What is the shape of influence in an AI World?

The first known physical marketing advertisement appears around 1500 BCE: an Egyptian weaver offering gold for the return of an escaped slave. Papyrus became one of the earliest sales mediums — a way to broadcast need, desire, and exchange. 

Then came the printing press, and the machinery of modern advertising unfolded.  

I’ve spent years inside legal marketing, and it taught me something simple: advertising isn’t inherently good or bad. It takes the shape of whatever medium carries it.

That’s why the rise of large language models feels like a pivotal moment. 

When the World Syncs and You Don’t: Notes After Watching Pluribus Episode 1

Image c/o Pexels: SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS

I watched Episode 1 of Pluribus tonight and found the premise unusually unique. A sudden global event causes most people to shift into a synchronized, hive-like awareness, while a small number remain unchanged. Carol, the author at the centre of the first episode, becomes one of these outliers.

What stood out to me was not the event itself, but the contrast between the two states: collective alignment and individual continuity. It created a useful frame for thinking about how synchronization works in the real world.

Large groups often move in coordinated ways — trends, moods, shared fears, shared beliefs. There are moments when society seems to tune itself to a single frequency. This immediately brought to mind informational gravity, the idea that certain ideas gain enough density to pull attention, behaviour, and narrative into their orbit.

The “hive” in the show isn’t portrayed as hostile. It’s simply interconnected. A kind of ambient awareness. That atmosphere aligns with ambient panopticon — not surveillance through control, but visibility through connection. Carol’s role as one of the few outside that field makes her an interesting fixed point. The anomaly inside the system rather than the opposition to it.

The episode also echoes concepts from emergent systems — especially systems where intelligence or behaviour emerges from many small units acting together. The hive mind behaves less like a singular entity and more like a patterned field of shared perception. Carol’s separate consciousness becomes a counterpoint rather than a threat.