Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Wed, 10 Dec 2025 20:39:03 +0000
Vince Gilligan's new sci-fi show asks an unsettling question: What happens when a civilization optimizes for peace over possibility -- and smooths creativity and innovation out of existence? ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- _This is a free edition of_ _**Faster, Please!**_ ,_my regular newsletter about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.) If you enjoy it and find it helpful in any way, please consider buying a subscription to the twice-weekly regular issues that include in-depth essays, Q &As with smart people, and summaries of relevant news stories. _ Upgrade to paid * * * # 😀😱 Of 'Pluribus' and progress ### Vince Gilligan's new sci-fi show asks an unsettling question: What happens when a civilization optimizes for peace over possibility -- and smooths creativity and innovation out of existence? | | James Pethokoukis --- | Dec 10 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- **My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:** Is _Pluribus_ , the well-reviewed, much-watched series created by Vince Gilligan (_Breaking Bad_ , _Better Call Saul_) for Apple TV, an Up Wing or Down Wing show? Or is it perhaps orthogonal to the entire concept? Hard to really know. Six episodes in and it's still up for grabs as to what exactly Gilligan is trying to say with his tale of romance-fantasy novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) -- a miserable misanthrope and one of the few people left uninfected after an alien virus sweeps across humanity, absorbing nearly everyone into an apparently blissful hive mind. Is it commentary on social media, artificial intelligence, or late capitalism? A parable about Trump? Round up the usual suspects -- all of which, in this case, are probably innocent. I haven't read a dozen Gilligan interviews or anything. And I'm not speculating about where the show is heading -- _though, to be clear, I have thoughts_. #### **A world of stultifying sameness** Caveat: I'm reading the show on its own terms, as I interpret them. And the scene that crystallized my thematic take occurs in the second episode, "Pirate Lady." Carol and a handful of other uninfected survivors gather at the Bilbao airport in Spain. There, someone mentions popping over to the Guggenheim for a look around. Yeah, it's the apocalypse, but that doesn't mean you can't take in the sights, you know? Carol, who wants to mount a resistance movement, ASAP, takes a _hard pass_.¹ That brief moment has stuck with me. These end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it leftovers -- other than Carol -- still want to stroll through galleries full of the strangeness that radiates from the human condition. Yet everything around them suggests they now live in a uni-mind world where no one will ever again make art -- especially after the Happy Shiny Others eventually figure out how to forcibly bring the immune into the collective. (It's their biological imperative.) In that instant, IMHO, _Pluribus_ quietly poses its most unsettling questions: What does a society lose when the conditions for creativity collapse? And what are those conditions exactly? #### **Death by status quo** At minimum, creativity -- in art, in science, in entrepreneurship -- requires individuality (a private interior space where ideas can form without a vote), friction (the freedom to upset norms, to be "wrong" or weird), and futurity (the belief that tomorrow can be something different). But now all those things have been expunged from humanity. (Sorry, Silicon Valley. No need for startups now.) _Pluribus_ imagines a civilization in which forward motion has forever stalled. The Others maintain rather than build. Oh, and there's no evidence they even procreate. They survive by scavenging whatever falls into their hands -- including, as later episodes reveal, the bodies of the roughly almost a billion other humans who died during the initial joining. Indeed, the Others are so incapable of disrupting anything, not even picking fruit, that they're projected to starve within a decade. _Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains._ ² A society that cannot create is one thing. A society that cannot procreate or even feed itself is something much darker: a civilization that has lost not only imagination but the biological instinct to continue. In that way, _Pluribus_ feels like the dystopian inverse of Apple's famous "Think Different" ad, the one that celebrates "the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers."³ CEO and cofounder Steve Jobs was making a claim about how progress happens: through outliers who insist on seeing the world differently. The Others regard that impulse not only as a fatal bug but as utterly antithetical to their existence (as short-term as it may be). #### **The collective as creativity 's undoing** Gilligan has publicly confirmed that Carol Sturka is named after Will Sturka, a character in the Twilight Zone episode "Third from the Sun."⁴ Maybe that Easter egg is an important clue, and maybe it's not. But after you rewatch that 1960 episode, take a look at the excellent 1967 _Star Trek_ episode "The Return of the Archons." The Enterprise crew visits a society absorbed into the collective "Body" under the rule of Landru, an ancient computer. Mr. Spock diagnoses it as a "soulless society," one with "no spirit, no spark. All is indeed peace and tranquility. The peace of the factory, the tranquility of the machine." And when Captain Kirk confronts the AI, he delivers the lines that feel like they could be _Pluribus_ 's thesis statement (at least if my take is correct): "Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. The body dies." And this killer closer: > Spock: How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as the one Landru provided. > Kirk: Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess. Kirk is correct, especially from an Up Wing perspective. As psychologist Dean Simonton's work on the history of creativity suggests, breakthroughs thrive not in placid monocultures but in places alive with pluralism, rivalry, and ideological jostling. The competition of ideas! Such conditions favor the personality traits most linked with innovation: independence, unconventionality, and a willingness to defy received wisdom. History's great creative flowerings -- from Periclean Athens to Renaissance Italy -- arose amid political fragmentation and intellectual ferment. Stability may deliver order, but it is friction, not harmony, that sparks ideas. Creative destruction and all that. _Pluribus_ offers an illustrative thought experiment about what's lost when a society eschews disruption and difference. It imagines a world where creation stalls, where new generations never arrive, and where the very idea of a different tomorrow fades into irrelevance -- a museum with no artists left to fill it. Yeah, _Pluribus_ seems pretty Up Wing so far. Upgrade to paid Share 1 "Enjoy it. Eat, drink and be merry. Go to the Guggenheim, Disneyland Paris, wherever else these whacked-out Moonies take you next. But know this, you are traitors. You are traitors to the human race!" Indeed. 2 That line is from the comic-book series _Watchmen_ by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. 3 The aired-version of the ad was narrated by actor Richard Dreyfus, though Steve Jobs did it first. From Wikipedia: "On the morning of the first air date, Jobs decided to go with the Dreyfuss version, stating that it was about Apple, not about himself." 4 This is fun: That TZ episode is based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. Matheson most famously wrote "I am Legend" novella about … the last man on Earth after a plague turns humanity into zombie-like vampires (or vampire-like zombies, I guess). * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- You're currently a free subscriber to Faster, Please!. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Comment --- | | Restack --- (C) 2025 James Pethokoukis 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe