In Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV show, Pluribus, peace on Earth reigns after a contagious virus amasses all of humanity into a single hive mind. Overnight, each individual becomes a vessel for the synchronized whole’s memories, experiences, and perspectives. There are only 13 immune survivors, including our protagonist, the curmudgeonly romantasy writer Carol Sturka of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who immediately requests a meeting with all the other English-speaking survivors and is swept off to Spain by her hive mind chaperone. Hoping to meet a cabal of brave resisters, she’s instead disappointed with the reality of her fellow survivors. A Mauritanian man named Koumba pulls up in a commandeered Air Force One, complete with presidential seals, after exploiting the hive mind’s acquiescence. “Bienvenue à bord!” he calls, pouring himself a flute of champagne.
If art is to rise to the occasion of these times, it should reach for a vision of the collective that’s more interesting than the one projected by network scripts.
A growing wave of hive-minded media is presenting audiences with a choice between Koumba and Carol, between Air Force One and freaking tf out. On the page, Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) was followed by Calvin Kasulke’s ahead-of-its-time bodysnatching 2021 novel, Several People Are Typing, in which employees’ consciousnesses get gradually uploaded and trapped in their workplace Slack. On the big screen, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (2025) juxtaposes conspiracy theorists and an alleged alien species trying to subdue humanity. And over the past few months, theatergoers have seen the hive mind onstage in Nazareth Hassan’s play Practice (2025), where, by the end of the play, all the actors but one are chanting in unison: “I’ve taken up residence in the bodies and minds of my company, they would do anything for me.” Welcome to the era of the hive mind, where mainstream culture is alternatingly enchanted and terrified by the concept of collective consciousness and shared intelligence.
It makes sense that this behemoth would be on our minds: Every day, an ever-growing swath of sans-serif corporate nonentities is trying to sell us all on the promise of “super-intelligence” with about as much subtlety as Koumba. The hive mind is a near-perfect stand-in for contemporary AI offerings, with their lofty promises and obsequious tone. Watching Koumba’s parade of lavish meals and beautiful women, I couldn’t help but hear shades of the countless YouTube videos hawking “10 AI Roles to 10x Your Performance” and “101 Ways to Use AI in Your Daily Life.” (Make the system work for you or you’ll end up working for the system, these efficiency maxxers promise.) Even a chorus of pseudofeminist takes from the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Demi Moore has taken up the “join or die” mantle, beseeching women to lean into AI or risk getting left behind. When listening to the conjoined collective “converse” with Carol, it sounds a lot like ChatGPT’s sycophantic affirmations. The collective can’t say no to Carol — at her request (with apologies for the spoiler), it even delivers an atomic bomb to her door.
Ironically, the same people eager to sign away their innermost thoughts to AI overlords are also throwing a hysterical tantrum about “thought police,” whom they consider the real enemies of creative intelligence. For the last half decade, we’ve seen ceaseless hand-wringing over the so-called “woke mind virus,” the brainwashing force of left-leaning social and cultural values supposedly propagated en masse at liberal arts colleges nationwide. To hear many right-wing conspiracy theorists tell it, a “social contagion” of “gender ideology” is on the loose, running so rampant it’s even, according to Alex Jones, “turning the frigging frogs gay.” In Pluribus, the virus is passed mouth to mouth, not so much a pandemic dreamscape as a fraternal one, taking the social contagion at its literal face value.
Reducing collective political opinion to some nebulous, authoritarian threat is as misguided as AI agitprop. It’s a kind of red scare logic transmuted to modern times, wherein the individual is ennobled if she rejects some collectives and punished if she refuses others. Self-fashioned iconoclasts like Bari Weiss have gotten enormous mileage out of claiming to resist dangerous political groupthink. But the “woke mind virus” is just a way of describing the effects of organized political action over time. While the best hive mind art, like Hassan’s Practice, interrogates our authoritarian impulses, the worst of it presents a crude battle between brain-dead collectivism and an Ayn Randian individualism.
Welcome to the era of the hive mind, where mainstream culture is alternatingly enchanted and terrified by the concept of collective consciousness and shared intelligence.
The fixation on resisting the hive mind strikes me as a confused metabolization of threats like consumer-facing AI and globalization. Wealthy tech companies exercise growing control over our lives, and the corrupt, capitalist goons who run them exert a homogenizing influence over our work and our language — all AI-generated emails look the same. But this is an outgrowth of economic power, not an amorphous social contagion born of humans’ deep weakness for conformity. Is individuality truly imperiled by hive mind thinking, or is the individual just oppressed?
AI is a prediction model, trained on an ever-growing mass of existing data. It operates by pattern-mapping what might come next based on data that already exist, but it doesn’t generate new thoughts, decisions, or concepts. The idea that one should sublimate one’s own human autonomy to what is effectively a souped-up spreadsheet is ridiculous — but equally ridiculous is the idea that we all ought to pull a Carol Sturka and hole up in Albuquerque about it. Expression alone won’t save us; nor will retreating to Walden Pond.
It’s a false choice, driven by a failure of imagination in our fiction and a failure of will in our politics. If art is to rise to the occasion of these times, it should reach for a vision of the collective that’s more interesting than the one projected by network scripts. In the end, I hope Carol and her intertextual peers can see the difference. Perhaps then —
all together — their audiences will follow suit.
Leah Abrams is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from North Carolina and the cohost of Limousine Readings. Her debut novel, Dated, is out in February 2027 from HarperCollins.
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