Pluribus & Alienation

Pluribus — the newest show by Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad fame) — is a show that is refreshingly new in its ideas. After finishing it discussed its themes with some of my friends and acquaintances, almost all of whom had quickly connected the show with artificial intelligence (AI). But for me, continuing on an earlier thought that AI is not extraordinary, it was much more obvious that Pluribus is about “the internet” more-so than AI.

The obvious reason that one might connect the “joining” in episode one with AI is that it leads very quickly¹ to what in practice becomes a sort of post-scarcity economy, at least for those 13 individuals who remain. But importantly this takeover is not a result of rapid gains in intelligence, but instead in communication. That each individual appears much smarter is a consequence of at all times having 7.1 billion people, some of whom are experts on the relevant topic, as instantly available sources. The large systems of coöperation and organisation that are displayed throughout the show² could not be done by mere intelligence alone, but instead it requires fast and seamless communication and delegation of needs and tasks respectively.

The technology that humanity has created for this task is commonly referred to as “the internet”, although it is not a single cohesive thing. The increasing connectivity of the internet means that more and more things can be utilised by this collective whole — every computer can in theory connect to every other computer. And because each individual today usually possesses a device capable of connecting to the internet (at least in the developed world) we can in turn communicate our wishes and opinions to (theoretically) every other internet-connected person in the world.

Throughout the first season (but in the following cases in the second episode) they³ will often cite the opinions of individual members of the collective, such as the bottling-plant worker who bottled a specific bottle of water, or of medical doctors throughout the world. That this is the case makes me think that the thoughts of the individual (as in activity in the mind) are still present, it is simply the case that the information transfer is so enormous that a chain of reasoning can be diverted and spread across the minds of all the people of mankind. What is individuality if all your thoughts and memories can be moved to another body?

While the degree to which this happens in Pluribus is of course impossible as of this time it is still occurring at a smaller scale today. When we share our opinions, and critically read those of others, we slowly construct a homogeneous state where all opinions and thoughts are the same and that serves as some kind of collective hive-mind. The widespread idea of “filter bubbles” is many ways false, we are much more filtered through our physical surroundings than our digital ones.⁴

They continually insist on the greatness of the joined experience, and on how each member of mankind saw it as a wonderful thing — just as we ourselves insist on how wonderful it is to be a part of digital society.

And in fact it is hard to argue with the benefits. As Koumba points out,

As we speak no-one is being robbed or murdered. No one is in prison. The colour of one’s skin, by all accounts, now meaningless. All zoos are empty. All dogs are off their chains. Peace on Earth!

This is in all regards an improvement in the state of things. It is in fact the idealised state of, dare I say it, most of mankind. What is the point in undoing the joining, as is the goal of Carol and Manousos, when continuing in the same trajectory inevitably leads to the same outcome? But Carol’s response to Koumba — “What has been lost?” — is equally valid, for it is clear that there is something in the human experience that is missing, both for the individuals and for the collective.

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Human Condition divides human activity into three different forms:

1. Labour
2. Work
3. Action

These three activities all have their own corresponding sphere — the private, the social, and the political respectively. What the joining destroys is both the social and political realms, and with them the two higher forms of human activity, work and political action. The Earth is left with only 14 distinct individuals, only one of which is really relevant for any economic activity. Thus there is no requirement for social interaction for any sort of production; when they leave Albuquerque Carol is perfectly able to go about her life, but she is left entirely alone — not even able to shift her life into the digital as the world did in 2020.

One of the most impactful scenes for me was strangely the almost silent scene when Zosia removes a body from a crashed car, helping place it in a truck before continuing on. It struck me in its simplicity — there is no genuine activity left, only cleaning up the entropy of the universe.

Performing work — in order to create a work — becomes useless once this final position has been reached; there will always be someone who is better and irregardless the extreme division of labour means that all work becomes eliminated, leaving the individual as a mere unit of labour power. This leads to Marx’ (and that Arendt adopts) description of the worker as alienated from their labour, incapable of seeing the whole production of an object through and only relevant in the production of a small part.

When the social and political disappears we are left alone. Alienated no just from or labour but also from each other. The individuals in Pluribus are separated from the rest of humanity, who all have one single shared experience that they can not communicate with Carol and the others. The only way to understand them is to join them, to become a part of this information flow and learn. But in doing so one naturally loses one’s identity and individuality, because the act of understanding the other necessarily brings you closer to them⁵ — just as how the internet makes you closer to some form of a global digital culture.

Is there a solution to all this? That is the question that is posed by Pluribus; What do we do when there is nothing more to be done as individuals? Does our individuality have any innate meaning and worth giving up social connections for, or should we trade it for the material rewards that come with social organisation? The answer may simply be that individuality was always meaningless — as they argue — and vastly eclipsed by the satisfaction of universal understanding.