2:40 "Carol" is also the name of a happy song sung in unison for the benefit of someone else, as in, we went caroling

I genuinely appreciate the linkage to earlier work.  Everything evolves.  Thank you.

A For Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and Blood Music by Greg Bear also deal with similar themes.  Excellent video, thanks.

I love the show-however one sticky flaw [in my mind, anyway] is- How was the invasion completed simultaneously on a world wide scale? It would more naturally have occurred as waves of conversions.

the connections here are next level. i was familiar with all these titles and their thematic similarities, but the continuity of your analysis is so seamless. you picked up on things i’d missed or forgotten too like the 2001 clip. really appreciate your work!

I've watched a number of videos, and no one has mentioned Phillip K. Dick's empathy machine (which didn't get into the movie).

I experienced a taste of having my identity and individualism stripped away. When I arrived at Air Force boot camp they took our clothes, shaved our heads, and gave us all matching green uniforms to wear. When I saw myself in the mirror later, I was horrified to discover I no longer looked like myself. Instead, I now looked just like all the other new recruits. I felt violated and erased. Being part of Pluribus' hive sounds like a nightmare.

Carl Jung, which is the belief that the unconscious mind comprises the instincts of Jungian archetypes—innate symbols understood from birth in all humans. Everyone shares the same programing from birth. But  Ayan Rand and "Fountainhead" novel. All in school we learn learn biographies of great conquerors, inventors, politicians, diplomats, and type of nonconventional  people like in novel "Fountainhead".

The Children Who Built Victorian Britain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ByG7q74qg
Erected statues for James Watt but Leeds cotton mills and photos' of  hundred children without limbs, where are their gilded statues? People say we stand on shoulders of Giants, but mainly we stand on bones of workers who run mills. Really something wrong is with our society. I am not nihilists, but something cynical comes to mind - "Better them, than me".

I think the right balance is to be "individualistic" while still caring about others. Giving up your individuality for a collective seems always like an awful idea as in the example of the Borg.

I identify with Carol. Becoming a robot doesn't really appeal to me.

I am Team Carol (and Manousos) all the way!

I have only seen a couple of small scenes from this series. These were YouTube clips, which means I am shooting from the hip and my shot is analogous to living in Minnesota and using a 45 to hit Mars... My guess is that the main character thinks all of the "things" are ONLY happening to her... In other words she is the main character, a la The Trueman Show... But what if EVERY man, woman and child on Earth is having this same experience?

They would, of course have their own version of the experience, but at least to me, given that I have watched something like 8 minutes of the series, I think it would be far more fascinating if our hero believed she was the main character, but really everyone gets their own turn at living through this (what would I call it?)... this experience, this experiment, this life?

I certainly hope they don't go the Bad Robot route with the cheap ass, lazy "Mystery Box" garbage, utilized by what's his name? That idiot who created Lost... B.J. Puke-ms.

Great essay. Glad you referenced other media and inspirations diving into similar themes. Would you say you are pro-joining?

The idea of an hive mind and/or AI overlord should be deeply disturbing to everyone. You need to ask what kind of people does a hive mind AI economy appeal to? Well, elite globalists, for starters, who want maximum efficiency and minimum human chaos in order to steer their assets toward maximum profitability and to reduce threats to themselves by the rest of humanity, which greatly outnumbers them. The rest of humanity is lured by the appeal of "safety", but in fact this is really only hi-tech communism, which is the antithesis of freedom and creative invention. Struggle is the basis of all spiritual, physical, and intellectual growth.

I don't know, I'd still rather be a self centred, egotistical individual than a vegan lesbian space communist.

I found Pluribus really annoying, mainly due to the usual buildup of the hero story. I have never finished the series. But that is not important; it has no value and therefore adds nothing... puff, it's gone...

Somehow you missed how your utopia is extinction event they will starve to death as they cant kill pests or animals to maintain substance

Individualism vs. collectivism. It would be a polarity worth exploring if either actually existed

Polarities/concepts don't actually exist. But the human body, under the spell of the abstraction-creator known as language, experiences the world turned inside-out where the narratives of language become what is real, and the world as-it-is apart from the abstraction of language becomes unreal.

It's the original abstraction and separation of "I am" that is the first disassociation that creates the appearance of the phantoms of "the individual vs. the collective."

The "I am" is an illusion. It does not exist, so there is no problem of individual vs. collective to resolve in the first place.

But when almost every human body is under the spell of I am," well, that's simply a hallucination.

There is no "I am," but the hallucinatory state makes the body feel that it is a separate individual, and when the hallucinatory state of "I am" makes the body act as if it is a separate individual in relation to other bodies under the spell, it reinforces the sense that "I am" is real (and therefore the conundrum between individual and collective is real), but neither exist outside of the spell that language casts upon the human body.

Xosia is Eastern European. The fact that non-Whites adore a hive mind, is not jingoism, it is pitiful.

Vince Gilligan is about as far away from Perennialism as you can be....