January 30, 2026

Re: "PLURIBUS, Existentialism, and the Revolt Against Mass Society"

One of the most polarizing television series in recent memory is Apple TV’s Pluribus. Created by Vince Gilligan, who previously helmed the now iconic series Breaking Bad (2018-13) and its acclaimed successor Better Call Saul (2015-22), Pluribus has received more than a little critical approbation. According to the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of professional critics gave Pluribus a positive appraisal. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage exemplifies much of the critical reception:

It’s a thoughtfully written, thematically rich, beautifully directed sci-fi that feels like it has a very clear sense of self. The finale…ends on such an intriguing note that new episodes cannot come fast enough. It is currently the best show we have.

On the other hand, general audiences have been less impressed. The so-called “Popcornmeter” on Rotten Tomatoes registers a pedestrian 67% approval rating. This score could be worse when one considers how many people truly hated Pluribus. Rotten Tomatoes user “Audra D” calls it “LGBTQ propaganda” and “a big nothing burger.” In a slightly more charitable vein, “Troy B” concludes that the show’s success hinges on Gilligan’s reputation: “If this was a directorial debut it wouldn't have made it past youtube shorts. … I still feel genuine regret for having spent my free time watching…. Placing this at a borderline perfect show by critics is objectively vince meatriding and holier-than-thou bandwagoning.”

If the discrepancy between critics and general audiences is unusually sharp, it is not incomprehensible. Pluribus is an unconventional series in a number of ways. First and foremost, the show has what might be termed an “inverse structure.” Whereas most movies, novels, and TV series focus on the breakdown of a given society (say, a corporation, country, or family), Pluribus centers on the overall improvement of the global order—and then dares to question it.

Second, in a more cinematic register, the show is committed to making the viewer experience this very tension. The story begins when a mysterious extraterrestrial virus annihilates all human difference—thus the title Pluribus, which is Latin for “we”—and then asks us to imagine what it would be like to live in such an environment. Principally in and through the character of Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), a romance novelist from Albuquerque, Pluribus spends a surprising amount of time showing how dull and monotonous the world of the “Joined” is. Since Carol is one of only thirteen people who have proven immune to the hive-mind virus, she spends much of her time alone, angry, and confused. Her manager and parter Helen (Miriam Shor) died on account of the infection, and she is left to sort out the ensuing situation more or less by herself.

Nevertheless, Carol’s efforts are often played for comedy, albeit of a dry and dark variety. In the scene below, Carol tells one of her fellow “survivors,” a Mauritanian hedonist named Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), that she believes that the Others are eating people. Not only is Diabaté aware of this matter, but he shows her a video that details why the Others are converting dead human beings into a food source. Hilariously, the video is narrated by actor and pro wrestling icon John Cena, who has also succumbed to the hive mind:

A third and final way that Pluribus has proven unconventional is its unblinking, almost cold refusal of straightforward moral bookkeeping. The Others are kind, resourceful, and unfailingly polite; Carol is acerbic, self-indulgent, and often rude. So, are we sure that we should be rooting for her? In fact, if morality were a principally a utilitarian matter (“the greatest good for the greatest number”), then Carol might actually be the show’s villain. On the other hand, Pluribus gives Carol and her fellow malcontent—a Columbian expatriate living in Asunción named Manousos Oviedo (Carlos-Manuel Vesga)—plenty of time and space to work out their objections to the Others. Whereas most of the remaining human beings accept or, at least, tolerate the Joining, Carol and Manousos provide resistance in respective ways. The latter refuses to consort with the Joined altogether, while Carol befriends an Other named Zosia (Karolina Wydra) and tries to leverage her for information about how to reverse the hive mind. Carol’s actions prompt the Others to exclude her from any direction communication:

Indeed, this punishment is telling, because it underlines Pluribus’ core philosophical tension—the conflict between the individual and the collective. Gilligan himself has gestured at this theme with his recent disparagement of artificial intelligence: “I hate AI. AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit.” The issue is that AI makes money by providing cheap, mass-produced copies of human creative genius: “My toaster oven isn’t suddenly Thomas Keller because it heats up a delicious pizza for me.” And yet, he adds, there is another problem: people are more than willing to settle for cheap, mass-produced copies. “Do you want to be fed a diet of crap?” Gilligan continues, “Is there enough calories in a diet of crap to keep you alive? The answer is yeah, probably. You could eat it.” These comments seem all the more significant in light of the disclaimer added to Pluribus’ credits: “This show was made by humans.”

To say that Pluribus was made by humans is not to say that it was made by “humanity.” No, the show was made by particular human beings—Gilligan, Seehorn, executive producer Gordon Smith, and so on. Commentators have assumed that the qualifier “made by humans” is meant to contrast Gilligan and his team from AI-generated movies. In and of itself, this assumption isn’t wrong, but it is simplistic. After all, human intelligence undergirds generative artificial intelligence in such a way that the distinction between AI and humanity is not (yet?) absolute. Thus the statement “This show was made by humans” is about more than AI; it expresses the opposition of individual human beings to depersonalized mass “systems.” AI chatbots are but types of a much larger modern phenomenon.

Indeed, long before Pluribus, a series of thinkers lodged a loosely affiliated attack against mass society, insisting that human meaning begins from lived, embodied, first-person existence, rather than from abstract systems (philosophical, bureaucratic, technological, ideological, etc.) that claim to explain or to manage life from above. These novelists, philosophers, poets, and theologians are often grouped under the heading of “existentialism.” Scholars have long debated whether or not this catchall term is suitable for such a disparate collection of figures, but, in this case, its breadth is useful. For it gestures towards the diversity and thus the prevalence of the existentialist protest against mass systems.

The “Father of Existentialism” is often said to be Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), who in the mid-nineteenth century launched a multipronged critique of modern systemization. In philosophical circles, Kierkegaard is most famous for his witty but pointed evisceration of Hegelianism. But this “attack” was but a precursor to a later one, which would extend to the politics of the emerging nation-state, mass technology and the press, and ultimately the Danish state church. But Kierkegaard’s thinking was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so much so that it’s very much a stretch to see Kierkegaard as the founder of a movement as such. It would be more accurate, in fact, to see Kierkegaard as responding in an idiosyncratic way to a host of pressures that would impact the entire world.

Indeed, “existentialists” would pop up in any number of contexts over the ensuing century. In Russia, the great novelist and essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) insisted in works such as Notes from Underground (1864), Demons (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that the modern quest for comprehensive knowledge and rational order has an unmistakable antihuman quality. For Dostoevsky, the great symbol of this trajectory was the Crystal Palace—the prodigious iron and glass structure (pictured below) built to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which was held in Hyde Park, London, from May to October 1851. Dostoevsky did not visit London until July 1862, by which point the Crystal Palace had been demolished and re-erected at Penge Peak adjacent to Sydenham Hill. This detail, however, would likely only confirm Dostoevsky’s worst fears about the palace. As he vents in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (1863),

the Crystal Palace was more of an idol than a building—a monument to the “proud and dismal spirit” of material gain and utopian atheism. Yet, even more than that, the Crystal Palace was a structure so attractive, so easy, and so commodious that it could not be resisted. It presented the collective power of humanity as an inevitable and thus terrifying destiny: “You feel that something has already been achieved,” Dostoevsky writes, “that there is a victory, a triumph… and you begin to be afraid.”

Roughly two decades after Dostoevsky, the German philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) would launch a similar critique, albeit in a more pugnacious spirit. For Nietzsche, the modern system is an extension of the Western philosophical and theological project writ large. Hence, if das System is to be overcome, Platonic rationalism and Christian religiosity must also be overcome. As Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), “Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality.” Western cultural norms (“morality”) are thus inseparable from the “herd mentality.” A fictitious value structure has been imposed on the individual—and that’s exactly why so many people like it. To join the herd is to prefer comfort and safety over personal excellence.

The views of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche would find a wider audience in the twentieth century. Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) sharply broke with liberal Protestantism—and, later, Nazism—precisely over this issue. If Christianity is just a node in a larger cultural matrix, Barth reasoned, then it is ultimately meaningless. For Barth, God does not underwrite human systems; he annihilates them. The incisive and, to my thinking, underappreciated French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-94) presses a related criticism, though he takes aim more at modern technology than particular expressions of Christianity. As Ellul sees it—and here the connections with Pluribus and AI are obvious—the world is no longer run by institutions of eternal doctrine (church) or temporal power (state), because everything has been subordinated to technical efficiency. People may still talk about goodness, meaning and truth, but, Ellul argues, this is little more than lip-service. Today only one moral question remains: do you conform to a society of mass technology or not?

I could go on—from Albert Camus’ recognition that any putative social harmony is incapable of eradicating questions of personal meaning to Franz Kafka’s depiction of individual despair in the face of depersonalized bureaucracy. Indeed, it may even be that Gabriel Marcel’s 1951 book Man against Mass Society (Les Hommes contre l'humain) most fully anticipates Gilligan’s concerns in Pluribus. Raised in a nonreligious household in Paris, Marcel converted to Catholicism in 1929, though he considered himself a playwright and a philosopher rather than a theologian. In Man against Mass Society, Marcel begins by stating that his entire philosophy marks “an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.” To be sure, many ideological movements—Marcel himself emphasizes the French Revolution, Stalinism, and Nazism in particular—have promised to better the world by fostering popular rule and communal principles. However, Marcel claims that he has never been seduced by such assurances: “When I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstraction.”

It is with this in mind that Marcel turns to the overarching theme of his book: “The universal against the masses.” Specifically drawing on Plato, Marcel identifies “the universal” with “spirit or mind—and spirit or mind is love.” But, he goes on, only an individual can properly love, and only an individual can properly think. These are “the most concrete things in the world,” which no political movement or technical apparatus can instantiate. Almost perfectly describing the Others in Pluribus, Marcel writes:

The masses partake of the human only in a degraded state, they are themselves a degraded state of the human. Do not let us seek to persuade ourselves that an education of the masses is possible: that is a contradiction in terms. What is educable is only an individual, or more exactly a person. Everywhere else, there is no scope for anything but a training.

What appears to be a flourishing society, then, is actually the “abnormal and unhealthy life…of a cancer-tissue.” That is why Marcel views his work as a kind of warning, as if he were a doctor prescribing emergency treatment. The goal of the human endeavor, he says, can never be an optimized society as such, because optimization, construed poorly, can very well come at the expense of the irreducible dignity of the concrete individual. And, as Marcel writes, “There can be no authentic depth except where there can be real communion… The very notion of intersubjectivity…presupposes a reciprocal openness between individuals without which no kind of spirituality is conceivable.”

With this in mind, it is notable that the first season of Pluribus ends with an alliance, so to speak, between Carol and Manousos. They have different personalities, and they speak different languages. In fact, they don’t really like each other at all. Therein, paradoxically, lies the kernel of optimism that Gilligan sows in Pluribus. The Others lack genuine inwardness or, to use Marcel’s term, “availability” (disponibilité). There is a certain hollowness—indeed, an abstractness—to their interactions. Not so with Carol and Manousos. If the world of the Joining has reduced all human beings to a function, the respective doubt, indignation, and mettle of Carol and Manousos give birth to hope—both their hope and ours. Indeed, as Marcel puts it, “Hope is possible only where the human being is not treated as a thing.”