Grand Theft automatons

STREAM OF STORIES

- RAJA SEN

A still from 'Pluribus'.

There can be no sentence that self-evident and yet—after watching Pluribus—it bears mentioning.

Pluribus, the sensational new Apple TV drama created by Breaking Bad maker Vince Gilligan, is about an earth where aliens have bound (nearly) the entire human population into a hivemind, where they efficiently live and share the world's resources with each knowing everything the other knows. This is a compelling what-if, with no war and no crime, and a world living and working as one, in perfect harmony.

However, within this hivemind, romance novelist Carol Sturka is just as good as William Shakespeare. She creates plots, characters, arcs. Her books affect and move readers. She tells stories. Therefore, in the megabrain, she performs the same function. I was already appalled by the premise of forking over my freewill—not to mention the very idea of everybody on the planet knowing my murkiest secrets—but this frightened the hell out of me. Imagine a world where our taste was the same. Imagine a world where everything was exactly as good as everything else.

Give me war instead.