As I worked on my review of the revised edition of Ned Foley's Ballot Battles, I started watching the Apple TV series Pluribus. As I got into it, I thought there might be a connection between the book and the show, since the latter is about an alien virus that produces a sort of "absorption" of all the thoughts and memories of people on Earth (except for 13 who are immune). As each infected human being now has access to all of their compatriots' thoughts and feelings, and all now agree on everything, this Borg-type (a concept developed in Star Trek) conglomeration at first seemed to me to be cognizable in terms of voting procedures. I wondered how differences of opinion and attitude might have been merged into a general will according to the show's writers. Foley's book describes a history of election fights since the U.S. founding days, but perhaps this extra-terrestrial virus would provide a sensible answer to how such fights might have been avoided.
It may be that my original incorrect assumption about how things worked in this fascinating show was tainted by my early studies in 17th-century philosophy. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Spinozistic metaphysics and spent a good deal of space in that work wondering about the feasibility of combining intellects into Spinoza's pantheistic deity. Later, I became interested in Gustav Fechner's "Daylight View," a more empirically grounded panpsychism, and was also drawn to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (and to Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell, which pictured the Earth as a kind of single living thing). However, by the time Galen Strawson and others began making panpsychism, and with it "the combination problem" (which I had tied to Cantorian mathematics in my dissertation), more respectable among scholars in the mid-2000s, I had, for good or ill, moved on. Although I lost interest in the possibility of "combining minds," I think this background may have played a role in my jumping to the conclusion that the Pluribus "Joining" involved that kind of mind-meld.
According to the actual series, untainted by my callow studies, infection by the virus completely ends all individual agency: all the shots seem to be called by whatever has produced the Joining. Certainly, the hive's will can't be any sort of aggregate of what people wanted before the Joining, whatever the voting and tallying method used (first-past-the-post, ranked-choice, STAR, or any other), since little of what the entity subsequently does would have survived a vote of all humanity as it then stood. There is absolute comity afterwards only because there are no individual differences of wants that need to be reconciled or compromised anymore. As the hive-mind is essentially an aggregated knowledge and compliance structure rather than involving anything resembling collective decision-making or will formation, it's not modeling democracy at all.
That means that the TV writers didn't need to worry about majority will, minority voice, factional conflict, legitimacy of electoral procedures, etc. The show instead brings up numerous questions about information and control — also interesting, but closer to theory of knowledge and AI studies than political theory. (Full disclosure: that particular point was made to me by Claude AI, which also suggested that I weave in something here about Rousseau's distinction between the "general will" and the "will of all.") It is certainly easy to imagine epistemologists delving into the reliability of the hive's assertions, given the evidence, pro and con, available to such a conglomerate, and how that evidence has been amassed.
Incidentally, moral theorists should also be interested, since a very peculiar (and vegan-adjacent) sort of dietary ethics is practiced by the...let's call it..."Plurby." So, while not particularly relevant to a history of election fights in America and perhaps a weird subject to bring up in this luckorcunning blog, both book and series are easy to recommend.
