) capitalism—much less social media or AI or any lesser target. Those parallels suggest themselves simply because they are actual existing large-scale combinations of humans into supra-individual units, with well-known perverse effects. But the show’s concept is so open-ended that you might as well say that the Joining represents human society as such, which always instrumentalizes individuals in ways that go against their interests and always demands conformity and suppression of individual impulse—even the nicest and coolest society we can imagine.

And with that, we get to the most profound challenge that the show offers: namely, whether the Joining is really so different from normal life. Two moments that I think really solidify this are the Joining of Kusimayu I describe above and the budding romantic relationship between Carol and her hive-appointed chaperone Zosia. Presumably the despicable example of Diabaté—who is effectively raping the animated corpses of all the individuals he is having sex with—dissuades Carol from having sex with the beautiful and endlessly accomodating Zosia, until she induces Zosia to focus on her own individual memories and say “I” rather than the hive-mind’s “we.” At this moment—and here is where I watched two episodes in a row too rapidly to savor it—we wonder whether the Power of Love has somehow allowed Zosia to recover her individuality. And when Manousos threatens Zosia’s safety with his experiments, Carol winds up siding with the hive mind against him, choosing to live an idyllic life of romantic bliss. Only when she realizes that Zosia has been used as a distraction so that the hive could develop a means to Join her does she decide to team up with Manousos to reverse the Joining—which is where we end the season.

In other words, the hive has manipulated both the willing subject Kusimayu and the resistent Carol to get them to conform to the hive’s demands. But even here, the question of how different this is from everyday experience continues to resonate. After all, Carol had learned from Zosia that her late partner Helen had merely pretended to like Carol’s “real” literary novel to placate her and maintain her motivation to keep writing the trash novels that made their lifestyle possible. Similarly, prior to the joining we see Kusimayu engaged in labor for her community, labor that her participation in meaningful ritual and song presumably helped to secure. And in a sense, isn’t every society, every community, every family, every relationship manipulating us for some benefit—or simply for the sake of its own perpetuation?

The overarching imperative of the Joining is not simply to include all humans, but to “pay it forward” by broadcasting the infectious signal to another planet—something they are devoting considerable resources to achieving even as the species slowly starves to death. This is where my title comes in, because this is Dawkins’ “selfish gene” operating at an intergalactic scale. But once again, I believe the show is challenging us to ask how this is so different. Do we not all exist as the outcome of a faceless process by which genes are selected and perpetuated? From an evolutionary perspective, do we not all exist to pass on our genetic heritage—not only every individual, but every species, including humanity? And doesn’t society, community, family, and intimacy all conspire to find ways to placate and manipulate the inconveniently individual consciousnesses that constantly threaten to gum up this process? Again, isn’t the confrontation between the stubborn individual and the Joining an exaggerated, stylized version of the underlying reality of our meaningless lives?

And in that case, why resist? Doubtless there have been many pub conversations and hot takes and thinkpieces suggesting that Carol and Manousos should just give up and let it happen because nothing matters. (After all, the “smart,” “nuanced” move in any online discussion is usually to claim that everyone should stop caring and just conform.) Yet I at least cannot help rooting for these two deeply flawed, deeply unappealing characters in their quixotic quest to save the world from harmony and perpetual bliss—in short, to force them to be free. “I am, I exist”: whatever we may think of the epistemological implications of that realization, its moral and ethical implications seem clear. The point of individuality cannot be to erase individuality. We may be errors inadvertantly produced by an impersonal self-perpetuating process, but we owe it to ourselves to turn ourselves from bugs into features—to make meaning, as individuals in relationship.