The New Anxiety of Our Time Is Now on TV

Pluribus, Severance and other sci-fi shows reveal our hidden fear

I eagerly awaited Vince Gilligan’s follow-up to his hit TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. But nothing prepared me for his latest offering Pluribus.

The only thing that stays the same in the new series is the setting, Albuquerque, New Mexico. But the story is existentially frightening and totally unlike its predecessors. An extraterrestrial virus sweeps through the population, removing their individual personalities and blending them into a single hive mind.

In the aftermath, everybody thinks the same and acts the same. They share the same ideas and information. They even speak the same words at the exact same moment—like some demonic chorus from a Greek tragedy.

And they are blissfully happy. Like ants in an ant hill, they love their new lives without individual responsibility.

Thirteen people on the planet have somehow avoided this contagion. And they must find some way of countering it.

But they are literally in a battle against happy, smiling people who have forgotten what it’s like to be a real person.

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The premise is intriguing. But Pluribus is not the only current TV series to focus on the destruction of personhood. Apple TV has already reaped the benefits of this kind of story in its hit show Severance, which explores the narrow existence of characters who toil away in a bland office without any idea of their lives outside the workplace.

A surgical implant has blocked any recollection of their everyday personhood. Once again, the comparison with ants in an ant hill is apt.

Actress Rhea Seehorn confronts the hive mind in the new TV series Pluribus.

And we see the same theme in all those zombie stories of recent memory. The danger in these narratives isn’t violence or even death—it’s the total loss of personality and selfhood.

That may even be the defining fear of our current moment. Or, perhaps, of our impending future.

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It can hardly be a coincidence that these series are so popular at the very moment that personhood is also under attack in society at large.

Consider this ominous anecdote from Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

I require substantial writing in my 400-person U.S. history survey course—but now I largely receive 400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical.

This is eerily like the zombie-ish characters in Pluribus, who all say the exact same thing.

But in Mintz’s case, this is real behavior from real students. They have voluntarily abandoned their individual opinions and embraced the hive mind.

And the hive mind is available to all of them via Chat GPT.

Mintz believes that this represents the latest stage in the dehumanization of education. The only way to fix it is teaching “that foregrounds the human mind—its voice, doubt, curiosity, and interpretive labor.”

But the system now rebels against this. Even worse, many students prefer the comfort of the single hive-mind answer as constructed by AI. That’s scary. It suggests that humans are willing to abandon key aspects of their personhood—provided that the mindset of the ant in the anthill is comfortable and stress-free.

Just as in Pluribus, happiness is a life without individual responsibility. There is already a single correct answer to every problem—you just need to repeat it along with everybody else.

You can now live without thinking for yourself. And this is what we call progress.

Maybe that’s why I’m especially alarmed by Google’s decision to replace search results—which provide many different answers to your questions—with a single authoritative AI solution. In this strange turnabout, search engines don’t want you to search anymore.

This runs counter to everything we know about science and progress—which require rigorous debate between different viewpoints. The same is true of education. Or even democracy. The worldview of the anthill makes all those things impossible.

Google is not alone. All of the big web platforms are increasingly designed to keep the ants happy in their anthills. They consume the same short videos, which are presented in a way that promotes endless scrolling—and not independent thinking. And participants are rewarded for attracting followers.

The very word follower conveys a sense of degraded personhood. The user’s existence is celebrated not for its independence, but as subordinated to the influencer. In the hierarchy of social media, the influencer is the queen bee, everyone else is the (appropriately named) drone bee or worker bee.

The scary thing is not just that billionaires and huge corporations are promoting this but that people so willingly participate. Maybe that’s why the audience is so large for shows like Severance and Pluribus. The sci-fi scenarios feed directly into our fears of abandoning our selves in this depersonalized world.

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Years ago, I studied personhood as a philosophy student at Oxford. Back then, it was an esoteric field of inquiry—and hardly a matter of concern for everyday life.

In those innocent days, most people believed that personhood was a simple concept—everybody was an individual with a specific and unique personality. That was so obvious that it was hardly worth debating.

There were a few exceptions, of course. Some people suffer from amnesia, or schizophrenia, or multiple personality disorder. But those are rare situations. Most people are stable entities—your Uncle Fred will still be your Uncle Fred next week, next month, and next year.

But philosophers love to disrupt these assumptions. David Hume did just that back in the 18th century. He shook up British philosophy by declaring that the human self did not exist. We weren’t stable persons, but just a “bundle or collection of different perceptions.”

I spent a fair amount of time reading through the relevant literature on this dispute. I thought that Hume (as usual) was just trying to be a spoil sport. He loved debunking familiar concepts (morality, causality, etc.). But it felt like a game to me.

In my world, Uncle Fred is always Uncle Fred.

David Hume, the intellectual antecedent for the attack on personhood

So imagine my surprise when, over the course of decades, that attack on personhood in philosophy gained more and more momentum. Consider the case of Derek Parfit, one of the most peculiar thinkers of the last half century, whose intense antipathy to the notion of a stable self got embraced by academic elites. As a result, Parfit gradually rose to the level of superstardom in the intellectual world.

In the aftermath, the unstable personality went mainstream. It got legitimized. Just imagine the consequence. Or—more to the point—look around and see the consequences.

Personhood got undermined, even eradicated, from serious discourse (and social policy). Of course, it wasn’t just Parfit. The rise of Derrida, Lacan, and other postmodernists contributed to the assault on the enduring self. There was some resistance in a few academic backwaters, but the hip and fashionable view was now that Uncle Fred is never reliably Uncle Fred.

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All this would hardly matter, if we lived in a society with strong democratic principles, robust notions of personal responsibility, and high standards of education. In that kind of world, personhood would still thrive, no matter what Parfit, Derrida, and others have to say.

But we don’t live in that kind of responsible world. Instead we got hit with a total collapse in all the institutions that nurture and support personhood. And it didn’t help that billionaires could make more money by turning us all into ants in their own digital anthills.

So we operate online behind avatars, keeping our real selves hidden from view—maybe even from ourselves. We socialize with other avatars, via texting and posting. At every step, real humans are replaced with digital simulacrums, even in our most intimate relationships.

With the final addition of AI, we now have lost the ability to know if actual people were involved in the making of any cultural artifact—a song, a movie, a book, a poem, etc. Even David Hume never dreamed of such a total eradication of personal responsibility and stability.

What can stop it?

I actually take some solace in TV series such as Pluribus and Severance. They show how anxious we are about this threat. At some deep level in our souls, we know that the destruction of our autonomy and selfhood is not a good thing.

It isn’t progress. It isn’t utopia. It isn’t liberation.

And that is the first step in escaping the ant hill. The next step is to bring others along with us.

This is why I keep talking about a New Romanticism (see here and here). That is our counter-offensive, and it’s already starting.

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A few months ago, I tried to describe what this means in real terms—and offered several predictions. Some of this is already coming true:

1. Critics of runaway tech will get much angrier and more vocal. This is already starting, and nothing can prevent the momentum from building.

2. The backlash will start forcing changes on a local level. Schools, for example, will impose prudent controls on AI, smartphones, social media, etc. Families will make changes in their own homes, without waiting for guidance from above.

3. Businesses will be slower to change—like the factories that hired child laborers in the 1700s, they are obsessed with making as much money as possible. But a backlash will occur here too, promoted by customers, employees, and community members.

4. Political intervention will happen later. Tech platforms have too much influence over politicians—so they will work to prevent regulation. But they won’t be able to stop it forever. Lawsuits and legislation are coming to force their hand, although we may need to wait 2-3 years before anything substantive happens.

5. Meanwhile, attitudes and ideologies will evolve—and the various compassionate, humanist, and creative agendas will gain strength. This kind of culture shift takes time, and I expect this to play out over a ten-year period. But the whole tone of society will look and feel differently as power and prestige shifts from the technocracy to the creative class.

6. Left and right will find—to their surprise—that they have much to agree on here. They will join hands in surprising ways to combat tech gone wild.

7. As part of this, technology will start getting used in ways that benefit the creatives, not the tech elites. This is already happening in some spheres (Substack, Bandcamp, Patreon, etc.), but the next wave will reverse the entire hierarchy. Romanticist outsiders will wrest control from technocratic insiders.

That’s our pathway. And it will happen—because the other alternative is the ant hill. And that’s not a viable option.

This is the defining culture war of our time. And I will return to it again in the future—because this danger is simply too big too ignore.