If you haven’t seen the show, and since it’s locked away on one of those subscription platforms that not everyone signs up for I can’t really blame you, it’s a quirky science fiction end-of-the-world drama about individuality and agency in a world of forced uniformity.

Spoiler alert, but I’ll tell you what happens in the first episode: an alien transmission is revealed to be the code for a viral genetic sequence that aggressively infects almost all humans. The effect of infection is a joining into a hive mind of all other infected human. Everyone who survives the infection (it causes some momentary seizures and thus accidental deaths are unavoidable during a mass infection event that kicks off the series) is joined into a seemingly harmonious collective of consciousness where thoughts, memories, feelings, and experiences are universally shared.  Not quite a dozen people in the whole world are immune and unaffected, including the series protagonist Carol, who struggles to reconcile with her individuality in contrast to the transformed world. Drama ensues.

Hive minds are a metaphor for many things, but in twenty-twenty six I can’t help but see this one as a really strong contender for an “algorithms are turning us all into a vapid, uniform paste and erasing our individuality” kind of message.

I did something here: I deliberately didn’t look up what anyone else thought this story meant. I didn’t read critical analysis, listen to podcasts, or watch “Pluribus explained” videos on YouTube. Mostly, I just haven’t had the chance yet, but I wanted to let this one sink in a little further and process it in my own head and outside of the hive mind of social media before I wrote on it.

Because that really is the message of the show: it’s become a world of “what do we think” rather than “what do I think.”  We may not be joined by an alien virus for instantaneous sharing of thoughts, but the urge to validate our experience against someone else’s opinion is almost an insatiable urge these days. I query reddit for vibes. I scroll reviews before I spend money. I am almost ashamed to admit that I asked AI to do a compare and contrast for a video game I was thinking of purchasing recently, telling it what kinds of games I already liked and “do you think I would like this one too” rather than just spending the twenty bucks and experiencing the damn thing raw, like a human.

In Pluribus Carol seems to be drawn to the notion of the collective inasmuch as she clearly yearns to be part of something larger than herself—but she is adamantly fearful of losing herself into it. I can’t help but see the parallels between my own (admittedly lower stakes) dabbling in social media, vibe coding, and performative media: I want to be part of something bigger and contribute to the collective, but the algorithm has a way of washing away my individuality and smoothing out anything I contribute into a corporate-friendly paste of uniformity.  We angrily call it feeding the machine, but the digestion that occurs as part of that process consumes the uniqueness of who we are, all in the name of corporate profit and family-friendly advertising indulgence.

Is the hive mind AI? If slurping up all of human knowledge and identity into a handful of private platforms that efface our individuality is anything besides, I don’t know.

Personally I’ve spent more hours than I’d care to admit in this little pixelated world (though not nearly as many as my daughter, who is the one who owns the cookbook.)

Yet among all the lessons of game design and creative struggle that are mixed into this game, there is a noteworthy point to be made about what it’s style says with respect to its popularity: it’s a pretty game, sure, but it’s also a pixelated cartoon abstraction with corny dialog and filled with absurdist elements.

In a landscape of game design where computational power and photorealism seem to be what every triple-A game developer is striving, the raw humanity evoked by the pixelated purity of a game like Stardew Valley is telling. This game is not popular because of any other reason than it feels like something made by a person for people to enjoy. It oozes humanity. It’s cozy and friendly and feels more real than a list of other more “produced” games that is too long to itemize.

Why is that?

If there was an easy answer that I could distill into my social media excerpt then surely I’d be working for some gaming company as a seven-figure consultant and not writing spec pieces on a private website… but I do think that the answer is mixed up in this ineffable concept of authenticity, a topic I’ve been exploring on this private collection of essays for as long as I’ve been writing it. I think Stardew Valley nails the plot on that idea, and tells us all something about what we really want from out culture, our art, and our pastimes, and that thing does not gurgle out of a slop engine or get built by a committee or necessarily gleam with pixel-perfect realism. 

It succeeds because it tells a good story, and not just through the plot, but through the making of it and the often-visible tool marks in the final product.

I found the subtly referenced book and read it, and the theories posited in Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ^[2] were obviously at the front of someone’s mind when they were penning the plot to the science fiction miniseries that rocked me back in 2016.

The short summary: Jaynes suggests that consciousness arose when the two lobes of the brain, the left and right hemispheres, started acting as one. Over the course of his long thesis and popular book it is argued that until a couple thousand years ago humans had two disconnected voices in their heads and that the disconnect answers a lot of questions about how people thought, heard gods, and understood themselves. He theorizes that self awareness and what we think of as modern consciousness arose when we no longer had two competing voices in our heads, but a unified internal monologue. Consciousness, then, results from the complexity in the conversations in our brains.

As much as Jaynes thesis was considered either radical or nuts, it is a milestone in the long journey for humans to understand why we perceive the universe the way we do… and how we could replicate that in a machine.

Westworld makes a lot more sense—at least all the philosophical AI science-ish stuff does—when you look at it in the context of Jayne’s mind-bending ideas. 

Westworld, if you’ve never watched it, is basically Jurassic Park^[3] but with robots—which, too, makes a lot of sense when you realize they originated from the same person: Michael Crichton. Westworld is a theme park where robots indistinguishable from humans in almost every way act out an Old West fantasy world for rich guests… until things get out of control.

I’ve been rewatching it. The first couple seasons hold up, and I’ve noticed that the story of the maze (a game that is not for the humans in the park but rather a hidden quest for the robots) and the reveries (the programming bug introduced to the code that allows the robots to, in effect, daydream memories) are all rooted in this notion of deliberately breaking down the sci-fi robot’s version of bicameral (two-lobed) thinking, all in an attempt by their creator to evoke—that’s right—consciousness in them.

Westworld is science fiction, of course, and like all science fiction is meant to teach us more about ourselves than our future. In this way it is not a predictor for AI sentience nor a recipe for some algorithmic process that could be replicated in a server farm somewhere. Rather, maybe, a reminder that we still don’t fully understand what makes us self-aware and that we still spend a lot of time and ink trying to figure it out.

Pinning it down in an algorithm is not a trivial thing, speculative theories or not.

Or, even, seen the films?

Look, if you haven’t stop whatever you’re doing right now… and go read them. You will not regret it. Then come back and continue reading this post, living your life, existing in the world.

Okay? We’re on the same page? Good. Because I recently have seen a couple people mention an interesting theory—I’m not clear on the originator—about the titular ring in the story. The One Ring, the all-powerful more-than-a-macguffin of the story has often been cited as a stand-in for an all powerful and destructive weapon. For years we’ve been thinking about it as an allegory for nuclear armaments. But—and so the theory goes—what if a better (read: more prescient) analogy maps to the concept? What if the One Ring is AI?

So the theory goes…

In the story nearly everyone who encounters the One Ring believes with absolute certainty that they are the one who can wield it for good—but ultimately they are deceived and cannot. It corrupts every last one, even Frodo the ring-bearer chosen for his purity, strength and innocence, eventually succumbs. The ring, after all, has it’s own intentions and desires and is merely using the bearer to serve a secret darker master.

Map the determination of any commercial user of AI with the intention to do good with the tool to the ultimate outcome: creative shifts, slop generation, intellectual laziness, cheating in school, offloading work and feeding a hidden corporate backend with unclear motivations. Hmm.

The One Ring atrophies everything about the one who carries it, and we are given the creature Gollum as an example of what happens to someone who holds the powerful artifact for centuries: he is narcissistic, lacking empathy, and devoid of his remaining “humanity” (for lack of a better word.) The One Ring after all, tells the wearer everything they want to hear and acts as a kind of whispering sycophant validating every thought and notion.

Cognitive offloading and atrophy of human skills—or failing to learn the skills in the first place—is one of those fears often levelled at the shiny marketing pitches for AI. All the while, the LLMs chat sweet affirmations that every notion we have is brilliant or a thoughtful twist on an old idea as they whisper with certainty that we are bright and intelligent and nigh infallible. 

The creation of the One Ring is explained more deeply in the supplemental texts of the novels, but we are given to understand that it was forged in the fires of a mountain so hot and evil that it now lays at the heart of the enemy’s territory. Mount Doom was where the ring was made and the only place it could be unmade, created in darkness and trickery with immoral purpose enshrouding its entire history.

AI, famously, has been trained on stolen intellectual property. It consumes huge quantities of energy in data centres whose presence devalues communities and fills the air with noise and pollution, and the stains the water with heat and pollution. Talk about an allegory for Mount Doom.

Look, literature is how we understand the world, in particular science fiction and fantasy which map modern ideas onto unfamiliar worlds—it is to help us overcome our bias and see the same problem from a different perspective. Tolkien probably never saw a computer, let alone a multi-core GPU running a neural network model, but he saw the dark capabilities of human nature. He understood what happens when we etch shadows of that nature onto objects and systems outside of it. And that’s real the allegory, I think.

Recall that film? I’ll wait here while you rewatch it. Or, just let me recap: Meet Bastian, a kid who lifts a magnificent tome from a dusty bookstore, hides in the attic of his school, and there reads the story of the land of Fantasia. This is a magical land brought to life by the imagination of readers, but it is being consumed by a dark all-consuming force called The Nothing. The tale is relayed through the course of the movie as the parallel quests—a journey rife with adventure and a battle for hope against darkness—by Bastian (in the real world) and the hero Atreyu (in the fictional world) all to uncover the truth of the Nothing that is consuming Fantasia and all that is contained within it so they can attempt to stop it.

The Nothing, or so we assumed in the 1980s when this movie was released, was a message about the waning imaginations of children everywhere, attentions consumed by television and video games, and too a cultural crisis topic onto which parents and the media had long since latched. The Nothing was an allegory meant to remind kids everywhere that their dreams built worlds, their creativity was bigger and more important than themselves, and that it was human to tell stories and invent universes.

These days the story seems a little too on the nose, particularly when we fast forward forty years and look at a much bigger cultural crisis of imagination and creativity that emerges from the shadows in the form of generative AI. 

It’s hardly a stretch of either imagination or interpretation to see how a mysterious dark force creeping over the very act of invention and imagination transposes neatly into this modern moment. The Nothing, that force that is shutting down human capacity to bring things beyond our reality to life through fiction and speculation and dreams, is all too real and often found in our fingertips as we type prompts into algorithms churning our ideas in algorithmically-generated content.

What was the lesson of film?

Might it be that human imagination is not a product but rather it is a process: a journey, an adventure, and perhaps even a battle in need of vigilance, persistence and bravery? I think so.