What does Netflix’s “Pluribus” show us about human cooperation? Spoilers included.
In “Pluribus,” humanity is presented with an evolutionary ultimatum. An alien virus rapidly transforms the global population into a unified hive mind—a single, seamless consciousness where the concept of “I” dissolves into “we.” This collective, reminiscent of eusocial insects like ants or bees, operates with perfect optimality. There is no conflict and no self-interest. Resources are conglomerated into central repositories, knowledge is universally shared, and every action is optimized for the efficiency and survival of the whole.
The show’s dramatic tension, however, lies with the handful of remaining uninfected humans. As they scramble to survive in a world redesigned for the hive, their desperate attempts to work together showcase the profound fragility of human cooperation. Their alliances are shaky, their goals are misaligned, and trust is lacking. One character seeks only personal pleasure. Another is paralyzed by the desire to reconnect with now-hived family members. The protagonist, Carol, finds herself tragically isolated in her quest to save humanity. She tries to rally others by sharing critical information—a tactic of informational asymmetry—but it fails. No one shares her ultimate goal; there is no overlapping interest.
This struggle shows a truth “Pluribus” unveils: The hive’s cooperation is a biological fait accompli, while human cooperation is a fragile, hard-won cultural achievement. We are not designed for selfless collectivism. Our cooperation is a complex negotiation, constantly threatened by the very evolutionary pressures that also make it possible: kin preference, reciprocal exchange, and competing individual interests. The show brilliantly uses the sci-fi horror of the hive as a lens to bring our own messy, beautiful, and vulnerable sociality into focus.
So, if our natural state is one of fragile, small-scale alliances easily fractured by competing interests, how did humans ever build cities, nations, and global networks? The hive in “Pluribus” scales through a single consciousness. Humanity had to invent cultural technologies to achieve similar ends.
Cultural Technologies for Scaling Trust
To overcome our innate limitations, human societies have engineered social structures that artificially expand the circle of cooperation beyond kin and immediate reciprocators. Consider the ethnographic example of segmentary lineages and cross-cutting sodalities, famously documented among pastoralist societies, like the Nuer of East Africa.
A segmentary lineage system is a political genealogy that defines relationships and obligations. An individual belongs to a nested set of groups: a family, a lineage, a clan. The key principle is that the relevance of a group shifts with context. If two brothers quarrel, their immediate family mediates. If a man from one lineage fights a man from another, the entire lineage mobilizes against the other. If the conflict is between two clans, all their respective sub-lineages unite. This system is a pre-legal algorithm for scaling cooperation. It creates a flexible, “us vs. them” identity that can expand or contract as needed, allowing thousands of people who may never have met to cooperate under the banner of ancestry.
But what prevents these large-scale lineages from perpetually feuding? This is where cross-cutting sodalities—associations based on criteria other than kinship—come in. One example is the age-grade system. In such systems, individuals initiated during a certain period become members of a lifelong age set. This bond cuts across lineage ties. A man’s age-mates will be spread across different, and potentially rival, lineages and clans.
This creates a powerful web of conflicting loyalties. In a feud between Lineage A and Lineage B, a man from Lineage A must fight. But in that fight, he may be facing an age-mate from Lineage B, a man he trained, hunted with, and underwent initiation with. This cross-pressure is a powerful brake on uncontrolled violence and a promoter of mediation. The age set becomes a supra-lineage forum for negotiation and peacekeeping. It is a cultural technology designed to create overlapping interests where biology alone would not.
The Human Hive We Built
These structures—segmentary lineages and cross-cutting sodalities—are humanity’s alternative route to large-scale cooperation. We did not achieve cooperation by erasing individuality but by weaving networks of shared identity, obligation, and mutual interest that overlay our individual drives.
This brings us back to Carol’s plight in “Pluribus.” Her initial failure is a failure of these cultural technologies. The apocalyptic event has shattered all superstructures. She is left with only raw psychology: kin selection (others prioritizing hived family), failed reciprocal altruism (no one owes her anything), and starkly non-overlapping interests. There is no larger group to summon, no cross-cutting institution to promote alignment.
Her breakthrough with Manousos, the shut-in skeptic from Paraguay, is the first, fragile step in rebuilding these technologies. They establish a shared goal, creating the seed of a new “sodality” of two. They must then navigate the painstaking process of building trust—the essential ingredient that allows reciprocal altruism to function. Their tentative alliance is a microcosm of how human cooperation begins: strategic, step-wise negotiation.
“Pluribus” ultimately suggests that our fragile form of cooperation, for all its flaws, is what defines our humanity. The hive is efficient but static. Human collaboration is messy and negotiated, and requires constant maintenance. And, critically, it is adaptable to new conditions. It is built on stories of shared ancestry, rituals that create bonds, and institutions that force enemies to see common ground. It can shatter under pressure, as the show’s survivors demonstrate. But its very fragility is its strength—it is adaptable, creative, and rooted in strategic choice, not compulsion. The show’s haunting question is not whether we can defeat the hive, but whether, in its shadow, we can remember how to rebuild the delicate, magnificent social web that made us human in the first place. Our survival has never depended on becoming a hive mind, but on strengthening the fragile, invented, and beautiful art of working together.