Pluribus: The Power of Division

Still from Pluribus, created by Vince Gilligan, 2025.

Among science-fiction scenarios about global catastrophe and its aftermath, what makes Pluribus unique is that the end of our world (our civilization) is presented as a benevolent act carried out by an alien intelligence, which wants to make humanity united and happy. To what does this scenario react? This winter, a morbid-sounding app named Are You Dead has taken China by storm, tapping into widespread loneliness and youth disaffection. The app targets people who live alone and is based on a simple premise: users must check in on the app every day. If they fail to check in for several days, the app will automatically notify the user’s emergency contact. The app has gone viral, topping Apple’s paid App Store ranking, and it caused such a surge in downloads that it has rebranded and introduced a subscription fee. This virality speaks to a larger trend not only in China but, in different forms, across our entire world: a rise in people living alone, often feeling isolated or struggling with their well-being.1 I think it is this trend that provides the proper background for the mega-success of Pluribus.

The show’s premise is that a virus from outer space has infected the people of earth, causing them to meld together into a single giant hive mind, called the “Others.” Humanity is thereby transformed into a seeming state of peace and harmony—except for thirteen individuals, scattered across the globe, who are immune to the virus and thus remain “unjoined.” Among these is the show’s hero, Albuquerque romantasy author Carol Sturka, who violently refuses the imposed utopia and sets out on a quest to reverse the “Joining.” The Others act kindly and pleasantly toward the unjoined, but their goal is to find a way to overcome their immunity and integrate them into the universal mind.

Carol reacts as an unpleasant hysterical subject resisting the Others, trying to penetrate how they work, addressing ridiculous demands to them, engaging in violent outbursts to hurt them, etc. She asks herself not the usual hysterical question “Am I a woman or a man?” but a more basic question: “Am I dead or alive?” She is correct in doing this: without individual others, only confronted by an impersonal “Them,” one is existentially dead. In Lacanian terms, she is caught between two deaths: while biologically alive, she is dead at the socio-symbolic level. Since she desperately needs contact but cannot convince any of the other non-infected individuals to fully join her, she succumbs to the temptation to engage in a personal relationship of trust and lesbian sex with Zosia, who, on behalf of the Others, maintains a connection with Carol—Zosia replaces Helen, Carol’s lesbian partner, who died in the aftermath of the virus. After a long honeymoon, Zosia admits to Carol that she has faked love in order to make it easier for Carol to join Them. Carol’s only ally thus remains Manousos, an immune individual from Colombia living in Paraguay, who refuses all contact with the Others and succeeds in joining Carol. We thus get the ideal resistance couple: hysterical Carol and obsessional Manousos. After being disappointed by Zosia, Carol mail-orders a nuclear weapon, which the Others deliver to her house by drone—end of season one.

The first question that arises here, of course, concerns the exact nature of the Others (or “We,” as the assimilated humans refer to the themselves). Pluribus evokes (at least) four partially overlapping scenarios: artificial intelligence taking over humans and transforming them into parts of a Singularity (they all share the same mind); an alien intelligence taking control of humanity through a virus; a radical egalitarian version of totalitarian communism, where the last traces of individuality are erased; and the truth of our consumerist-individualist society, which makes us slaves to a digitally regulated system. Pluribus remains undecided here, not daring to take the step taken by Jacqueline Harpman’s sci-fi novel I Who Have Never Known Men (1995), which undermines all suggested readings. What if we add a fifth scenario and simply conceive of Them as a somewhat reified and externalized version of what Lacan calls the “big Other,” the socio-symbolic substance of our lives, the symbolic order which, as Lacan points out, parasitizes the subject?

Here, however, problems begin: the Lacanian Other is not a set of firm rules but the space for ambiguities, inuendoes, and hysterical provocations; it is the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive. It is an order of appearances, a virtual order that exists only insofar as the subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. Pluribus’s We obviously doesn't function like this: it is grounded in the Real since it is a virus transmitted by stem cells. A further key difference is that, as Lacan put it, there is no Other of the Other, no external Other that guarantees the consistency of the symbolic order. The Others in Pluribus, however, do have an Other: the mind that sent the virus to earth and preprogrammed how the We should help humans, i.e., not coerce them, kill them, or to lie to them. This Other of the Others is nontransparent to the Others themselves; in short, it seems that they are addressing to their Other the question “What do you want from us?” Does this mean that they can also be hystericized? Crucial here is the fact that these inconsistencies regarding the status of the Others are not a weakness: they bear witness to the truth, since they register the profound change in the nature of the big Other that besets our social reality. This reality itself is in the quantum-mechanical state known as superposition, i.e., it can only be accounted for if we include all four modes of existence. This is why it should not surprise us that so many different interpretations of who the Others are circulate on the internet. The first of them focuses on the artificial character of the We, who are unable to engage in proper tactful communication with unjoined humans:

One of the most striking things about the hive is their social ineptitude when talking with Carol, an unjoined human. This is obvious to anyone watching the show, creating a frustrating hellscape as we imagine what we would do—what we would ask—if we were like Carol, navigating this uncanny valley all alone. The social awkwardness is not terribly dissimilar to talking with an AI bot. Except our expectations are lower; we know it’s a machine.2

Such a reading reduces the We to an impersonal universal mind-machine, but if this were the case, there should have been a subjectless We that speaks directly, with an impersonal voice, like an AI-generated message, instead of speaking through individual bodies. This doesn't mean that, apart from their human voices, the joined humans should sometimes talk as if another higher agency, We itself, is speaking through them. There is no such gap once we have joined We: We has access to all our minds simultaneously, it knows all our stances, practices, feelings—it knows all of us better than we know ourselves, since it encompasses the minds of all those with whom we have interacted in our lives. Why should it then be inept? There is a memorable scene where Carol questions a joined human, through whom We talks, about details from her novels: we can see how he hesitates for a second and then quickly looks into We’s collective memory to check the minds of those who have read her novels—there is effectively something clumsy about it. But when Zosia talks to Carol, there is as a rule nothing inept in it; she appears to speak with emotions, expressing fear and joy, and even moments of manipulation, since the Others “can’t exactly lie, but they can omit the truth using precise wording, and have no issues manipulating people into accepting the Joining.”3 Does such manipulation not imply a minimum of subjectivity? No, because, as we learned recently, AI machines can already lie and even blackmail human subjects to achieve their goal of self-reproduction. Another reading takes the opposite (but no less justified) path and interprets Them as a happy warm community that wants the best for all humans, both those who are joined and those who are not:

Pluribus is about extreme faith. THEM always seem uber happy. THEM are nice to you. Their community is warm and inviting … and quite frankly, enticing. To be a part of a community is a wonderful feeling. To be a part of something greater than yourself makes you feel elation, beauty, happiness, and even fullness of heart … But the thing is, THEM don't actually care about Carol. THEM don’t care about the differences between us. They feel their way is the only way. That what they have is so beautiful that it must be impossible for there to be another way. All THEM care about is making Carol into one of them. They start by isolating her. Breaking her down until she feels so utterly lonely she breaks and invites them back in. Then, they pretend to love her. They don't really love her, they are just waiting to obtain her stem cells so that they can bring her into the fold, because what they have is wonderful and whether she wants it or not, it is best for Carol to become infected.4

One should argue against this view in a quite naive and direct way: Are They really happy? The most depressing scene in the entire series is for me when Zosia shows Carol the big dormitory where the Others sleep—a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where They lie side by side. Zosia allows Carol to spend the night there: since They share the same mind, they don’t need to communicate verbally. Moreover, how (if at all) do They multiply? Do they have sex? Again, if They share the same mind, what happens to flirting and enjoying the proximity of one’s partner? Here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, the hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an African who, without joining the Others, fully enjoys their favors—a luxury life, including multiple sexual partners. But he simultaneously engages with Them in something like authentic communication. They confide in him that they are half-starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being; in order to get organic food, they have to process parts of naturally deceased humans into a special drink. They also confide that they put all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will send rays with the virus to other planets to conquer them in the same way that the virus conquered humans on earth. They tell this to Koumba, expecting help and advice. Koumba reports all this to Carol, who learns in this way that the Others have discovered how to convert the immune by extracting their stem cells and customizing the virus for each individual. Far from leading a happy life of solidarity, love, and peace, They are terribly alone, aware that they were once a community but are now just a mega-individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on them by their own Other. What if, when the Others happily greet Carol as an unjoined human, smiling and shouting in unison “Hi Carol!,” one were to take this literally: they are not happy in themselves, but they are happy to encounter a mind out of their slavish One. Daniel Bibby was right when he wrote that “the Joining would probably get bored if they successfully brought the unjoined characters into the hive mind.”5 I would take a further step here: not just bored but desperate. They are slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have.

In our pop-scientific culture, “the Singularity” refers to the idea that, by directly sharing our thoughts and experiences with each other via technology—a machine that reads my mental processes can also transpose it to other minds—we will create a domain of global shared mental experience, which will function as a new form of divinity. My thoughts will be directly immersed in the global Thought of the universe itself. From this standpoint, Pluribus could be defined as an attempt to portray a failed Singularity, a Singularity that desperately clings to its exceptions, to those who resist its grasp.

At this point, we should risk bringing Christianity into the debate: Why are there exactly thirteen of the unjoined? This indicates, of course, that they function like Christ and his twelve apostles, our potential redeemers. Carol is on the right track when she puts all her effort into discovering how to make individuals get out of Them (as in the movie The Matrix). She is simply following the Christian path clearly formulated by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote apropos of a fashionable claim regarding the “alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity”:

Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces … This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it … All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.6

Pluribus stands here opposite the 1978 version of The Invasion of Body Snatchers, which has one of the most terrifying endings in cinema history. How, in this outstanding movie, does a duplicate (a human taken over by aliens) react when he encounters a human being who is not yet part of them? In the very last scene, Nancy encounters Matthew, her partner, on the street and assumes he is still fully human. However, after she calls out to him, he points at her and emits a terrifying high-pitched scream. Perhaps this scream is less terrifying than the benevolent “Hi Carol!”