Dispatch 28: On Pluribus and Addressing an Audience

carol from pluribus made me restructure my blog?

Me, you, and a hand grenade— Apple TV

Like everyone else, my husband and I are hooked on Pluribus. We watched the first episode at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving, at his parent’s house, after cheap Chardonnay and a Cuban cigar. I’ve thought about it every day since.

The Apple TV drama about one dogged woman’s fight against a hive mind apocalypse is prismatic: Every viewer sees a different debate shining through the screen. Is the show an allegorical warning about an AI-dominated future? Does the main character, Carol, embody hyper-individualism? Is she the version of it we want, or the one we deserve?

When I stare into the Pluribus prism, I see something uncomfortably familiar in Carol’s interactions with the “Others”—the rest of humanity that’s now bound together by a “kind of psychic glue.”

Carol doesn’t know how to address an Other. She speaks to one person, but she can’t shake the awareness that they represent the knowledge and memories of millions. She falters, often slipping between singular and plural pronouns, until the pressure and confusion mounts her speech into a scream.

When I’ve tried to write Dispatches over the past three weeks, I’ve felt my face twisting and reddening to match Carol’s. There are so many stories I want to tell you: Jennie, Kara, and I crying about womanhood and doing somersaults at 3 a.m.; hosting friends at our new home for the first time; playing pool and cracking dirty jokes with my husband’s Mamaw.

I used to write Dispatches with only the faces of the people I was describing in mind. Now I can’t shake the awareness that they represent the knowledge and memories of 275 other wonderful humans who receive these emails. Readers who may know the people in my stories, or know of them, and form their own impressions of them.

As we head into the new year, I want to address you—loved ones and favorite internet strangers—differently. Instead of only narrativizing slices of my life, I want to use this small corner of the internet to question, observe, argue, and think aloud together.

It’s not enough to describe how it felt to recognize an uncomfortable truth through Carol. I want to understand how that character reshaped my sense of our connection and invite you to test my experiences against your own.

All of that to say: Dispatches is evolving from a weekly blog of near-daily narratives into a series of flash essays about everyday life, culture, place, and attention, published once or twice per week. I’ll pair each dispatch with recommended readings and follow-up questions, in case you want to keep the conversation going.

As always, since you’re kind enough to read my dispatches, I’d love to read yours in return. Feel free to share a dispatch from your world in the comments or email me at dispatchprojectwrite@gmail.com. If you’re open to having it published in a future post, please let me know—I’d be honored to celebrate it with you.

Still thinking about it? Read this next:

• Decoder TV’s Pluribus reviews: I’m the type of TV viewer that reads the episode reviews before the credits roll, and I’ve been enjoying Decoder TV’s Substack analysis of this layered show.
  

• “the mirror-self”: I kept this fantastic essay by Kate Wagner open in another tab while (trying to) articulate to whom or for whom I write. Among many selves, Wagner dissects the “epistolary self,” which she describes as:

“a vessel into which matters of substance are poured back and forth from the vessel that is ourselves. It is the closest thing most of us get to addressing the one who can never answer, to caressing the very fringes of the real.”

I ask you / You ask me:

• If you were Carol, what question would you ask an Other to reveal facets of the hive mind scenario that haven’t been exposed yet?
  

• This is a loaded question, but who do you write for?