How to Be a Human

The Prisoner is a sci-fi TV series that's 50 years old. It's about the struggle of a man who is wrongly trapped in a weird electronic gulag that eerily resembles modern life. It's streaming on Amazon now, but you have to pay to watch. You can get the gist of it by watching a few episodes. Many of the themes of the show are present in a million other TV shows, movies, and books.

The show seems to really be about the struggle of a man to be fully human within the context of civilization, and the psychopaths and patsies that are its servants, who want to reduce him to a number.

The Borg from Star Trek: Next Generation is a fictional representation of a similar set of themes. The Borg and Data represent two sides of that problem. The Borg is all consuming, reducing humans to numbers who live in a hive. Data is a computer that wants to have a heart (the Vulcans represented the same concept in other iterations of the show). The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are yet another version of this concept.