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.