I found the relationship with animals to be interesting. Though the collective won't harm animals in any way, it also has no relationship with them. We see this at the end of Kusimayu's joining, where as they walk out of the village the goat she was tending follows here for a bit, and then looks like it realizes it is being abandoned.
The show is also an interesting contrast with Severance, which I'm watching now.
I admire this essay! The Lacanian through-line helps me see Pluribus’ conceptual bite, and “embrace your lack” is a cheeky invite.
You lead me to one point of possibly productive trouble: the Joined in your account feels too docile. In psychoanalytic terms, the pre- or extra-linguistic is not simply plenitude: it’s also the realm of drive, excitation, polymorphous perversity. Even if desire requires lack, it’s not obvious that, lacking lack, the Joined would simply “peace out” rather than “enjoy” different libidinal economies—compulsion, jouissance, immediate and dangerous pleasure.
And this connects to the show’s treatment of culture. Pluribus seems to imagine cultures as removable veils—difference as costume—after which one finds not an average of norms but something like a default substrate: Western, secular, efficient, ascetic. That substitution feels worth naming. The Joined do not deliver a frenzy of intensities; they deliver something closer to managerial homeostasis.
If Pluribus idealizes lacking-lack as regulation, what does this teach us about LLMs—and about what we think art, culture, and language are for? Are they merely compensatory bridges over constitutive absence (Freud/Lacan), or practices that actively produce distance and opacity as values? The show’s horror is plausibly Lacanian (lack abolished, desire extinguished), but it also gestures to another possibility (Deleuze) in which the end of lack would not yield silence so much as an unleashed economy of intensities. That Pluribus cannot imagine this alternative seems as revealing.
"Pluribus seems to imagine cultures as removable veils—difference as costume—after which one finds not an average of norms but something like a default substrate" -- yes I love this!
One pleasure of the show: imagining the "We" as a culture of its own rather than either an average of all human cultures or as humans minus a culture—which, I argued above, seems impossible, given psychoanalysis. Would there even be something like the unconscious in the plural: what could they *not* know that they know, to speak like Zizek? What repressed could be discovered/created? The whys and whithers of this new world are weird.
The Joined do not lack in human terms, as the essay and comment make clear. But they DO lack, and severely, in extra-human terms.
Their purpose is to assimilate other extraterrestrial intelligences and they plan to (are) turn the entire productive resources of the planet to discovering extraterrestrials and spreading their contagion.
The show has done a good job getting us to focus on the humanity, but the Joined are effectively carriers of an alien virus. Dare I say a mind-virus. It reminds me of toxoplasmosis, with apocryphally is a virus carried by cats that infects people’s brains to make them like cats, increasing the spread of cats and therefore the virus.
In a “Selfish Gene” lens, the data, in the form of an RNA sequence, is the carrier of the thing that wants. And it wants to spread.
Whatever race sent the transmission in Ep 1, it is possible they consumed the entire resources of their home planet(s) to accomplish the sending. Maybe there is nothing left back there but a smoking ball of lava, the virus having consumed that host in an effort to infect another.
I’d have to rewatch Ep 1 to see if the transmission were wide spread, or focused precisely on the Earth. Seems like a big distinction in terms of the technique of spread.
I like the “selfish gene / mind-virus” thing, but I’m not sure it maps cleanly onto Lacanian “lack” or psychoanalytic desire. Replicators “want” only in the teleonomic sense (they behave as if purposive); that’s not lack, not the gap necessary for symbolization, not desire as a structured impossibility. And narratively, if Pluribus were primarily a spread story, we’d expect the Joined to reorganize the planet around outward transmission—energy capture, launch capacity, probes/antennas, etc.—with “joining everyone” as a mere precondition. Instead the show gives us something stranger: an ethicized, quasi-ascetic conversion apparatus, where culture and care only function as vectors for total assimilation. That difference feels important: neither entropy machine, maximizing burn, nor space plague amping contagion, Pluribus is smiley face biopower that eats its own tale. It’s like green burial for everyone. The writers are treating the Joined as the most humane way to end humanity: better to fade away, forget everything, never have been, than to burn out. Nietzsche: “Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
I am so appreciative of observations in the comments that take things in such brilliant directions. "Pluribus is smiley face biopower that eats its own tale. It’s like green burial for everyone." Yes read this.
Let me suggest we separate this into two scopes. Because I think the analysis of lack and its motivating force to create elaborate symbols to try to connect, whether via art, language, culture or something else, is very interesting and I don't have that much to contribute, although I am reading eagerly.
The second scope is the spread story and the multi-star-system one. Clearly the signal arrived from off-planet as another intelligence. Zosia made some comments about "those who shared their gift" and "we have to share it with others" -- "those" "we" and "others" in my mind refers to those who sent the signal; we the human joined; and those other races in the universe.
If the Joined condition were terminal, not for the human race but for the virus (or the organism that created the virus; and perhaps "seed" is more appropriate than "virus"), what would have launched the signal to the Earth to begin with? Perhaps it is a central entity targeting all of the intelligences it can find, each of which is terminal, but the metaphor of a virus spreading randomly and then using and ultimately consuming its host in order to find more hosts seems more robust.
It could be that Gilligan intended the off-world signal as a storytelling device to get everyone joined, and then explore the dimensions you are talking about in the intersection between the joined and the independent. He could have the entire series take place here and never refer back to the "assimilation" arc that is implied, like setting a play in a foxhole and never resolving anything about the greater war at all.
Much like a reader could say, hey what else is going on out there in the war? What's happening over in the Pacific while we're here on the Eastern Front? We could say, what is going on in the rest of the world? For the other seven billion people, I don't imagine they are just standing around waiting for Carol to be assimilated. They are going on with whatever other project there is. It could be that Gilligan as a storyteller has decided not to focus on that, which is completely fine.
Hollis' analysis of the Peru scene helps us see that, within the story's logic, any particular human culture is ameliorative, merely a comfort: once the Quechua girl, Kusimayu, joins, the facade of daily life crumbles, which is chilling. Parenthetically, the woman who plays Kusimayu, Darinka Arones, is shown—can't remember how I saw it—crying when she sees that scene because of her own cultural pride. Which captures an irony that the showrunners exploit: the fiction shows us culture as easily simulated, easily put on and taken off; the fiction requires (on the part of the actors) something similar; but the latter requires some bite into the real, what we still call authenticity. It's weird to see this actor cry (over the latter) having successfully and powerfully presented the former!
Anyway, I think this contrast matters and may be the point or a point. Manousos and Carol are showing us plucky individualism, loyalty to each other (eventually) and to their species being. But I'm not sure the show really prizes them and their choices, their ability to choose: when Manousos screams at... I can't remember who, to force a "reboot," we know that he just killed millions of people/sheeple. This is not Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the Borg of Next Gen. It's a stranger game. That's why I think the game as an END-OF-EVERYTHING game is more compelling than a "plot" for domination or resource extraction. There will be no new babies. There will be green dreams. Our protagonists are fighting to make their own mess not to make a better world for themselves or for anyone else. That's interesting.
I guess I think that the virus could (simply) be the senders' way of simply nipping in the bud cultures sophisticated enough technologically to receive their message. Cute. Deadly. Smart. That's why the Joined all have, um, hospice nurse vibes: they're just there to make everyone as comfortable as possible as the inevitable dawns, either slowly (everyone dies eventually) or more quickly (planes fall out of the sky).
I am sure that Gilligan is familiar enough with those well-trodden (although still fun!) scifi tropes to be easily able to subvert them, or hint-and-dodge at them to play with audience expectations. Hopefully he will take us somewhere new.
Interesting idea that the communication was a logic bomb to dead-end any culture that takes its message seriously! I was going to ask, why didn't they just send an immediately lethal message. But perhaps the program is more sophisticated and has to run awhile to have the affected species' worth be properly judged. Either they don't understand the message and there is still time for them to mature, or they do understand the message and are sophisticated enough to not just turn it loose. Or in between: They opened the box, but now they have to complete the ordeal to be judged.
.. in all discussions of this show I have in the back of my mind that one flashback that the date counter placed at like seven years in the future, when Carol and her wife are at the Ice Hotel. Like, isn't Helen dead and her body rotted? Did Carol acquiese and is now in some matrix-style dream theater? I think that's Gilligan's way of telling us that we have no idea what's really going on because there's no way to connect that scene to the present using the show's logic as we currently understand it.
The ice hotel! I think it was seven years in the past. That's why, when Zosia mentions it, Carol knows that she's been rooting around in Helen's memories.
I'm still attracted to my hospice metaphor: the virus isn't there to instantly wipe out a particular species, it's to have that species, humanity, put everything safely back in order before its ultimate extinction... If I'm right, then I would expect the Joined to dismantle cities, safely dispose of all wastes, shut down everything that could affect the future evolution of other species. But they can't do this until the Unjoined have either joined or died naturally, because it would be too upsetting to the latter. And as we've learned, the Joined have an imperative to keep the Unjoined happy and to convert them if the consent. And now they have the means to do so.
Hollis Robbins’s essay Embrace Your Lack, prompted by Pluribus, sharpened a thought I had been circling. What differentiates outcomes in human–LLM interaction is not intelligence itself but the stance taken toward curiosity. The crucial distinction is not between human and machine but between prompt engineers and prompt poets. Prompt engineers operate infrastructurally, managing curiosity as a variable to be constrained and resolved within a closed system. Prompt poets embrace curiosity as a condition to be sustained rather than satisfied. Where the engineer optimises, the poet interrogates; where one closes pathways, the other works along the fault line. Prompt poetry is inquiry: curiosity held intact and organised around uncertainty. In this light, the singularity is not a culmination of intelligence but the moment a fully integrated collective system believes it has all the answers and therefore stops asking questions. Culture and innovation persist only where curiosity is allowed to remain unanswered.
After reading all the comments, I can only, in our society, feel I'm one of the unjoined. I have a cell phone for messaging a very few follks, most incoming calls are unanswered. I have a computer, but don't watch TV, don't follow memes, have only one program I watch on TV (Colbert in pieces on YT.) Sometimes I wander lonely as a cloud through my neighborhood, sometimes I steer my electric box through some aspect of the Bay area. Kaiser does my health, Safeway my food, Solar powers my car. I feel no lack of culture, no meaningful alienation from humanity, nor embrace it. Psychologize away! It's fun for you.
Bob Dylan was wrong, I think...I'm not busy dying. Born in'40, before the Great Patriotic War. My ethnic origins were Hungarian (Visc, now Vishkovo in SW Ukraine.) I have a blue and yellow flag. Is that cultural rejection? Or anomie?
That's exactly where human value lies. AI can simulate the technical features of art, it can create something that looks impressive, but it lacks the subjectivity required for authentic creation. Thank you for this insightful piece!🦩
Very insightful. So much of the show is hidden in these small details. It is so mundane in its horror and beauty. There is a quiet, creeping sense of invasion, but also, yes, this desire from the Joined for Carol and the others. I wonder how the show will explore the ideas of re-differentiation, as it seems that it what Manousos has edged into discovering. I'm also trying to write something on the series, as it stirred up a lot of ideas after the finale. But this is a brilliant look into how this story reflects current anxieties about our interactions with LLMs. So interesting as I believe that Gilligan did not actually intend for this connection, though I may be mistaken there...
There are some fascinating Reddit threads about animals and sound waves that I'm following closely. So much to talk about beyond LLMs! Such a rich series!
Auden's great sonnet to his friend Benjamin Britten! Yes this is apt and thank you for bringing it into the conversation. It made me think how little music has mattered to the plot so far, though I suspect the whole sound wave subplot will matter.
Love this framing of lack. It reminds me of Westworld (2016): "It was Arnold's key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening; suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be." It seems like there are so many ready parallels between the hosts and the hivemind.
PS. Maybe the spoiler tag should be higher? I've watched the whole show, but some of the pre-spoiler tag observations seem like they might spoil earlier episodes.
I am not attempting to create more spoilers but I do have to ask an obvious question- do any of the unjoined ever request that the hive to unjoin any of their members? Were I put in the place of one of the 13, I would almost instantly ask for this once it became clear the hive was serving me.
What do the owners of LLMs lack which drives them to drive the tech into our lives? I am curious to find out if there’s an overmind, a controller unrevealed in this story, and whether there’s some lesson of totality and being lurking.
One striking absence is Carol's lack of curiosity about the origins/plans/fate/history of the source of the virus, especially in light of the inabiity of the collective to lie. So many basic questions arise but none ever seem to cross Carol's mind. What kind of life form generated the virus? What was their fate? How many other civilizations have been infected? What is the expected lifespan of the collective on Earth? Will the Earth collective be expected to send more code out into space? And what about the minor matter of how does the virus actually work to generate the collective outcome? While the show was successful in engaging interest and had many of the positive aspects mentioned, it seems that Carol could have used some of the enormous amount of time on her hands to ask some questions.....
I found the relationship with animals to be interesting. Though the collective won't harm animals in any way, it also has no relationship with them. We see this at the end of Kusimayu's joining, where as they walk out of the village the goat she was tending follows here for a bit, and then looks like it realizes it is being abandoned.
The show is also an interesting contrast with Severance, which I'm watching now.
That was very sad. The goat still has the "lack" but the joined are uninterested in filling it it.
I admire this essay! The Lacanian through-line helps me see Pluribus’ conceptual bite, and “embrace your lack” is a cheeky invite.
You lead me to one point of possibly productive trouble: the Joined in your account feels too docile. In psychoanalytic terms, the pre- or extra-linguistic is not simply plenitude: it’s also the realm of drive, excitation, polymorphous perversity. Even if desire requires lack, it’s not obvious that, lacking lack, the Joined would simply “peace out” rather than “enjoy” different libidinal economies—compulsion, jouissance, immediate and dangerous pleasure.
And this connects to the show’s treatment of culture. Pluribus seems to imagine cultures as removable veils—difference as costume—after which one finds not an average of norms but something like a default substrate: Western, secular, efficient, ascetic. That substitution feels worth naming. The Joined do not deliver a frenzy of intensities; they deliver something closer to managerial homeostasis.
If Pluribus idealizes lacking-lack as regulation, what does this teach us about LLMs—and about what we think art, culture, and language are for? Are they merely compensatory bridges over constitutive absence (Freud/Lacan), or practices that actively produce distance and opacity as values? The show’s horror is plausibly Lacanian (lack abolished, desire extinguished), but it also gestures to another possibility (Deleuze) in which the end of lack would not yield silence so much as an unleashed economy of intensities. That Pluribus cannot imagine this alternative seems as revealing.
"Pluribus seems to imagine cultures as removable veils—difference as costume—after which one finds not an average of norms but something like a default substrate" -- yes I love this!
One pleasure of the show: imagining the "We" as a culture of its own rather than either an average of all human cultures or as humans minus a culture—which, I argued above, seems impossible, given psychoanalysis. Would there even be something like the unconscious in the plural: what could they *not* know that they know, to speak like Zizek? What repressed could be discovered/created? The whys and whithers of this new world are weird.
The Joined do not lack in human terms, as the essay and comment make clear. But they DO lack, and severely, in extra-human terms.
Their purpose is to assimilate other extraterrestrial intelligences and they plan to (are) turn the entire productive resources of the planet to discovering extraterrestrials and spreading their contagion.
The show has done a good job getting us to focus on the humanity, but the Joined are effectively carriers of an alien virus. Dare I say a mind-virus. It reminds me of toxoplasmosis, with apocryphally is a virus carried by cats that infects people’s brains to make them like cats, increasing the spread of cats and therefore the virus.
In a “Selfish Gene” lens, the data, in the form of an RNA sequence, is the carrier of the thing that wants. And it wants to spread.
Whatever race sent the transmission in Ep 1, it is possible they consumed the entire resources of their home planet(s) to accomplish the sending. Maybe there is nothing left back there but a smoking ball of lava, the virus having consumed that host in an effort to infect another.
I’d have to rewatch Ep 1 to see if the transmission were wide spread, or focused precisely on the Earth. Seems like a big distinction in terms of the technique of spread.
I like the “selfish gene / mind-virus” thing, but I’m not sure it maps cleanly onto Lacanian “lack” or psychoanalytic desire. Replicators “want” only in the teleonomic sense (they behave as if purposive); that’s not lack, not the gap necessary for symbolization, not desire as a structured impossibility. And narratively, if Pluribus were primarily a spread story, we’d expect the Joined to reorganize the planet around outward transmission—energy capture, launch capacity, probes/antennas, etc.—with “joining everyone” as a mere precondition. Instead the show gives us something stranger: an ethicized, quasi-ascetic conversion apparatus, where culture and care only function as vectors for total assimilation. That difference feels important: neither entropy machine, maximizing burn, nor space plague amping contagion, Pluribus is smiley face biopower that eats its own tale. It’s like green burial for everyone. The writers are treating the Joined as the most humane way to end humanity: better to fade away, forget everything, never have been, than to burn out. Nietzsche: “Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
I am so appreciative of observations in the comments that take things in such brilliant directions. "Pluribus is smiley face biopower that eats its own tale. It’s like green burial for everyone." Yes read this.
omg I love this and think you are right: "Pluribus is smiley face biopower that eats its own tale. It’s like green burial for everyone."
Ha! Tale is a typo; meant to write "tail," but "tale" is better!
I saw and heard both: own it!!!
Let me suggest we separate this into two scopes. Because I think the analysis of lack and its motivating force to create elaborate symbols to try to connect, whether via art, language, culture or something else, is very interesting and I don't have that much to contribute, although I am reading eagerly.
The second scope is the spread story and the multi-star-system one. Clearly the signal arrived from off-planet as another intelligence. Zosia made some comments about "those who shared their gift" and "we have to share it with others" -- "those" "we" and "others" in my mind refers to those who sent the signal; we the human joined; and those other races in the universe.
If the Joined condition were terminal, not for the human race but for the virus (or the organism that created the virus; and perhaps "seed" is more appropriate than "virus"), what would have launched the signal to the Earth to begin with? Perhaps it is a central entity targeting all of the intelligences it can find, each of which is terminal, but the metaphor of a virus spreading randomly and then using and ultimately consuming its host in order to find more hosts seems more robust.
It could be that Gilligan intended the off-world signal as a storytelling device to get everyone joined, and then explore the dimensions you are talking about in the intersection between the joined and the independent. He could have the entire series take place here and never refer back to the "assimilation" arc that is implied, like setting a play in a foxhole and never resolving anything about the greater war at all.
Much like a reader could say, hey what else is going on out there in the war? What's happening over in the Pacific while we're here on the Eastern Front? We could say, what is going on in the rest of the world? For the other seven billion people, I don't imagine they are just standing around waiting for Carol to be assimilated. They are going on with whatever other project there is. It could be that Gilligan as a storyteller has decided not to focus on that, which is completely fine.
Hollis' analysis of the Peru scene helps us see that, within the story's logic, any particular human culture is ameliorative, merely a comfort: once the Quechua girl, Kusimayu, joins, the facade of daily life crumbles, which is chilling. Parenthetically, the woman who plays Kusimayu, Darinka Arones, is shown—can't remember how I saw it—crying when she sees that scene because of her own cultural pride. Which captures an irony that the showrunners exploit: the fiction shows us culture as easily simulated, easily put on and taken off; the fiction requires (on the part of the actors) something similar; but the latter requires some bite into the real, what we still call authenticity. It's weird to see this actor cry (over the latter) having successfully and powerfully presented the former!
Anyway, I think this contrast matters and may be the point or a point. Manousos and Carol are showing us plucky individualism, loyalty to each other (eventually) and to their species being. But I'm not sure the show really prizes them and their choices, their ability to choose: when Manousos screams at... I can't remember who, to force a "reboot," we know that he just killed millions of people/sheeple. This is not Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the Borg of Next Gen. It's a stranger game. That's why I think the game as an END-OF-EVERYTHING game is more compelling than a "plot" for domination or resource extraction. There will be no new babies. There will be green dreams. Our protagonists are fighting to make their own mess not to make a better world for themselves or for anyone else. That's interesting.
I guess I think that the virus could (simply) be the senders' way of simply nipping in the bud cultures sophisticated enough technologically to receive their message. Cute. Deadly. Smart. That's why the Joined all have, um, hospice nurse vibes: they're just there to make everyone as comfortable as possible as the inevitable dawns, either slowly (everyone dies eventually) or more quickly (planes fall out of the sky).
I am sure that Gilligan is familiar enough with those well-trodden (although still fun!) scifi tropes to be easily able to subvert them, or hint-and-dodge at them to play with audience expectations. Hopefully he will take us somewhere new.
Interesting idea that the communication was a logic bomb to dead-end any culture that takes its message seriously! I was going to ask, why didn't they just send an immediately lethal message. But perhaps the program is more sophisticated and has to run awhile to have the affected species' worth be properly judged. Either they don't understand the message and there is still time for them to mature, or they do understand the message and are sophisticated enough to not just turn it loose. Or in between: They opened the box, but now they have to complete the ordeal to be judged.
.. in all discussions of this show I have in the back of my mind that one flashback that the date counter placed at like seven years in the future, when Carol and her wife are at the Ice Hotel. Like, isn't Helen dead and her body rotted? Did Carol acquiese and is now in some matrix-style dream theater? I think that's Gilligan's way of telling us that we have no idea what's really going on because there's no way to connect that scene to the present using the show's logic as we currently understand it.
The ice hotel! I think it was seven years in the past. That's why, when Zosia mentions it, Carol knows that she's been rooting around in Helen's memories.
I'm still attracted to my hospice metaphor: the virus isn't there to instantly wipe out a particular species, it's to have that species, humanity, put everything safely back in order before its ultimate extinction... If I'm right, then I would expect the Joined to dismantle cities, safely dispose of all wastes, shut down everything that could affect the future evolution of other species. But they can't do this until the Unjoined have either joined or died naturally, because it would be too upsetting to the latter. And as we've learned, the Joined have an imperative to keep the Unjoined happy and to convert them if the consent. And now they have the means to do so.
I’ve embraced my lack by somehow not knowing anything about Pluribus until I read Hollis’ essay.
Hollis Robbins’s essay Embrace Your Lack, prompted by Pluribus, sharpened a thought I had been circling. What differentiates outcomes in human–LLM interaction is not intelligence itself but the stance taken toward curiosity. The crucial distinction is not between human and machine but between prompt engineers and prompt poets. Prompt engineers operate infrastructurally, managing curiosity as a variable to be constrained and resolved within a closed system. Prompt poets embrace curiosity as a condition to be sustained rather than satisfied. Where the engineer optimises, the poet interrogates; where one closes pathways, the other works along the fault line. Prompt poetry is inquiry: curiosity held intact and organised around uncertainty. In this light, the singularity is not a culmination of intelligence but the moment a fully integrated collective system believes it has all the answers and therefore stops asking questions. Culture and innovation persist only where curiosity is allowed to remain unanswered.
This reminds me of The Truman Show, with 13 Trumans and The Director is all knowledge.
Thanks for this, Hollis! I see a lot of Hartmut Rosa (The Uncontrollability of the World, Resonance, etc.) in here.
Yes! And thank you.
After reading all the comments, I can only, in our society, feel I'm one of the unjoined. I have a cell phone for messaging a very few follks, most incoming calls are unanswered. I have a computer, but don't watch TV, don't follow memes, have only one program I watch on TV (Colbert in pieces on YT.) Sometimes I wander lonely as a cloud through my neighborhood, sometimes I steer my electric box through some aspect of the Bay area. Kaiser does my health, Safeway my food, Solar powers my car. I feel no lack of culture, no meaningful alienation from humanity, nor embrace it. Psychologize away! It's fun for you.
Bob Dylan was wrong, I think...I'm not busy dying. Born in'40, before the Great Patriotic War. My ethnic origins were Hungarian (Visc, now Vishkovo in SW Ukraine.) I have a blue and yellow flag. Is that cultural rejection? Or anomie?
That's exactly where human value lies. AI can simulate the technical features of art, it can create something that looks impressive, but it lacks the subjectivity required for authentic creation. Thank you for this insightful piece!🦩
Thank you!
Apposite use of scare quotes to refer to Las Vegas’ culture.
Very insightful. So much of the show is hidden in these small details. It is so mundane in its horror and beauty. There is a quiet, creeping sense of invasion, but also, yes, this desire from the Joined for Carol and the others. I wonder how the show will explore the ideas of re-differentiation, as it seems that it what Manousos has edged into discovering. I'm also trying to write something on the series, as it stirred up a lot of ideas after the finale. But this is a brilliant look into how this story reflects current anxieties about our interactions with LLMs. So interesting as I believe that Gilligan did not actually intend for this connection, though I may be mistaken there...
There are some fascinating Reddit threads about animals and sound waves that I'm following closely. So much to talk about beyond LLMs! Such a rich series!
W.H. Auden got at the creative possibilities of the "lack" in his poem The Composer:
All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.
From Life to Art by painstaking adaption
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.
Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;
You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.
Auden's great sonnet to his friend Benjamin Britten! Yes this is apt and thank you for bringing it into the conversation. It made me think how little music has mattered to the plot so far, though I suspect the whole sound wave subplot will matter.
Thank you!
Love this framing of lack. It reminds me of Westworld (2016): "It was Arnold's key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening; suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be." It seems like there are so many ready parallels between the hosts and the hivemind.
PS. Maybe the spoiler tag should be higher? I've watched the whole show, but some of the pre-spoiler tag observations seem like they might spoil earlier episodes.
I'll make a note re: spoilers -- thank you! And yes I felt a lot of Westworld vibe....
Reminds me of the Lurianic Kabbalah principle of divine restraint to create a previously lacking lack that enables human creativity/ethics/love.
I am not attempting to create more spoilers but I do have to ask an obvious question- do any of the unjoined ever request that the hive to unjoin any of their members? Were I put in the place of one of the 13, I would almost instantly ask for this once it became clear the hive was serving me.
So would I!! In the first season, at least, the joined are figuring things out on the fly and don't quite know their own powers...
What do the owners of LLMs lack which drives them to drive the tech into our lives? I am curious to find out if there’s an overmind, a controller unrevealed in this story, and whether there’s some lesson of totality and being lurking.
That is a good question!
One striking absence is Carol's lack of curiosity about the origins/plans/fate/history of the source of the virus, especially in light of the inabiity of the collective to lie. So many basic questions arise but none ever seem to cross Carol's mind. What kind of life form generated the virus? What was their fate? How many other civilizations have been infected? What is the expected lifespan of the collective on Earth? Will the Earth collective be expected to send more code out into space? And what about the minor matter of how does the virus actually work to generate the collective outcome? While the show was successful in engaging interest and had many of the positive aspects mentioned, it seems that Carol could have used some of the enormous amount of time on her hands to ask some questions.....