by Joe Miller
My wife and I recently watched “Pluribus,” the Apple TV+ series that debuted in late 2025.
Normally, we know a bit about a television show before we sit down to watch, but in this case, we knew only that it was supposed to be pretty good. I’m going to give some minor spoilers for episode 1 below, so if that’s not your thing, now is the time to stop reading.
Still here? Great! Here goes.
In the opening scene, astronomers intercept an alien signal that contains the genetic code for a virus whose effect is to join (almost) all humans into a single collective consciousness.
Worldwide, only 13 people remain disconnected from the group. The show follows Carol (Rhea Seehorn) – one of the 13 unconnected individuals – as she tries to come to terms with this exceedingly strange turn of events.
Seehorn brings phenomenal depth and complexity to a role that frequently requires her to be the only person in a scene. Seehorn’s Carol is fundamentally decent and often sympathetic, but she is just as frequently dislikable and intensely self-destructive. It’s a difficult balance, but Seehorn carries it off brilliantly.
My favorite type of science fiction is the sort that sets up big thought experiments, and “Pluribus” certainly delivers on that front.
Carol obsesses over trying to undo the joining, putting the world back the way it was when everyone possessed individual minds.
The new group consciousness (for simplicity, we’ll call it The Joined) does not want to go back and that, moreover, the joining has made the world a much better place.
It’s a solid point. Conflict disappears overnight.
There’s no more crime, no more war, no more divisiveness. The Joined is largely benevolent – indeed, it goes to fairly absurd lengths to make the 13 unconnected individuals happy. In its own actions, it prizes efficiency and conservation.
Carol (mostly) acknowledges those points but dismisses them as irrelevant. The problem, Carol argues, is that the people who have been joined did not agree to it. They were infected with a virus (spread deliberately by the first few to be infected) and were subsequently incorporated into the group consciousness.
The Joined – in the person of Zosia (Karolina Wydra), who serves as Carol’s chaperone and spokesperson for The Joined – counters that each joined individual is still represented in the collective mind and that having experienced life both as individuals and as The Joined, it prefers to remain linked.
It’s a tricky ethical problem.
The Joined is a single consciousness that has thoughts, desires and emotions. It is self-aware and able to express clear preferences.
By any sort of standard account, The Joined is a person (albeit an unusual one, in that its one mind is housed in many bodies).
But Carol is also right that The Joined forced everyone into its collective consciousness.
Conflicts between individuals and group minds are about as old as the science fiction genre itself – the astronauts in H.G. Wells’ “The First Men in the Moon” encounter the group mind of the Selenites.
Group minds frequently serve as antagonists – think Heinlein’s puppet masters, “Star Trek’s “Borg, the Formics of “Ender’s Game” and the various Dungeons & Dragons-inspired monsters of “Stranger Things.”
That’s not terribly surprising, either. There’s something instinctively unsettling about losing our identity, about having the things that make us unique absorbed – and subsumed – by a larger consciousness.
And while, yes, adding my uniqueness to a group consciousness will inevitably change that consciousness in some ways, my overall contribution would be so small as to be effectively invisible.
Like most folks, I come down pretty solidly on the side of Team Individual.
It’s true that ending conflict, having everyone work together for a common good and (in the specific case of The Joined) refusing to kill all sounds pretty good.
But you know what else is good? Art. Literature. Poetry. Music. Finding that one perfect person to spend your life with. Watching your child grow up and making their own way in the world.
That all goes away in a world without individuality.
We see a glimpse of that loss in The Joined’s reaction to finding that Carol (a novelist) has begun to write again. You can hear the longing in Zosia’s voice when she tells Carol that The Joined is eager for “something new to read.”
It’s the first hint we get that life as The Joined might be slightly less rosy than it is letting on.
It’s also a reminder that encountering something new, struggling to overcome challenges and putting others’ needs ahead of our own are large parts of what make life worth living.
A world with only a single conscious mind and a single collective will? A world in which you will never encounter a thought that is not your own?
That’s being alive, but it’s not really living.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
