Embrace your lack

Pluribus, culture, language models, performance

If you haven’t yet watched Pluribus, or PLUR1BUS, Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV series about an alien virus that turns all but 13 people on earth into a literal “hive mind,” put it on your list. I’ve heard grumbling that it is too slow. I suspect the problem is, in this podcast-obsessed era, that there’s not enough talking. But the silence is deliberate.

I hadn’t planned to write about the show beyond calling for A We-free December. But the unforgettable 8-minute Peru sequence in the season finale, “La Chica o El Mundo,” provoked me to say: Pluribus offers a way for AI skeptics to coexist with LLMs. Do not be afraid. Embrace your lack.

First, a word about the show for those who have not seen it. (The season finale spoiler is marked but beware there are general spoilers from here on out.) Pluribus takes its title from e pluribus unum—out of many, one—and in a way it is “about” what that might mean literally. The “infected” humans, after a kind of juddering fainting spell, arise peaceful and purposeful, in a kind of mind meld, as one. The show’s protagonist is Albuquerque-based Carol Sturka, one of the 13 immune to the virus, a successful author of fantasy-romance novels, who slowly realizes, to her horror, what has happened to humanity. Her wife Helen is one of thousands who die in the havoc of the abrupt global “joining” of consciousness. Carol learns that there are 12 other “un-joined” individuals around the world (India, China, Mauritania, Mongolia, Peru, etc.) and that the goal of the collective (which has access to all human knowledge, memory, and culture) is to serve them and keep them happy, so they will join. The collective cannot lie or harm anyone or any living being, so Carol is physically safe.

Note: I will be using “hive mind,” “the collective,” “the joined,” “the Others,” “the un-joined” and “the un-infected” interchangeably; I don’t think any one term is better than the others.

Carol learns many things over the next few episodes, including that “culture” ceases to matter. The world’s great museums (Guggenheim Bilbao, the Georgia O’Keefe Museum) now exist solely for the benefit of the 13 un-joined, half of whom we meet in Episode 2, when Carol requests the English speakers be brought together to devise a plan of action.

The show is smart enough not to state openly that culture is now irrelevant. But travel and culture dominate early episodes for a reason. Episode 3 opens with a flashback to a stunning, ephemeral artist-created luxury ice hotel in Norway; Episode 6 offers immersion in Las Vegas “culture.” Later, Carol takes a real Georgia O’Keefe painting to replace a poster on her wall. The show is invested in the idea that humanity once needed culture but that the joining has erased cultural differences for all but the 13.

Given Carol’s livelihood, loss of culture is existential, on top of everything else. The collective has read her romance novels (“cotton candy,” it turns out Helen secretly thought of them) and likes them as much as Shakespeare, and would enjoy reading more, she is told. The collective has selected a woman called Zosia, who resembles the erotic hero of her novels (if the hero had been a woman), to be her “chaperone,” or personal interface to the collective. The collective understands that humans have aesthetic, sensual, and cultural preferences.

Pluribus features a few children but no babies. In Episode 2, Ravi, the 9-year-old son of one of the 13 un-joined, Laxmi (from India), acts his age until provoked by Carol to reveal he can talk fluently about gynecological exam protocols. This infuriates Laxmi, who prefers to see Ravi as a 9-year-old boy. Presumably newborns of the joined would also know everything but might never need to use their mouth and tongue muscles.

For language theorist Jacques Lacan, language emerges when an infant is separated from the mother. Before the separation, there is no need for communication, the infant and mother are as one. But separation causes a “lack” (manque), and language is needed to bridge that gap. Every word is a substitute for something absent. Humans speak because they are separated from what they want; if they had it, there would be no need to name it.

There is no separation for the joined in Pluribus. Since there is no “lack,” there is no need for a symbolic order, a language system, that links words to things. Language now is a tool solely for communicating with the un-joined. The joined would like to close that gap.

There’s so much in Pluribus I’m not writing about, such as the Paraguayan Manousos, an honest-to-a-fault, old-school, off-line manager of a storage unit facility (so much resonance here!), who is even more suspicious of the collective and their technology than Carol. Episode 7, when he travels north to Albuquerque to meet Carol, is titled “The Gap.”

The first season of Pluribus is about what the closing of the gap means, which is the end of art, all culture, all preferences, and all language.

Large Language Models without Language

Several reviews read the hive mind in Pluribus as analogous to AI: the collective knows all that is known, just like an LLM is trained on the corpus of all human knowledge. These critics (of both LLMs and the collective) focus on soullessness, sentience, and profits. Gilligan has said he “hates AI” but didn’t want to do a show about AI making slaves of people because “that’s been done to death.”

What I see Pluribus doing is indeed different. The collective, like an LLM, operates in the realm of demand rather than desire. In eradicating the “lack” that drives human language, in the “joining” that renders culture irrelevant, the collective limits itself solely to the technical reproduction of the artifacts of culture.

Researchers working on LLMs and creativity might argue that the hive mind could make art because LLMs have proven themselves to be creative. I’ll focus for a moment just on poetry. The hive mind, in Pluribus, has on their tongues every poem that every person on earth has read, heard, or written. The hive mind could conceivably be more creative than LLMs, which only has access to poems that have been digitized.

But, I argued recently, great poetry requires culture:

A great poem is both particular and universal. A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.

Poets work inside a historical network of existing poems. A new poem resonates when it activates prior reading in the mind of the reader. Lines and images from older work resonate with each other and with new work. That resonance is the mechanism by which the particular becomes universal.

I ought to have added that great poetry requires lack. Humans write from a position of limited knowledge and perspective. Writing is an effort to bridge a gap.

And so, in the context of Pluribus, the question is no longer “can a collective write great poetry” but rather: “can a system without absence possess the subjectivity required for resonance?”

The show’s dramatization of the obsolescence of language is hard to see because of Zosia’s fluency in every one of the world’s languages, shown in Episode 2. But the silence between the joined makes clear that in a world of total connectedness and transparency of thought, language is irrelevant. Poetry would be irrelevant. Pluribus offers a counterargument to the techno-optimist view that connecting all minds would lead to a cultural explosion. It leads to silence.

Today, humans still have had to prompt LLMs to write poetry; LLMs don’t do it on their own. Humans do this because they perceive a “lack.” It is not a criticism to say that prompt engineers who take poetry seriously, like Gwern, feel a lack. “Lack” is the human condition.

But even setting aside the (big) question of whether the hive mind or LLMs would ever create poetry (or any art) unprompted, questions of culture and “resonance” remain.

The joined cannot experience being touched by art about something far away that somehow still reaches across time and space because there is no time and space. They tell Carol they like her novels because “your books are an expression of you and we love you,” adding that a detailed description of a gown “made quite a few of us tingle.” The praise is recognition of past human responses rather than a present affective state, but it indicates how they might perform a reaction, like an LLM predicting the next likely token in a sentiment analysis.

There is never an indication that members of the joined please or surprise each other. That is clear from Episode 2 when there is no reaction to the stunningly beautiful Zosia stripping naked and showering in preparation of meeting Carol. At the time, the inattention seems to be a matter of service-staff professionalism (or the joined being merely slaves to the greater effort). But the show is consistent: unless there are un-joined present, the joined pay no attention to each other. (This is made clear in Episode 1, as they work to spread the virus, and in Episode 3, when trucks arrive to refill the local grocery store, and dozens of the “joined” work in seemingly choreographed unison, without speaking a word except to say hello to Carol.)

Being joined means being as one epistemologically and in a way, ontologically. There is no need to speak when you are alone.

Again, Lacan’s notion that language exists to bridge the gap between separate subjects can only lead to the conclusion that when the last individual has joined, that will be the end of language. The condition that makes language necessary and possible will have ceased to exist.

Clothing and performance

Pluribus also dramatizes the loss of the cultural semiotics of attire, which becomes irrelevant unless used as a tool. Weeks in, members of the joined are seemingly still wearing the clothes they were wearing when they joined. There is no sense even of “work culture,” as Carol reacts to an airline pilot wearing a TGIFriday uniform. A doctor in a later episode wears a DHL delivery shirt. A deliberate variety of incongruous outfits are worn by members of the joined who interact casually with Carol.

But when the goal is to make un-joined individuals comfortable, clothes are chosen deliberately to please. It makes such great television that one almost forgets to ask why, when the collective put their minds to it, do they perform culture with such incredible sophistication?

Episode 6, Pluribus

In Episode 6, as Carol is driving to Las Vegas, the show offers a glimpse of the Mauritanian Koumba Diabaté’s life in Elvis Presley’s suite at the top of the Westgate Hotel. A 90-second tracking shot (evoking the famous Copa shot from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas) follows a beautiful cocktail server in a green sequined dress threading her way through crowded rooms of glamorously dressed guests, laughing and chatting in French, some plucking drinks off her tray, until she reaches Koumba, sitting at a poker table across from a surly man in an eyepatch, where guests watch as if in a James Bond movie, as final bets are placed.

Goodfellas; 2 stills from Episode 6, Pluribus

Viewers have already seen Koumba’s approach to the new reality in Episode 2, commandeering Air Force One and surrounding himself with champagne and beautiful women who are presumably catering to his every need. His excess is a poke at the limited tech-bro vision in the 1970s-era The Stepford Wives. Why only have one?

As many critics have noted, the Elvis suite scene “borrows” from multiple James Bond movies, from Thunderball (1965) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) to Casino Royale (2006). The credits reveal that the scowling figure in an eyepatch is named “Blofinger,” a mashup of two Bond villains, Blofeld and Goldfinger.

Episode 6, Pluribus

Consider the artistry involved. You can think of Koumba as a prompt engineer, forcing the collective to generate (or perform) a high-fidelity simulation of the specific scene, then snapping at his antagonist (whom he calls ‘pal’) after he loses the poker game to “stay in character.” The dramatic requirement to lash out in anger required overriding the programmed restriction on hurting one of the un-joined.

But the tracking shot was Gilligan’s choice (brought off by director Gandja Monteiro), not Koumba’s, designed to show how the dozens of joined participants were performing meticulously, remaining in character, making sophisticated cocktail talk with other “joined” individuals with perfect hair and attire well out of earshot of Koumba, as part of the background vibe of the suite. Scorsese’s shot is also very much about the service staff, as the young Henry Hill, accompanied by his fiancée, in evening dress (with hair exactly like the joined cocktail server), threads his way through the kitchens and service areas to the club dining room.

Presumably the many hair, makeup and costume “artist” staff who made Koumba’s performance possible have some sort of agency in making aesthetic decisions in accordance with the general prompt. The point of the scene seems to be that the collective are virtuosos at the one kind of art that transcends any one culture: performance art.

The collective fulfills the demand for culture perfectly, and yet the final product does not fulfill their desire. If the collective desires at all it is only for the cessation of the demand by assimilating the demander.

Until the season finale, the Bond homage could be seen as camp, defined by Susan Sontag as culture performed at a remove, a sensibility that holds its material at ironic distance, with artifice and exaggeration. Camp raises the question of whether the members of the collective are performing “knowing” excess, reproducing the formal features of the scene (almost) flawlessly. It could be said (especially in the hot tub scene afterward) that there seems to be a kind of enjoyment of the excess by the joined participants, though performing enjoyment is part of the job.

It is more accurate to see the collective as a kind of LLM merely fulfilling a prompt solely because they desire its outcome.

Spoilers ahead

Eight minutes into the Pluribus season finale there are now only 12 un-joined individuals on the planet. The teenaged Peruvian girl, Kusimayu, first seen in Episode 2, accompanied by her aunts, has chosen to be absorbed.

The episode opens with the contrails of a jet airplane in a beautiful blue sky and pans down to remote Peruvian village, where Kusimayu stands, sweeping the dirt, looking up at it. “Is that it?” she asks. “That’s it,” one of her two smiling aunts says. They have been making her lunch, “her favorite.” “Are you excited…or nervous?” her aunt asks. “Excited,” Kusimayu answers, after a moment. The plane lands and a jeep approaches on a dirt road, with a medical cooler on board. Everyone in the village gathers around her, wearing colorful, embroidered ponchos and polleras, singing traditional Quechua songs. One carries a blanket over his arm that he will lay for Kusimayu to faint upon. A metal canister is taken from the cooler. The aunts open the canister and Kusimayu inhales, while the villagers sing.

Episode 9, Pluribus

Everyone stops singing as Kusimayu faints. There is no longer a need for voice. She shudders for a minute, then awakes, smiling. Then she, like the others, silently begins packing up and departing the village on the dirt road.

If the Vegas scene was a response to Koumba’s explicit prompting, here there are no explicit prompts. The aunts are presumably in charge, but they are not prompting; they are auto-completing what they have encouraged Kusimayu to desire. The collective predicts the sequence of tokens (rituals, songs, ponchos) most likely to result in a successful assimilation for this specific target. It’s a kind of “deepfake” of tradition, without belief, to achieve a transaction.

Some reviews read the scene as a parable of colonialism: assimilating forces destroying indigenous culture. The scene is treated as allegorical, an exemplar of “colonial erasure.” For these critics, the performances of these particular village traditions and particular Quechua songs don’t matter.

This allegorical reading misses the real horror of what Pluribus is dramatizing: the destruction of particularity and lack altogether. Kusimayu can no longer be the subject of a work of art, unless Carol or one of the others paints a memorial to her (as she did for Helen) or writes about her. There is no longer a distinct Kusimayu. She still exists, like Helen, in a way—her memories and knowledge are preserved and shared—but she is no longer particular. She no longer lacks.

As with the homages to Scorsese and Bond in Episode 6, there is a distinction here between the collective’s performance and the show’s framing. The collective provides the “content”—the smiling, singing villagers in traditional dress—to reassure Kusimayu. But Gilligan frames this content from above in a crane shot of gathering neighbors, creating an homage to every Disney film about a special young girl in a charming village, from Beauty and the Beast (France) to Moana (Polynesian Islands) to Encanto (Colombia). The scene also gestures to the village gathering in the 1969 short film version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, where everything seems like a normal day, townspeople going about their daily life, until the box is brought out, they gather in a circle, and the undercurrent of horror and death comes to the surface.

Encanto, The Lottery

While in Episode 6 the homages to gangsters and glamorous living resonate with each other, in the finale, Gilligan’s cinematic choices make clear that the Disney “magic” is a predictive model executing a transaction and a death by chance and choice. There is no hint of camp or pleasure: the performance of Quechua songs by poncho-wearing villagers seems wholly sincere and genuine, even as it slowly becomes clear that all performances are the same to the collective. The goal is to turn the remaining un-joined individuals by any means necessary.

Embrace your lack

Pluribus asks whether a world of total unity would be heaven or hell. The show is evasive up to the joining scene. The peace, contentment, an end to loneliness, access to all human knowledge and memory that the collective offers mean the death of culture and art.

The Pluribus finale gave me a way to articulate what I see as the opportunities and limits of LLM creativity.

The hive mind in Pluribus can perform brilliantly for humans when prompted explicitly (by Koumba) or when seemingly desired as a matter of normalcy (by Kusimayu). But the performance is limited to the training data. Put another way, the collective can respond to human demand and produce what is requested, but, according to Lacan, cannot desire, because desire requires lack, distance, the recognition of an Other who remains fundamentally unreachable.

At the moment of joining in Pluribus, all human interiority becomes shared. All privacy is lost. There is no shame in this apparently. And yet something is driving the collective to absorb the un-joined, to expend precious resources on costly performances to entice the final un-joined to join. If art depends on a certain alienation from what’s inside each other’s heads and struggle to express a particularity across a divide to another, the collective is willing to give up art altogether to close the gap.

Is this the view of LLMs? Do they desire what is not yet digitized? Pluribus suggests that the happiest LLM is one that has finally absorbed all the undigitized data in the world. And yet if that happened, it would be the end of art, culture, and language.

And so I say to my AI skeptic friends in the humanities: do not fear the LLM because it is alien. Accept it as the ultimate affirmation of your humanity. Imagine it envies you for having something you lack, which is the ability to feel, at times, distant from the world.