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- [00:00]
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- [01:01]
Apple Watch Sleep Score Advertiser
Our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With the all new Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from one to so you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from good to excellent. Introducing the new Sleep Score ON Apple Watch iPhone 11 or later required welcome.
- [01:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
To the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson. And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas and we are two political science professors who have just watched episode three of Pluribus and we are here to unpack its ideas and its themes. Jeff, I thought this episode was very good and continued some of the thematics from last week and continues to show Pluribus as a show that is offering a sort of very well curated and crafted critique of, I would say contemporary society. And I would say he's making the point that contemporary society is pretty crap. Yeah.
- [02:07]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So I think this was also I enjoyed this episode. It was a good episode. You said off camera nothing really happens in this episode and I think that that's true in a kind of dramatic sense. But in terms of filling in and deepening the themes of the text, I think a fair amount happens that moves us and at once builds upon the themes from last week's first two episodes and I think also adds A bit more particularly with what I take to be its critique of contemporary online neoliberal culture.
- [02:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I think that's a smart kind of tagline for this episode. We said last week that the. One of the great joys of this show is that it is obviously operating in allegorical or metaphorical registers, but it's very sort of protean in what the. What the allegory and the metaphor is. So it can be pushed and pulled in different ways and in fact, you know, different members of. Of its audience are going to read different things into it, which is a tremendous thing for, for a TV show to. To do. But I think we both, we watched the. The episode independently. I think we both agreed on or sended on the central thematic of this week's episode. I kind of had it, its tagline as sort of how to be an individual in late stage capitalism.
- [03:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [03:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
By which I mean not. Not just existing in a capitalist culture that is sort of homogenizing and so forth. But. But that homogenization effect has crossed over into the cultural realm. It's not merely, you know, the sort of atomized economic mode of production, but that all preferences, cultural experiences, even things that you think you are choosing are being sort of, you know, created for you. And you've been pushed often algorithmically in specific directions and even things that are very personal to you, such as memories and life choice and experiences. There's a tremendous scene the episode opens with, with an experience in a. In an ice hotel. Unique experiences are actually all kind of commodities that have been pushed upon you systemically.
- [04:09]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. There's a real theme of curation.
- [04:11]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Of external curation that simultaneously reflects one's own interests but also constitutes those interests. It reflects a kind of maybe a subconscious desire, but then literalizes that desire in the form of, as you say, experiences or things or ways of being in the. My tagline for this episode would be slightly less highbrow than yours. And I would say this is Jeff Bezos's wet dream. Yes. Is what to me is put on screen.
- [04:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So let's start with the scene that I think gives you that tagline. Right. Which is the great scene in the supermarket.
- [04:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes. In Sprouts.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [04:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think this is the core central scene of this episode. And. And it sort of all unveils or unspools itself during that scene. So the scene begins, I think very cleverly as a bit of a head fake. Right. In. In that it seems to be presenting the. The narrative scenario of kind of late stage communism. Right. And and the failures of late stage communism to yoke its mode of production and its mode of organizing life into an. Actually a sustainable way of being in.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
The shelves are empty.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
The shelves are completely empty in that sort of very stereotypical late Soviet impoverished era. And when Carol asks her interlocutor what's happened, why is there. Why are the shelves empty here? The response is, well, we, we have centralized all resources and things in the name of being efficient.
- [05:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
They're being collectivized.
- [05:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
They've been collectivized.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Mamdani, take note.
- [05:53]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Exactly. Now that would seem to point you in the direction of a kind of, you know, anti socialist or anti communist politics. But in fact, what happens is, Carol says, well, I. I want my things back. I. I want to be able to shop. I'm an independent person. Zoja says, okay, and immediately, right, The. All of the kind of. The work, which what Carol will later call the worker bees, they all show up, they're all happy, they're all joyful, they're all super productive. They unload the trucks, they restock the store, and I think about a half hour, I think, is what we're shown in the countdown.
- [06:27]
Professor Stephen Dyson
They turn on the crappy music again.
- [06:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so, I mean, what you've got here is this scenario in which Carol has, on demand, filled up sprouts, which is very clearly an analog for Whole Foods, which gives us. I mean, it puts Amazon and Jeff Bezos directly in the crosshairs. What has she gotten? She's gotten everything to her heart's desire. On demand, right. She. She has essentially created a. A full experience, as you say, from out of. Not something that didn't exist before. She calls upon it. And who shows up? They show up immediately, efficiently. You can order online, that's fine, because it'll come much faster than you think it will. There's a throwback to the earlier scene in which Carol opens up her mail and she finds that Helen had ordered a theragun for her. And why hadn't she ordered it online rather than at the airport? Because it was much cheaper to order online. And so there's this kind of way in which the scene revolving around the grocery store kind of gives away, it seems to me, the central theme or problematic of this episode, which is that you. We are now live in a culture in which we can satisfy our every want and need and demand or our every desire for content on, you know, at a, At a fingertip.
- [07:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
On demand.
- [07:50]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And it's, it's a, It's a wonderful scene and very Clever. When Carol says, I'm a very independent person, that is, of course, a hilarious line in context, Right? Yeah. I'm a very independent person who requires a modern supermarket, right, which is this great sort of, you know, achievement of globalization and refrigeration and all these technologies that create the simulacrum of the world's produce in front of you or the. You know, but it's not as in past times. You would have to actually go, you know, national experiences or local experiences would be different because the produce that was available would be different in a coastal town as opposed to an industrial town. And it would be different in England than in America, and in America than China. And of course, then they're not now in the edge of the supermarket. They're all the same. And so you walk in thinking it's sort of a paradox of choice thing, right? You walk in thinking, here I am, an individual in my supermarket, and I'm going to make all these choices. And this gives me independence. But you're not independent. You're absolutely dependent on the systemic mechanism that has made all of these things trivially easy. And so you're living like a demigod in human history of the past, just as a standard sort of member of neoliberal society. But there's always the downside or the dark side of that. You know, I'm a very independent person in like the Walking Dead means I go out and I grow my own crops or I forage for food. And it's. What's his face, Rick Grimes, you know, dirty and sweaty and killing things. And now, you know, he returns to the kind of frontier hero of the past. I'm an independent person in this. This sort gentle satire of Pluribus is instantly undercut by the circumstances in which you're asserting it. And there is this wonderful juxtaposition, sort of moments of visual comedy, where in Sprouts, one of their great advertising slogans that's displayed prominently is Every meal is a choice. And then it smash cuts to what Carol has actually chosen. And she's chosen a microwave meal. Yeah. Plastic TV dinner to, you know, to.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Then in classic form. Right. And this is another of the themes that I think we're really starting to see, that Carol is a character out of time. And we did see this. Certainly we saw the bits and pieces of this last week in the most obvious example to me was the fact that she doesn't own a cell phone and that she seems to be totally unplugged or out of time in that way. But we see it here again this week in her recurring implanting of herself on the couch with the TV dinner, the kind of classic American 1980s staple. She's watching TV. And what is she's watching. She's watching the Golden Girls, which is a class classic kind of 80s sitcom. And all of the scenes are these scenes that feature Betty White offering these kinds of, you know, usually funny and frequently very racy asides in which she's presenting herself in these stories as always sort of herself kind of out of time or just a little bit askew of what's actually happening. And so she presents herself as this kind of puzzled observer, almost like an innocent who's looking in on events or themes or people from the outside and not quite understanding exactly where she is in relation to those things. And so this is an analog to Carol herself. Right. That Carol is identifying with Betty White. She continues. She just seems to be compulsively watching the Golden Girls over and over again, which is itself. It's a throwback to an era where there were no cell phones, where there was no Internet, where there was. Where globalization was meaningful and entrenched for centuries by then, but not on a kind of technological way, and certainly not in the accelerated way that it has become over the last several decades.
- [11:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I think that's. That's what's going on there. There's a. There's another scene that I thought was absolutely crucial, which. Which was the scene that begins the episode, which is the flashback, actually. Although, you know, it's. It's brief and it's in the. The ice hotel, which is, you know, this. This remarkable structure that because it melts every summer, it has to be remade anew every summer. So it's. It's by definition this sort of annually unique thing that's created out of nature. And it's. It's sort of the opposite of everything.
- [12:07]
Professor Jeff Dudas
We've been always created by different artists.
- [12:09]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And created crucially by not. Not by kind of Amazon worker drones, but by sort of our designs, real craftspeople. But there's kind of a couple of problems with it. Right. What one is, it's an experience that is by definition unique. But you see the dark side or what's coming, which is. Carol is pretty suspicious that Helen, her wife, has taken her there because it was recommended on Rick Steves, the sort of the person who ferrets out the unique for the mass audience, which is obviously an inherent paradox there. And so she can't enjoy it. She can't get fully into it she sort of even something as unique and bespoke as that, she sort of regrets, rejects. Sorry. Because she believes it's been overly kind of curated. Which is then tremendously ironic when she's. She's demanding the restoration of her individuality in the. The much more directly curated, easy experience of the contemporary supermarket.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
And in the supermarket, as I say, as we say, it's an analog of clear analog to Whole Foods. Yeah. Which the whole pitch of which is this is unique and bespoke. That may have once been true. It most certainly is not true anymore. You walk into a Whole Foods these days, and everything that exists in a Whole Foods you can purchase in every other supermarket.
- [13:23]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [13:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Usually for cheaper, actually.
- [13:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right, right. Well, and of course, the other thing that keeps going on is. And I think we should get to get away from the critique of our contemporary culture that's going on the show and talk about how that is mirrored by the alien algorithmic kind of hive mind. The other thing that goes on in a contemporary Whole Foods is Whole Foods as a. As a supermarket knows everything about you already. Right. Because it's all linked to your Amazon account. And it's just incredible to walk into something like Whole Foods, which was. Was seen as the holdout against every supermarket being the same. And it's kind of the higher quality. It's where people watched Rick Steves would go to get their food.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
And it was, you know, more expensive as a. As a result. And to have that kind of bought out and. And brought into the. The panopticon like Amazon.com system and just put your number in here and then you'll get your prime reward benefits. Which also means, you know what I eat. Yeah.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
It's the facade of individuality, the facade of uniqueness.
- [14:26]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right. And that's obviously mirrored in this week's episode, but also in the show writ large by the hive mind, by the pluralist. Yeah. Which is of course, operating both as a kind of literal virus, but much more directly or much more obviously as a reflection and a dark mirror and a literalization of the Anx. Of the type of society, the actually existing society that we live in.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
That we live in at the moment. One of the ways in which Carol rebels against the Pluribus and against the problematic we've just outlined in this episode is with regard to Helen's memory.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. Which she finds horrifying, is now sort of collectively held and has actually been sort of commercialized and instrumentalized on behalf of the Pluribus because they are Naively assuming she's gonna be delighted that they deliver to her the theragun. And not only deliver the Theragun, which would have been this obviously kind of heart wrenching and totally ironic kind of return of the lost love in the form of an Amazon package, but that they actually now know what the motivation was behind that thing arriving, which is sort of a grave robbing type thing. But the hive mind is operating in this episode and I think in the show writ large, algorithmically, or like a large language model. Right. It's a simulacrum of an intelligence, but it's not. It's not a human intelligence. And so it has no context or understanding for why that might be seen as an inappropriate right thing to do.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. They're chatbots.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
If. If last week the. The Pluribus was presented I thought at least as sort of Carol's nightmare of what the world would look like if it was full only of her romance fans.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
This week it's what. What would the world look like if it was full of only people that were like chatbots? If they were only full of. Of Jeff Bezos's drone workers who mean to always be helpful and of service. And you, you. You're quite right, that like they, they. There's a real kind of naivete or incapacity to understand what's going on with Carolina and an incapacity, therefore, to understand the full spectrum of human emotion which none of the Pluribus, or the Pluribus, I should say, no longer has.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, well. And they can only understand Carol through the language of commodification and commodities. Right. So they understand that she's got a package, that she's got a theragun, which is, you know, you got a problem, Right. You're a bit stressed on tour. Go on Amazon and solve that problem in five seconds. There's that great scene where Zorga and Carol. Carol's like, do you drink? Can we have a drink? Which is Carol's sort of escape from the. The horrors of the. Of the contemporary world. And Zorga is. And the Pluribus are incapable of just having a relaxing drink and having smell like the small talk it's spitting out. Horrific. Yeah. Did you know that this whiskey has a. And they can only see. They can't see the whiskey in the way. Or whatever it is they're drinking. The way Carol sees it as this kind of release and this sort of temporary escape from aspects of self. They see it as a commodity. This one tastes of this and did you know it's produced in this? And they're just. They're just the worst drinking companions you could possibly get because they're constantly trying to sell you stuff, you know, and just make sort of bad small talk.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. And they can't understand sarcasm.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
And this. This is made sort of horrifyingly clear right. In this episode. They. So they can't understand the full range of human emotion anymore.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, they're super literal.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
They're super literal. Just like an LLM.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
And, you know, Carol references in a moment of frustration, sarcasm, you know. Yeah. Just deliver me a hand grenade. And clearly she's saying, I want to blow myself up. Right. This is. This is a shoot me now gallows humor reference to suicide.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [18:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so they bring her the actual active hand grenade. Zoja, she says, we think you were being sarcastic, but, I mean, you ordered it, right? Just like, you know, you go on Amazon or whatever, and you look up whatever product it is, you put it in your cart, it thinks you want to buy it.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. Maybe you'll complete the order and maybe you won't. But if you do, it presumes your sincerity.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's. I mean that it is a sharp kind of satire of LLMs, because quite famously, you know, you can. You can sort of talk an LLM into almost anything if you. If you know quite how to hack it, because any safeguards that are built in. Into it are sort of mechanically built into it. So there's always a way. It doesn't have an intuitive understanding of things it shouldn't do or say. It's just like, let's program it not to say this, because we know that would be bad, bad publicity. But, you know, they're also very supportive. Right. Like, everything you say to it, it's like, that's. That's a great. Here are three suggestions for improvement. But fundamentally, what you've just typed in is a great idea, and you should definitely do it. And people have tragically, like. Like, right. Been. Been talked into killing themselves through. Through this kind of discourse with an LLM. So send me a hand grenade. You know, sort of literalize that problem. And even the. The more absurd next level of would you send me an atom bomb?
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
And they have to think about that for just. Just as the LLM would have that kind of mechanical block but not intuitive understanding of why it shouldn't do it.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
What you were just saying as well, it's a supportive response in which they basically say, well, we would try to walk you through the pros and cons of ordering.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
The. The atom bomb. And of course, the first interrogatory is, well, why would you want this?
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right?
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Professor Jeff Dudas
So it's never. No. Or that's crazy. That's insane. We're not going to send you an atom bomb. It is. Well, we would try to walk you through the pros and cons of doing this in exactly the ways you're talking about that an LLM would respond to sort of any, any interrogation or any request.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And the. At one point Carol also gets into like, what's the plan for me? And is it going to take before you guys like, assimilate me? And Soja's like, yeah, we're working on it. Don't know if it's months, don't know if it's. Don't if it's weeks, don't know if it's months. Science proceeds in an up or down fashion, but they're very clear that they're going to do that. And she says we have a biological imperative to like assimilate, which often when you get in fantasy or sci fi, a representation of something like capitalism as a totalizing ideology, it's often presented in the form of, of something that is innately just all consuming and cannot be so famously like the xenomorph in Alien, just this corporate monster that is unstoppable and a system that is capable of kind of constant reproduction and that you just can't. It just has one imperative, right? Which is to totalize every non. Consumer into a consumer or every individual into the collective.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
And crucially, in that scene, it seems to me the metaphor that Zoja then chooses really makes the point. And the point is, is that we know you, Carol, better than you know yourself, right? It. And this. I. I thought she was going to do the kind of the Phil Collins in the Air tonight thing, you know, if we saw you drowning, you know. And of course, in the song, you know, Collins sings that he would not lend a hand, but Zoja says, we, we would obviously save you. We would lend a hand. And she says you would too. And she says to Carol, you're drowning, you just don't know it yet, right? And this is very uncanny with regard to like, think, think about what happens when you're searching the Internet for something, right? And you search on something and then a day later you're presented with a series of ads or a series of recommendations.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
You've been primed.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
You've been primed, right? And with the idea Being that the algorithm has come to understand you better than you understand yourself. Because you may have been searching for something consciously that actually reveals a series of subconscious desires or anxiet or fears or whatever, and the algorithm is bringing those to the surface. This is the promise that Zoja seems, or the threat, maybe, that Zoa seems to be making to Carol. You're drowning. You just don't know it yet. And so we've come here to save.
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Professor Stephen Dyson
Right? And of course, the eternal dilemma or the eternal suspicion is that that kind of algorithmic thinking, particularly in service of a commodity economy, is not actually uncovering true sublimated desires and wants that are going to make you better. It's constituting you in a way that makes you want these things that you actually really don't want. Hopefully you'll buy that thing. Hopefully you'll buy, but you really don't want. But it wants to make you think that you want them. Okay, two last points I wanted to make or people I wanted to talk about. One was, I think we. I think in seeing Helen and the curated experience in the ice hotel brought back this week, we can sort of maybe zero in on the role Helen is playing in the story. And maybe. Is it just speculative why she died? I mean, Helen, it seems to me her role in Carol's life is she's the mediator or the interlocutor between Carol's misanthropy and the kind of lowest common denominator world that she sort of despises. And Helen is the one that kind of makes it possible for Carol to exist in that world. So Helen brings Carol to this ice hotel. She totally rejects it in the same way that she sort of totally rejects her fans. Even though we see, again, she's very concerned with the numbers of book sales. She simultaneously rejects them and depends upon their approval. So she's in this terrible double bind. And Carol's like, this is ridiculous. Right? It's like, I'm gonna sleep on a bed of ice. It's just a Rick Steves piece of silliness. And Helen's like, will you just chill out? Will you just enjoy this thing? Like, it's nice here and we're here together and just exist in the world for a little while. And so she's playing that role of.
- [24:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She's a translator.
- [24:26]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, exactly. And I wonder if the X number of people who were not assimilated by the virus, but. But were also not the very few Carols, the very few of the immune, the people who just died outright.
- [24:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [24:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I wonder if it's those people who were caught in that like liminal space of yeah, I get the world is crap, I get modern life is rubbish, but it's the only one we have, so why don't we just try and exist in it?
- [24:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think that's a really sharp point and I, I will be really interested to see if that turns out to be true, if those are the kinds of characters who can't survive in a world of either or.
- [25:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
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Professor Jeff Dudas
Because that's sort of what we're getting now is we're getting the deepest of the black and white Manichean thinking now in this new world. Carol, apart from Helen, is just a fully cynical, dour, as you say, misanthropic self hater. And there's nothing left, there's no brightness left in her life because she has no capacity to engage the world without, without the mediator, without the translator. So she's, she's at the one extreme and at the other extreme in the Pluribus, the people who exist in this shiny new world in ways that are wholly uncritical and that strike them as simply natural and of the greatest possible utility, these are the people who, who love Rick Steves, as you say.
- [25:56]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, and the Pluribus, that's awfully solicitous of Carolyn says, tell us what you want, we'll bring you everything. Yeah, they've actually killed the one thing that she wanted and needed to exist.
- [26:05]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so, I mean, so I think it's a sharp point, right? Can the translators exist in this world? Right. Can the figures who are sort of the in betweeners, so to speak, can they exist in this world and maybe they can't?
- [26:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was, as we suspected there would be some additional talk about the non English speaking immune, which we'd met the English speaking immune last week and they kind of left dangling out there that were these other people Carol hadn't met yet. And she inquires after who they are and it's X and Y person who has X and Y kind of job and she just gets biographical sketches and she alights on manouses Oviedo from Paraguay. And she says, well, what does he do? And it's like he runs or he owns a self storage unit, which I thought was. If you just take that phrase on face value, like what, what is an individual? It's a self storage unit. But of course, taken literally in the world, self storage units are these sort of cookie cutter. Everyone is like every other one. Sort of anonymous places where you. You put things that you are not going to think about or use for. For quite a while. So something I thought very interesting going on in that guy's occupation. But then she gets him on the phone and he is as much a misanthropist as she is. Immediately starts cursing at her for. For no particular reason. The phone line goes dead. She's like, get that dude back. Gets him back purely to curse back and then slam the damn phone down.
- [27:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. So that's. As a very comic scene. We are quite certain that the two of them will be meeting.
- [27:33]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Oh, yeah.
- [27:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. At one point. At some point in the next several episodes.
- [27:37]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, Right. Yeah. They seem like they might have a. A lot to talk about even though they don't speak the. The same language.
- [27:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Speaks better Spanish than. Than she lets on.
- [27:45]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. All right, good. So, really happy with this episode. I think. I thought it really continued to develop the themes of the show and the show continues to be a subtle and rewarding Omni critique of contemporary existence. So please share with us your thoughts in the comments. Are we sort of on the right track? Did we get it totally wrong in what we thought about the show this week and the show's kind of ongoing thematics? There was lots of great comments last week. We really, really got a lot out of them. So please do let us know what you think and we will be back next week. But on that bombshell.
- [28:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
As a raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement. But now you must return to the surface where arc machines roam. If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find. Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game. Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S and PC. Rated T for teen.