: Writing from a hive mind POV The story: Centuries ago, humanity have been incorporated into an alien hive mind, spread by a bacterial-like infection. The "bacteria" infects the blood and brain

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It's apt that you'll be writing in French, since Descartes formulated his "I think, therefore I am" argument in both French and Latin, and critics have argued all that can be inferred is "there is a thought" rather than that someone specific called "I" is having it. Needless to say, that weaker statement can be formulated in such languages. One can then avoid saying who is having a thought. This can, but need not, involve the passive voice when speaking of the thought(s) in question. But since others have already pointed out that not everything needs to be from the hive mind perspective, the technique I've described needs only occasional use or it gets annoying. It's best to use it early to introduce the reader to the premise; then you can bring in the protagonist as you switch away from it.

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I think what you're looking for is Emergence.

Emergence seems to be a fundamental part of our universe, and it basically means that dumb things can become smarter together.

An individual transistor is very limited, it can only block or let an electric signal through, however, you can build logic gates out of them, and from those, a computer.

The same is true to ants, their hive is way "smarter" than it's constituting parts. Take the hive, and replace ants with humans. and the hive becomes our civilization. We are different types of idiots, who together, can complement each other's weaknesses, most of us anyway.

If you were to connect together humans, I believe it would remove their individual flaws and insecurities, and create a being that is one level higher in the order of life than humans. Though it can also be that I watched too much of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

More info on emergence:

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Just a small suggestion: I appreciated how the Hive Mind was treated in the Ender's Game sequels. The main character is an individual, but he interacts with an Hive Queen, showing efficiently how such a thing would think.
My memory is not what it used to be, but I think we mostly read about the Queen in Xenocide, the third book.

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Also check out And Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. It's second-person, and it works. Where you seek an effective hive-mind, Ferris sought an effective Office — the collective murmurings of a bunch of coworkers. The use of second-person enables an omniscient narration — all of the events are well-known gossip, water-cooler talk — while still allowing personal perspectives (it is, in a sense, each character's individual narrative; just all of them together). And Ferris tapers off from a more comprehensive second-person, containing and expressing the thoughts of a whole office, down to a dialogue between just two characters: the narrator, and the reader. If you don't have time to give it a thorough read, honestly, I would recommend reading the first few pages, snippets in medias, and the very end. That should offer Some helpful sense of what he does.

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Here's a thought: would the infected members of the population even be aware that there is a hive mind of which they are a part? Sure, they experience extreme empathy and are subconsciously driven to act in ways that benefit the whole, but perhaps there is an individual experience that is largely oblivious to the organizing structure in which it is embedded.

Try an experiment where you write the hive mind as its own distinct character (perhaps using the first person), with its perspective distanced from the people that make it up. I might talk about my heart, lungs, stomach and arms, but mostly I just use them and ignore them, at least until they start malfunctioning. The hive mind probably doesn't even think of the individuals with their names, but rather in terms of their functions.

You can continue to write the individuals as relatable characters, allowing you to space out your transitions to the more foreign hive mindset to more manageable chunks of the story. The character perspectives are of course still impacted by their infection (notably, having markedly less selfish motivation), though I imagine the crisis underlying the story brings about conflict in part by forcing people to deal with their previously suppressed selfish impulses.

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David Brin's Uplift series has the traeki/Jophur, which are physically connected hive minds of stacked rings. Each ring is nominally a separate entity; the distinction between traeki and Jophur is the presence of a so-called 'master ring', basically an overriding personality which controls the other parts of the hive mind.

As the species is only one of the viewpoints in the books, use of the third person is very effective as a reminder to the reader that a stack of rings is a hive mind, not a single personality. Use of the first person indicates an overriding (single) personality. In your case I believe the distinction between first and third person could even be(come) a central theme, or way of expressing the difference between a thought from a hive mind and a thought from an individual. To me it seems that your choice of narrative should be based on 'where' the source is for a given thought or feeling at any given time.

This is also true for a given point of view - if a single person is walking through a room, the first or second person view is definitely not irrelevant; even though the control and sentience remains with the hive, you have made it clear that basic instincts still contribute to what defines individuals. Separate enjoyment by separate entities is an interesting angle in your introduction; bear in mind that this will also affect things like fashion, status, sex, careers, experience...

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A different slant on things, but Ayn Rand's Anthem has a non-supernatural hive mind (collectivism gone mad, I guess) and she shows it by using collective pronouns even for individuals. So instead of "I" she uses "we", even when there's only one character involved. I hate the book, but the pronouns were interesting.

You might also want to check out Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It has a super-powerful AI using human bodies to do its bidding, and they function as a sort of collective. It gets a bit confusing sometimes, but it's pretty well done, I'd say.

Other than the pronouns, I think you'll probably have to decide just how entwined these humans are with each other. If their connection is totally voluntary and can be turned off, it would just sort of be like people having hardwired internet, and you wouldn't need to do much beyond acknowledging it. But if you're going for a deeper connection, one that can't be controlled and that would remove all traces of privacy, you'll have to really think about every aspect of your society and take it from there.

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(This might get good answers on WorldBuilding SE also.)

I think you have to decide, from a storytelling viewpoint, how these people communicate. Does each individual have his/her own thoughts but others pop in and out like everyone is always in the same room and thinking out loud? Do you only hear the thoughts of people within X geographical distance? Or is it more like the Borg, where there's the constant white noise of a billion minds in the background?

How has this affected society? Is there an Internet? Are there phones, email, texts, mail? Do people travel as much? Can they link to the point of looking through someone else's eyes, so to speak?

Once you work through these structural details, it should become clearer how to tell the story — if you have individuals who think but are always hearing other individuals, that could be first-person or third-person limited, but if everyone is a Borg drone with free will, then third-person will make more sense.

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