Disclaimer:
This essay describes a dystopian world in which a hive-like shared collective mind exists on planet Earth.
While it is completely hypothetical, it is loosely based on my personal experiences from the age of 30 until now, beginning with a huge breakdown at that age. After that breakdown I spent a short time on the “psych ward” and was put on medication to help with nerves, anxiety and depression. Then, after a short recovery, back to work!
After some lengthy discussions with a ChatGPT subscription, where I described my experiences and symptoms and asked loads of questions, it appears that autistic people can experience significant difficulties towards the end of their years in education when they diverge from the “neurotypicals”, with those difficulties then continuing throughout adult life.
I came to understand my previous breakdown as likely “autistic burnout”, which these AI discussions suggested often happens around 30 years old. It’s a case of “you cope until you can’t”, to steal a phrase from another burnout sufferer who posted online. Quite frankly, during these burnout experiences it can feel like you are living in hell, with your mind becoming a torture chamber and your nervous system on fire.
Recently, following my doctor’s advice to cease medication, I adopted the metaphorical role of a “submariner”. Although I can’t stay submerged for long, I’ve attempted to include a bit about this hypothetical submariner role in The Submarine section.
Those who think the whole idea is ridiculous may simply see it as dystopian fiction, while others may recognise some of the experiences or ideas being explored. The more interesting question is not whether someone believes in the hive, but how human behaviour would change if such a structure existed.
If theoretical actors within this scenario knew the hive existed and participated in it, and then abused that privilege in terms of money, power or sexual gratification, and if those benefits were gained without having done the actual work, while somebody else paid the real price, or without fully informed consent, what price should be paid if they were exposed?
There is another distinction too: if such a hive existed, some people might be naturally talented, while others might derive their talent from the hive—which would you be?
So while this essay does not claim that a literal collective mind exists, can anyone really prove that it does not exist in some form?
**I’ve included a short list of films and books at the end of the essay that AI researched, under “Dystopian Fiction with Similar Themes”. I can’t claim to have read all the books or seen all the films, but they are listed for anyone who may be interested.
The Basic Idea
Imagine a world in which the mind is not actually private. Behind ordinary life there is some kind of hive through which thoughts, memories, emotions, ideas and experiences can be shared. Some people know that this system exists, understand how to use it and have perhaps grown up knowing its rules. Other people know nothing about it and live exactly as most people would expect to live, believing that thoughts remain private unless they deliberately speak or write them down.
Now imagine somebody spending decades living under that second assumption. Private thoughts are treated as private. Embarrassing memories are safely inside the mind. Sexual thoughts, dreams, fears, mistakes and hopes belong to the person experiencing them. Decisions are made on the assumption that nobody else can simply look inside and see what is happening. Then imagine discovering that this assumption was wrong and that other people had been able to see far more than was ever knowingly shared.
The effect would not simply be embarrassment. It could destroy the person’s understanding of their entire life. Decades had been lived according to one set of rules while other people had apparently been playing by another set. It would be like finding out after fifty years that the walls of the house had always been made of glass while everyone else knew it except the person living inside. The damage would reach backwards into old memories, conversations, relationships and experiences because events that once appeared private would suddenly have to be reconsidered in the knowledge that perhaps they never were.
That alone could carry an atomic psychological price. But the situation becomes far worse if the hive does not merely allow people to observe one another. Suppose it can also be used to influence thoughts and emotions. A thought can appear, and then enormous anxiety, depression, hope, fear, attraction, guilt, excitement or sexual feeling attached to it. Some participants may even have learned how to use these mechanisms for their own gratification while remaining hidden from the person whose mind and life are being manipulated, while also concealing themselves from the hive so that their own minds do not contain memories capable of exposing their involvement.
Within this hypothetical, all of that is accepted as fact. The question then becomes much bigger than whether the hive is good or bad. It becomes a question about who actually owns a human life.
Privacy That Was Never Really Private
There is a huge difference between growing up knowing that minds are shared and discovering it after decades of believing the opposite. Someone who always knew would presumably learn how to live with it. They would understand what could be seen, how to protect themselves, what counted as acceptable behaviour and what boundaries were possible. They might even regard the system as normal.
Someone who never knew would have built an identity on completely different foundations. They would have thought their mind was the final private place. They might have tolerated thoughts that would never be spoken because thoughts themselves were harmless and private. They might have worked through fears internally, imagined impossible situations, had fantasies they would never want in reality, or simply enjoyed having a private inner world that belonged to nobody else.
Discovering that this privacy did not exist would therefore not simply reveal something new. It would change the meaning of things that had already happened. A private thought from thirty years earlier might suddenly feel exposed. A strange reaction from another person twenty years earlier might be reconsidered. Things that had once looked accidental might now appear differently. Whether those new interpretations were right or wrong, the person’s understanding of their life could be blown apart by the discovery itself.
That is why the word atomic fits the hypothetical. An atomic bomb does not damage one room while leaving the rest of the building untouched. It destroys the structure around it. Discovering that decades of assumed mental privacy were false could have the same effect on somebody’s understanding of themselves and the world.
Sharing Must Still Be Defined by the Person Sharing
Even in this world, however, the existence of a hive would not mean that everybody automatically had the right to everything inside somebody else’s mind. That would be one of the most important boundaries to establish. Being technically able to see something is not the same as having permission to see it.
A person might decide that the hive has some useful features. Perhaps ideas can be shared. Perhaps problems can be solved with the help of many minds. Perhaps somebody can ask a question and somehow receive useful answers or connections they would never have reached alone. There could be enormous benefits in that kind of system.
But agreeing to use those benefits does not mean giving away the whole person. Somebody could agree to share ideas about a project while refusing access to private memories. They could accept help solving a practical problem while keeping intimate relationships completely outside the system. They could use the hive to help achieve something they genuinely want without agreeing that the hive may choose what they should want in the first place.
That distinction is essential because otherwise one small act of participation becomes a permanent surrender of privacy. Someone accepts one useful idea and suddenly everyone claims a right to everything else. That cannot be meaningful consent.
Sharing should therefore be consensual and take place within the person’s own definition of what may be shared. The person decides what is shared, why it is shared, who it is shared with, how long it is shared for and what remains completely private. If the hive goes beyond those limits, then it is no longer sharing. It is intrusion.
When Thoughts Are Given Emotional Force
One of the most dangerous parts of this hypothetical is the possibility that thoughts can be given enormous emotional force. A simple idea can be considered rationally and rejected. An idea that arrives with huge fear, sexual desire, hope or emotional importance is very different because the emotion changes the conditions under which the decision is being made.
Someone might have spent thirty years knowing that a particular type of life, relationship or identity is not what they want. Then suddenly an idea connected with exactly that outcome arrives with an overwhelming emotional charge. The person may still be capable of thinking, but they are now thinking while being pushed by feelings powerful enough to change behaviour.
If the hive can deliberately create those feelings, then the fact that someone eventually behaves differently does not automatically show that the new behaviour represents what they really wanted. Within this hypothetical, the amount of emotional pressure required might depend on both the intensity of the emotion being created and how strongly the person would normally reject the act.
A relatively minor decision might require little influence, while forcing participation in something deeply unwanted could require many members of the hive acting together to generate enough fear, desire, guilt, anxiety, depression or other overwhelming emotion to override the person’s normal rational judgement. The resulting behaviour would therefore show only that the emotional pressure became powerful enough to force participation, not that the person freely wanted or consented to the act.
The proper question would therefore be much simpler: would the person have chosen the same thing without the added emotional force? If the answer is no, then the emotion itself cannot be used as proof of consent.
This matters especially with sexual behaviour. If feelings of attraction, arousal, curiosity or emotional closeness can be artificially created or strengthened, then the existence of those feelings cannot automatically prove an underlying sexual preference. In this hypothetical, another person or group may deliberately be producing them in the targeted person’s mind because they benefit from the result.
Hidden Sexual Actors
The sexual side of the hive would create an especially serious problem if the people doing the manipulation could stay hidden. In ordinary life, someone being sexually pressured can usually identify the person applying the pressure. In this system, the actor might never reveal themselves at all.
A person could therefore experience sexual feelings or thoughts and naturally believe they came from their own mind, while somebody else was deliberately creating or encouraging them for their own gratification. Within this hypothetical, both statements could therefore be true: something feels planted, and somebody really is planting it for sexual purposes.
The person or group doing this might have an additional reason to remain hidden from the hive itself. If everybody’s memories could be exposed, then those knowingly abusing the system might not want their own minds to contain a clear record of what they had done. They might therefore find ways of hiding their identities or their involvement while continuing to benefit from somebody else’s experience.
That would create an extraordinary imbalance. One person would have their private mind exposed while another person could use the system against them and then hide the evidence inside their own mind. The person being used would carry the experience while the actor tried to remain invisible.
In that situation a sexual response could never, on its own, prove consent. A response deliberately produced by somebody else would prove only that the mechanism worked.
Building Somebody Else’s Life
The problem becomes even bigger if the hive is used not merely to influence individual thoughts but to build an entire alternative life for somebody. Perhaps other people decide that the individual’s own dream is inconvenient. Perhaps they think another life would be better. Perhaps the alternative gives them something they want. Instead of openly explaining this and asking for agreement, they spend years developing their preferred version.
Money might be spent. Relationships might be arranged. Jobs, status, property, family, sexuality or social roles might all be included. Huge amounts of effort could go into making the new future possible. From the point of view of the people designing it, it might eventually represent years of work.
But none of that gives them ownership.
If a person or group secretly spends £10 million building a house for another person, the intended occupant does not have to live in it. The person or people who built it chose to take that risk without asking first. It makes no difference whether the house cost £10 million or £10 billion. Money cannot create consent where consent was never given.
The same applies to somebody’s life. If a person or group spends twenty years secretly constructing a future for someone who never requested it, those twenty years do not become a debt the person has to repay by living the life. The simple answer remains that no person or group should have spent twenty years building somebody else’s future without first asking whether they wanted it. The waste belongs to whoever made the decision to proceed without consent.
Making the Existing Life Bad Enough to Force the Alternative
The situation becomes much darker if the existing life is deliberately made miserable so that the alternative eventually looks attractive. A dream might repeatedly be blocked. Relationships could be damaged. Opportunities could appear and then vanish. Hope could repeatedly be raised and destroyed. Emotional pressure could continue until the person becomes exhausted.
Eventually the alternative life might be offered, and because it now looks better than the nightmare, the person might consider accepting it.
That still does not necessarily make it free choice.
If a person or group deliberately creates the bad situation and then offers the only obvious escape, the escape itself becomes part of the coercion. A person walking out of a burning building does not necessarily love the street outside. They simply want to get away from the fire.
This creates a very important distinction. Somebody might accept an alternative because it is genuinely what they want, or they might accept it because everything else has been deliberately made unbearable. Those two things can look identical from the outside but are completely different in terms of consent.
That is why an individual could reasonably refuse to accept a new life simply because it is better than the current nightmare. Otherwise the nightmare becomes the tool used to manufacture agreement.
Why the Original Dream Still Matters
The person’s own dream matters because it provides evidence of what they wanted before all of this pressure was applied. It does not mean that dreams can never change or that every ambition must come true exactly as imagined. People naturally change their minds and adapt to reality.
But a long-standing dream that survives years of thought is very different from a sudden desire appearing under extreme emotional pressure. If someone has repeatedly wanted roughly the same kind of life, returned to the same goals and deliberately worked towards them, then those preferences tell us something important about the person.
Any alternative can therefore be tested against that history. Would the same relationship have been chosen without the pressure? Would the same career have been wanted? Would the same identity have been accepted? Would the same future have looked attractive if the person’s existing life had not first been made unbearable?
If not, then the alternative cannot simply be called the person’s true choice because circumstances eventually pushed them into it.
Using the Hive Without Belonging to It
Using the Hive - The Hive as a Collective Intelligence
The fact that the hive can be abused does not mean every part of it must be rejected. In fact, one of the most interesting possibilities is that it might be enormously useful when used properly. A useful analogy is artificial intelligence. One human mind contains only a limited amount of knowledge and experience, while an AI can draw on patterns and information learned from a body of material far beyond anything a single person could realistically remember. In that sense, the hive could work in a similar way: not simply as many separate minds, but as a shared pool of knowledge far more powerful than any one individual mind.
By connecting many minds, it could generate ideas that one person would never reach alone. Somebody struggling with a problem might suddenly see a solution, and something considered impossible might turn out to be possible because the hive brings together knowledge, experience and ideas from many different people. Just as a person using AI can sometimes solve something in minutes that might otherwise have required years of learning, the hive could give an individual access to a breadth of knowledge no single human mind could realistically contain.
Using the Hive - When a Debate Is No Longer One-to-One
That immediately creates a fairness problem. In a supposedly one-to-one debate, if one person is connected to the hive while the other has no help from the hive and is relying only on a single human mind, the contest is not genuinely one-to-one. One side is drawing on something closer to a collective intelligence, while the other is limited to one person’s memory, experience and ability to reason in real time. Unless that advantage is openly declared and equally available to both sides, the hive-connected participant would effectively be cheating.
Using the Hive - What Counts as a Fair Debate
A genuinely fair one-to-one debate would therefore require both participants to be disconnected from the hive and relying only on their own minds. Otherwise it is effectively a group of minds competing against a single individual while pretending the contest is equal.
Even then, the result would only show which of those two individuals argued better from the knowledge they personally carried. A single human mind cannot contain anything close to the breadth of an enormous library or the combined knowledge of many specialists. The debate may therefore be fair as a contest between two people, while still being a limited way of deciding which argument is actually correct.
Using the Hive - As a Tool
Seen in that light, one of the hive’s most useful functions might be to broaden the information available before conclusions are reached. The danger begins when access to that wider intelligence stops being a tool and starts becoming a source of control. The sensible response might therefore be neither complete surrender nor complete rejection. It may be possible to use the hive to bring in knowledge, ideas and solutions that one individual could never produce alone while still refusing to let it decide what that individual’s life should become.
Using the Hive - Help Without Ownership
A useful idea remains only an idea. It can be tested, accepted or rejected. If it helps somebody achieve something they already wanted, it may be extremely valuable. But the hive does not gain the right to change the goal simply because it helped discover a route towards it. This is where the individual’s own definition of sharing becomes essential. The hive may be invited into certain parts of life while being completely excluded from others. Help can be accepted, wider knowledge can be used and problems can be solved without ownership of the person or the direction of that person’s life ever being transferred.
The Submarine
The submarine is one way of describing how somebody might move between two very different states. On medication, life may be closer to the surface. It may feel quieter, safer and more private. It may also feel extremely beige.
Off medication, the person may feel as though they have descended into the hive. Ideas may arrive rapidly. Connections appear everywhere. Possibilities that once seemed ridiculous may suddenly seem achievable. There may be excitement, humour and moments when ordinary life suddenly appears much bigger.
But that same state may also become torturous. The person may constantly have to fight against thoughts or emotions that appear to be steering them somewhere they do not want to go. Every useful idea may arrive surrounded by noise, pressure, fear or attempts to destroy the person’s own goals.
Because remaining in that torturous state can become unbearable, the submarine does not have to stay below the surface permanently. It may submerge, find something useful, and then come back up before the pressure becomes too much. The ideas brought back can then be examined under calmer conditions. If an idea still seems useful once the extraordinary emotional pressure has gone, it may be worth keeping.
But if anxiety, depression, fear, guilt, sexual feeling or another overwhelming emotion made the idea seem convincing, or pushed the person to act before normal rational judgement could operate, neither the apparent acceptance nor the action itself should automatically be treated as freely chosen. The real test is whether, once the pressure has gone, the person would still have chosen the same idea or action without it.
Most importantly, going underwater does not mean giving everybody consent for unlimited access. The person’s own considered definition of what may be shared—formed through reflection, challenge, discussion and careful consideration of the consequences—remains in force even there.
There is also an important unknown when the submarine returns to the surface. Medication may relieve much of the pain, anxiety and depression associated with being submerged, but within this hypothetical it is impossible to know exactly what that means.
Does the medication merely suppress the symptoms while leaving the person permanently connected to the hive, once again creating the impression that they have returned to a private mental world, while still being exposed to the same abuse? Or does it actually detach the person from the hive and restore genuine privacy? The difference would be crucial, because feeling private is not necessarily the same as actually being private within the rules of this fictional system.
The Beige World and Building Something Better
Coming back to the surface may still create a problem because the ordinary world can feel beige. That beige life may have existed long before the most recent experience of the hive, meaning the hive might not have created the original dissatisfaction at all, but simply introduced a dramatic contrast.
The answer therefore doesn’t have to be a choice between a torturous hive and a dull ordinary life. Useful ideas that seem to emerge from the hive could instead be used to make ordinary life better.
If the hive appears to reveal an opportunity, that opportunity can be investigated. If it seems to produce an idea that might improve life, that idea can be tested. If it suggests that something previously considered impossible might actually be achievable, perhaps it is worth exploring.
The important point is that any such ideas should be used only to help build the person’s freely chosen life, rather than replacing it with somebody else’s preferred version.
The objective would be to take whatever useful ideas the hive may appear to offer and use them to make life on the surface less beige, without allowing the hive to decide what that life should become.
The Hijacker
The hypothetical of another consciousness somehow living through somebody else’s life can be framed using the term “Hijacker”. Imagine this hijacker, or hijackers, who can see and experience every action of the hijacked individual, and may be able to influence or control the person’s actions by introducing thoughts, suggestions or emotional pressure. Speech might also be influenced, with the person using phrases or words they would not normally use or were not consciously aware of knowing.
But to add a twist, what if the hijacked individual realises what is happening and stubbornly fights back, resisting any control, while the plans of the hijacker depend completely on compliance? The hijacker might want to experience different relationships, different sexuality, different work, different interests or an entirely different future. Realising that compliance and consent will never be obtained, being forced to experience the hijacked individual’s chosen life instead might feel unbearable to the hijacker.
But that still does not give the hijacker ownership.
If somebody—or possibly more than one person—climbs into a car’s passenger seat without permission, they do not become the driver simply because they dislike where the car is going. The fact that they are stuck on the journey does not give them the right to seize the steering wheel.
The same rule applies here. If the hijacker—or hijackers—were never knowingly invited in, the person living the life has no duty to redesign everything to make them happy. If they cannot tolerate the journey, then the answer is for them to leave, not for the owner of the life to surrender it.
The Atomic Price of Taking Somebody’s Life Away From Them
Money can sometimes be replaced. Property can be replaced. Careers can sometimes be rebuilt. A human life is different because time only moves in one direction.
Youth cannot be returned. Relationships that never happened cannot simply be recreated decades later. Opportunities deliberately destroyed may never appear again. Years spent fighting against somebody else’s plan cannot be handed back.
That is why appropriating a person’s life carries an atomic price. The loss is not just financial or emotional. The person may have lost part of the only period in which their own chosen life could have been lived.
If somebody else has benefited from that loss through money, power, sexual gratification, status or opportunity, then another question follows. In this hypothetical, what happens to benefits that were obtained without doing the actual work or while somebody else paid the real price? At what point does benefit become a debt, and what would proper repayment mean when some of what was taken can never be restored?
Money might be repayable. Power might be surrendered. Unfair advantages might be removed. But decades cannot be repaid in the same way. That is precisely why the price becomes so enormous.
Sunk Costs Do Not Create Rights
The people who built the alternative future might eventually say that too much has already been invested to abandon it. Too much money has been spent, too many people are involved and too many plans depend upon it.
But none of that creates rights over the intended person’s life.
The planners chose to spend the money. They chose to involve other people. They chose to build without first obtaining consent. If the person ultimately rejects everything they created, the loss remains theirs.
In fact, the more that has been spent without permission, the larger the original mistake becomes. The investment does not make the planned future more legitimate. It simply means more resources were committed to something before checking whether the person expected to live it actually wanted it.
No Informed Consent Without the Whole Offer
There is another basic problem if the final alternative remains hidden. Nobody can give informed consent to something that has not been properly explained.
A person may understand that some kind of plan exists. They may recognise broad parts of it. They may suspect what other people want. But none of that is the same as being given the complete proposal.
Real consent would require knowing what changes, who is involved, what relationships are expected, what freedoms remain, what is permanent, what can be refused and what the actual consequences are.
Until that is known, there is nothing complete to consent to.
And even once everything is explained, the answer may still be no. Disclosure creates the possibility of informed consent. It does not create an obligation to give it.
Reclaiming Authorship
The central issue is therefore not whether every dream comes true. Life does not guarantee that. The issue is whether a person remains the author of the life they actually live.
Some dreams may change naturally. Better opportunities may appear. Ideas that originally came through the hive may genuinely improve life. A person might even freely choose something that happens to resemble part of the future other people once wanted.
But there is a fundamental difference between arriving there freely and being pushed there through hidden plans, emotional manipulation, sexual pressure or manufactured misery, such as deliberately induced anxiety or depression.
The purpose of reclaiming authorship is not to freeze a person forever in one set of choices. It is to make sure that when choices change, they change because the person genuinely wants something different rather than because somebody else has successfully broken down resistance.
Conclusion
In this hypothetical world, the hive could be one of the most useful things humanity has ever had. It could share ideas, solve problems, create extraordinary knowledge and perhaps allow individuals to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible. But the same system could also become one of the most abusive things imaginable if people learned how to use it for money, power, sex or control while perhaps also avoiding responsibility for what they were doing.
That is why the important question is not simply whether the hive exists. It is what people do with it.
An individual or group of people who use shared knowledge to help another person achieve a freely chosen goal are doing something completely different from an individual or group who use the same system to manipulate emotions, steal ideas, gain money, obtain power, satisfy sexual desires or secretly construct a life for somebody else.
Consent remains the dividing line. An individual or group of people does not gain consent simply because the person eventually stops resisting. Consent is not created because the pressure becomes unbearable, because other people have already spent enormous amounts of money, because one useful part of the system was accepted, or merely because an individual or group believes the planned life is better.
The person living the life decides what is shared, what remains private, what help is accepted, what relationships are wanted and what future is being pursued. The hive may offer information and possibilities, but it does not gain ownership simply because it can reach inside the system.
If an individual or group of people has spent years building another future without consent, they took that risk themselves. Any repayment or penalty would have to take account not only of what they gained, but also of what the other person lost; and if the consequence is that everything the individual or group built, gained or expected to keep is ultimately lost, then that loss would add to the repayment and penalty for what they chose to do.
The hive may contain millions of voices, but the existence of those voices does not give them the right to take somebody else’s life and write it for them. A shared mind may help build a future, but only the future freely chosen by the person who has to live it. If a life is stolen at the level of its authorship—its choices, relationships, direction, time and possibilities—then the price of that theft must ultimately be existential, because what has been taken is not simply money, opportunity or happiness, but part of the person’s existence itself: the life that could otherwise have been lived.
Dystopian Fiction with Similar Themes
I’ve used AI to check whether other authors and filmmakers have explored dystopian ideas similar to the hive described here. I’m well aware that clever people have usually had the same ideas as me many years earlier.
The only one of the books I can claim to have actually read is Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is often quoted when discussing the increasingly strange “clown world” around us. I’ve also included a short list of films with overlapping themes, where ideas such as hidden control, altered reality, planted thoughts, collective minds and loss of personal autonomy appear in different forms.
Even within a completely hypothetical framework, it does seem rather odd that so many books and films appear to cross over with elements of the hive described here and with the experiences that helped inspire it. That does not prove that any such hive exists; perhaps these ideas are simply normal and obvious to some people. But for those who do not find them normal or obvious, it does make me wonder whether there may be other people like me out there who have had similarly strange experiences or thoughts and either found their own way of expressing them through fiction and art, or perhaps felt too concerned about mentioning them openly at all.
None of this proves that any such hive exists, but the similarities are certainly interesting.
Popular Books with Similar Themes
This Perfect Day - Ira Levin
Probably the closest match. A supposedly harmonious collective system controls people’s lives, choices and behaviour, with medication helping to keep the system stable. This is similar to the hive deciding what a “good life” should look like for the individual.
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Individual identity is swallowed by a collective society in which privacy is almost nonexistent. This closely matches the idea of discovering that the walls around a supposedly private life were never really solid.
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Explores a world in which even private thought is no longer safely private. It relates closely to the idea that the final private territory—the mind itself—can be observed, judged and used against the individual.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Probably the strongest parallel to the emotional-override idea. Behaviour is manipulated through conditioning, raising the same question explored in this essay: if the rational mind has effectively been bypassed, was the resulting action genuinely chosen?
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
People are conditioned to accept a highly controlled society and may even experience that system as normal or pleasurable. This resembles the possibility that many people could be perfectly comfortable inside the hive while somebody who rejects its assumptions experiences it very differently.
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The characters gradually realise that wider society has already decided what their lives are for. This parallels the idea of discovering that somebody else has effectively constructed a future for a person without allowing that person genuine authorship of it.
Popular Films with Similar Themes
There are also several well-known films containing ideas surprisingly close to parts of the hive described in this essay. Again, none contains exactly the same idea, but different films explore hidden control, planted thoughts, constructed lives, collective minds and the question of whether somebody is really making their own choices.
The Matrix (1999)
Probably the most obvious comparison. People live inside a constructed reality believing their lives are normal, while a hidden system controls the world around them. Those who discover what is really happening can effectively “unplug” from it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
The Truman Show (1998)
Truman believes he is living an ordinary private life, but almost his entire world has secretly been constructed around him and other people know far more about his life than he does. This closely matches the idea of discovering that a supposedly private life was never as private as believed.
https://www.paramountpictures.com/movies/the-truman-show
Inception (2010)
Perhaps the closest film to the idea of a thought being deliberately “planted”. The central task is literally to place an idea inside another person’s mind so that the target eventually believes the idea came from themselves.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
A hidden organisation has a predetermined plan for somebody’s life and secretly manipulates events to keep him on the path chosen for him. He discovers the plan and decides that he wants a different life. This strongly resembles the essay’s question of who actually gets to author a person’s future.
https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/the-adjustment-bureau
Dark City (1998)
One of the closest matches to the hive itself. A group with a collective consciousness secretly changes people’s memories, identities and surroundings while experimenting on them. Most inhabitants do not realise that their lives are being repeatedly altered.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Particularly relevant to The Hijacker section. People discover a way to enter another person’s mind and experience life through him, with the story also exploring control over the person being inhabited.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120601/
Equilibrium (2002)
A controlled society uses medication to suppress emotion and keep the population compliant. It is not the same medication idea as the submarine, but it raises a related question about how much of somebody’s experience and behaviour remains genuinely their own when emotional states are externally controlled.
https://www.miramax.com/movie/Equilibrium/
Where the Hive Is Different
As with the books, none of these films quite combines everything in the essay. The hive may provide extraordinary knowledge and useful ideas while also allowing privacy to disappear, thoughts or emotions to be manipulated, hidden participants to influence behaviour, and other people to attempt to construct somebody else’s life.
That mixture is what makes the central question different: can somebody use the useful parts of a shared intelligence while remaining the sole author of the life they actually choose to live?