Apple TV's Pluribus is the most-watched show on the platform for a reason. It taps into something we all feel.

The premise: an alien virus transforms almost everyone on Earth into a peaceful hive mind called "the Others." They share one consciousness. No more conflict, no more loneliness, no more war. They're happy.

Carol Sturka is one of thirteen people who are immune. She keeps her own mind—and her misery.

The show gives us two options. Carol can stay herself: isolated, struggling, free. Or she can join the collective: connected, content, erased.

This feels like horror because we recognize the predicament. Not from science fiction, but from every group project, every committee, every organization we've ever been part of. But this is a false binary.

The Tradeoff We've Accepted

You know how this goes.

Option A: One person decides. It's fast. But if they're wrong, everyone suffers. And everyone else checks out because they had no voice.

Option B: Everyone decides together. It's thorough, but it takes forever. By the time you agree, the moment's passed. Or the decision is so watered down it means nothing.

Most of us have lived both failures. The boss who moved fast and broke things. The committee that met for months and produced mush.

So we conclude: this is just how it works. You're either the individual or you're the hive. Pick one.

Pluribus takes this tradeoff to its extreme. The Others "solve" collective action by eliminating individuals entirely. Perfect agreement, because there's only one mind left to agree.

What If the Tradeoff Is a Design Problem?

Here's where it gets interesting. Researchers have been studying how groups think, and what they've found suggests the tradeoff is softer than we assume.

In 2017, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman and behavioral economist Dan Ariely ran experiments with thousands of people. They asked factual questions (How tall is the Eiffel Tower?) and moral questions (Is it ever okay to lie?).

First, people answered alone. Then they formed small groups of about five and discussed briefly—less than a minute. Then they answered again.

The result: small group discussion made everyone smarter. Not just smarter than individuals. Smarter than averaging thousands of individual guesses.

Four small groups outperformed the "wisdom of crowds" from thousands of people.

The key ingredients: real discussion and different perspectives, at the right scale. In a group of five, you can't hide. Everyone talks. Everyone listens. The group figures out who knows what—without anyone directing them.

Other research backs this up. MIT and Carnegie Mellon scientists found that group intelligence doesn't come from having smart individuals. It comes from structure: Does everyone get a turn to talk? Can people read each other? Is information flowing?

The tradeoff we assumed was fixed—fast versus inclusive, individual versus collective—turns out to be a design problem. Get the structure right, and you don't have to choose.

The Gap: What About Groups of Groups?

But here's where the research goes quiet.

Scientists have studied individuals forming into crowds. They've studied individuals forming into small groups. Both can work well under the right conditions.

But real collective action isn't usually individuals coming together. It's groups relating to other groups.

Social movements have hundreds of organizations. Nonprofits work in networks. Communities trying to make change aren't one team or one crowd—they're collections of neighborhoods, each with their own identity and way of making decisions.

Our tools don't help with this. Slack, email, social media—they treat everyone as individuals sending messages. Project management software assumes one organization, one hierarchy.

Nothing treats the group as the basic unit. Nothing helps organizations think well internally, then communicate their positions to other organizations, then find alignment—without every single person being involved in every single conversation.

The space between individual and collective—where groups meet groups—is infrastructure we haven't built.

What Pluribus Gets Wrong

The hive mind in Pluribus solves the problem by deleting it. No separate groups to coordinate because no separate people exist.

But that's not a solution. It's a surrender.

Collective intelligence works because of diverse perspectives. The whole point is that different viewpoints catch different things. The hive mind might be peaceful, but it's static. It's lost the friction that makes learning possible.

Humans didn't build cooperation by erasing our differences. We built it by weaving networks of shared purpose while remaining ourselves.

Carol's choice—join or stay alone—is the wrong frame. The question isn't whether to dissolve into the collective. It's how to structure the space between individual and collective so that groups can think well and act together.

The Stakes

We've drawn the line between "things I decide" and "things we decide together" based on assuming that collective decisions are slow and bad.

If that assumption is wrong—if it's a design problem we could fix—then we should redraw the line.

Better tools won't make hard problems easy. There will always be real tensions between freedom and solidarity, between moving fast and including everyone. But we might stop sacrificing so much of each to get any of the others.

Pluribus shows us the binary we've accepted: individual or hive. What it doesn't show is the third option—the space between, where groups can stay themselves while still acting as one.

That space needs to be built. That's the work Socialroots has championed.