I am currently watching a show called Pluribus on Apple TV. It isn’t somehow turning into all that interesting a watch, mainly because the main character is so deliberately unlikeable. I’m sure we will be gleaning some backstory on the reasons for her behaviour, which will be intended to make her more likeable and maybe more complex.
The premise is that the entire world’s population, with the exception of 12 people, have been consumed into a hive mind. Everything happens in harmony; everyone has what they want, no one has desires that are not met. There does not appear to be anything other than The Golden Girls on TV, which I’m sure will prove significant at some point. The 12 exiles from paradise can ask the hive mind for whatever they want, at any time, and it is instantly delivered to them. A flight on Air Force One, their grandmother’s recipe cooked to perfection, clothes, hookers, a fully stocked supermarket. There is no speech, because all thoughts are instantly known. Thousands of people operate as one, all communicating with ultimate efficiency to achieve common goals. Information is instantly retrieved, and everyone is an expert at everything. The girl from TGI Friday is flying a Boeing.
One of my new year’s resolutions this year is to improve my concentration. I am so distracted constantly by the desire to be constantly up to speed with the latest news, another interesting blog on Substack, what the Economist says about AI, what the FT says about tariffs, what utter fictions the Telegraph has laid out for my delectation on any given topic, and then I round it off with a quick trot through Twitter madland, via a scroll on my Google feed. The next level down, which I engage in in the evenings, is the scroll through Facebook reels, bouncing around looking for a better resolution on the algo that feeds me almost exclusively ballet and baby videos. For a while I managed to keep ballet to Insta and babies on Facebook, but now they’re all the same content. I get a bit bored after a while, and the whole thing ends up feeling super-stressful. So many snippets of data stealing my attention away, surfacing in my thoughts, taking me over. So sometime in November, I decided to spend the commuting window without looking at my phone. It’s about 3 hours a day in total. I do kind of have to check my Outlook and Teams chats at 6 am, but it doesn’t really take that long. I fail every day, but I’m getting a little bit better all the time, extracting myself, letting my mind wander where I want, processing my day and my worries in front of my mind’s eye, finding phrases and thinking of things to write about.
So there I was, this evening, looking at all the people on the Central line, but they were not looking at me. On a carriage with about 50 people in it, there were maybe five including me who were neither reading, nor listening to music, nor scrolling slightly manically on their phones. I got off at Tottenham Court Road, following a girl with her nose glued to her phone as she alighted the train, a passenger in her own life, unaware of opportunities or dangers. That was me a few months ago, constantly trying to cram more information into every second of my day, as if I could create an infinite wellspring of wisdom by reading and failing to remember what everyone else thinks.
In Pluribus, the hive mind is some kind of alien virus that spreads from person to person, very slowly at first, but as the main spokesperson for the hive mind (to our protagonist, anyway) explains,
“We didn’t intend for anyone to die. And for the first month, no one did. We would bring in newcomers individually, thousands every day. It was all very peaceful. But then, the military discovered us, and to avoid more bloodshed, we had to accelerate the process.
“How many people died?”
“886, 477, 591. As of this moment”
The show still makes it seem so appealing. It was the original promise of the internet, spreading knowledge and harmony. I remember those articles in 1994, about knowledge and having so much leisure time. And there they all are, standing on the platform, not talking to each other, plugged into a division machine. Many people would be a lot happier with their lives if they weren’t instantly able to compare themselves to everyone else on earth, and find their circumstances wanting. I look around at this mass of humanity, all trying to achieve something ever more out of reach. We don’t spread harmony through knowledge at all, we just use technology to destroy each other, not necessarily intentionally. Now we’ve added to the mess by creating fictional videos, generating reams of random text; we sure did accelerate the process.
Maybe long term the lack of digital veracity will increase people’s desire to read real books, or we’ll set all all the nukes based on a misunderstanding, and the tiny sliver of survivors in some remote part of New Zealand will start again.
The resting writer 
Leave a comment