All posts tagged: hive

The Colonized Hive Mind | Mind Matters

The Colonized Hive Mind | Mind Matters

Do you ever feel a sense of despair at how boring and clone-like some people are? You probably experienced this with some dull family/extended-family members or old friends, as you sit alone sober in the kitchen at parties or get-togethers. Booze is a good antidote for this, as it stupefies the intellect, but not everyone drinks alcohol. I’m no intellectual snob, but I’ve often felt a bit like the late British historian and TV broadcaster, Kenneth Clarke, sitting at a table with TV celebs the Kardashian’s, as they celebrate Kim’s latest rear-end implants, although that is something Kenneth’s late sleazy son, Alan, would’ve relished! (Kenneth Clarke, not to be confused with the Tory politician who shares the same name, was a refined, classy gentleman who narrated a TV series during the late 1960s called Civilization. He sounded snobbish but he wasn’t a snob. If he saw what passes for civilization today, he’d be spinning in his grave!) But back to Normies: It’s difficult and irritating being surrounded by many people who seem to not care …

Inside The Hive: What Manchesterism Actually Means

Inside The Hive: What Manchesterism Actually Means

Andy Burnham and Manchesterism (Illustration by Tracy Worrall) 7 min read2 hr What would Burnham’s Britain look like? Ros Taylor explores the Manchester mayor’s governing philosophy – derided by some as more a vibe than a replicable political model, but celebrated by others as key to the city’s recent success The first hint of Manchesterism in the public consciousness came at an outdoor press conference in October 2020, when Andy Burnham heard about the latest Covid restrictions to be imposed on the city and the money available for it. In a moment that launched a thousand memes, the mayor looked down at his adviser’s phone bearing the news and grimaced. “I mean, it’s brutal, isn’t it?” he said. “This is not right. They should not be doing this – grinding people down: £22m to fight the situation we are in is frankly disgraceful.” Boris Johnson was the prime minister then, but the refrain has persisted: ‘Manchester is being done down by Westminster and Whitehall, deprived of the autonomy it needs to thrive and …

How Does the Hive Mind Work in ‘Pluribus?

How Does the Hive Mind Work in ‘Pluribus?

You know what’s great about a show like Pluribus? It’s that we don’t really know what’s going on, so we get to speculate. Just like real life! In case you haven’t seen this show, which just finished its first season, here’s a quick recap: A radio transmission arrives from a planet 600 light years away, and the message turns out to be RNA code for an alien virus. Some fool synthesizes it, and it infects almost everyone on Earth, causing them to act as one entity—a hive mind with common goals, values, knowledge, everything. The show’s title comes from the old US motto “E pluribus unum”—out of many, one. Only 13 people remain immune, including Carol Sturka, an ornery romance novelist who’s intent on keeping her individuality, against all efforts by the collective to absorb her. We don’t know for sure how the hive mind works, but it seems that the plurbs (the infected people) commune with each other unconsciously through radio waves. Talk to one of them and you talk to all of them. …

From “Sinners” to “Pluribus,” 2025 was the year of the hive mind

From “Sinners” to “Pluribus,” 2025 was the year of the hive mind

For a few exuberant days, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), the despondent heroine of “Pluribus,” almost convinces herself to be happy at the end of the world. That wouldn’t be much of a challenge for most people in her position, since Carol’s apocalypse is curated to please her. As one of a dozen people worldwide immune to a phenomenon called the Joining, which unified billions of people into a blissed-out hive mind, Carol’s well-being becomes everyone else’s mission. It takes her a while to get used to that. First, she had to stop fighting the Others, the term for the billions united in groupthink, and accept if not entirely trust that the collective love they profess to have for her is real. That required modulating her anger and recognizing she prefers the company of her designated companion, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), to sullen loneliness. The hive mind is one of genre fiction’s most reliably unsettling tropes, embodying our native fear of being overwhelmed by a force organized around a singular purpose. In the season finale, “La Chica …