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Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times

215 points by CountHackulus 15y ago

arethuza 15y ago
The observation about nobody wasting time in Star Trek made me think of the Culture - where 99.9999% of the human population are effectively doing nothing other than "wasting time" - having a jolly good time along the way, of course. Then I saw a comment that explains it: "Star Trek and the Federation actually depict a Space Amish splinter group from the Culture."
- dasmoth 15y ago
  Plausible, but the Aubrey/Maturin LARP seems even more likely.
  - tsunamifury 15y ago
    This seems to apply -- as most of the episodes show earth citizens goofing off all day or working hobby jobs.
gee_totes 15y ago
I agree with the author that the social subtext on DS9 (and Star Trek in general) was very old fashioned (i.e. no gay crewmen). But to it's credit, DS9 had a very modern political subtext. DS9 was a show set in space dealing with an occupied peoples that suffered decades of repression and were trying to regain their sovereignty. The show was filmed as the first Intifada and Oslo peace process happened in the real world, and I feel the a major part of the series arc is about Israel/Palestine. I have not seen a show on TV since that attempts to have a smart political discussion about this issue.
- tontomurphy 15y ago
  I'd rather think that outside of episodes devoted to gay issues that many characters could be interpreted as gay or straight. Essentially that it was a non issue in the future. I partly agree with your second point. I think the Cardassians are clearly the Nazis and the Bajorans as the oppressed Jews.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
> Battle re-enactments are eminently useful for military officers But what good are they for a doctor and an engineer? To paraphrase Ender's Game, how do you apply the lessons learned at The Alamo, or on the fields of ancient Ireland to three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space? Another thing that struck me is that perhaps nobody wastes time because of the culture the Federation has become. They don't have money, either, and don't seem to particularly miss it. Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level. Or perhaps when anything is accessible via subspace radio, holodecks and replicators, the only thing that truly brings peace and a sense of accomplishment is actually accomplishing something instead of clicking on cows.
- jerf 15y ago
  "three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?" ... well... if you take Star Trek seriously, for some mysterious reason, space battle in their universe isn't actually 3 dimensional. At best it's 2.5, taking place on a two-dimensional plane with a few hundred meters of play in the third. Also, everything takes place at what would, even with modern military hardware, be considered point-blank range. Not only is Star Trek combat modeled on naval warfare, it's modeled on 17th century naval warfare. To your next paragraph, I would point out that we are following the elite of the elite. Sisko is the officer, out of all the presumably billions-if-not-trillions of people in the Federation, who is considered most suitable to be in charge of an incredibly strategic station. Odds are he's not a typical sample of humanity, nor any other officers there. I suspect our best officers today similarly do not "waste" much time either. Otherwise... I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working. I particularly enjoy playing this game with Futurama, something you're not "supposed" to do that with. But having spent some time on Star Trek, I find it's really, really hard to square the stated philosophy of the Federation with what seems to be the reality of the Federation. It just doesn't make sense. Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action). And I just find that in the end, there's no practical way to actually put together the pieces into anything like a coherent whole. Almost as if Star Trek was written over the course of decades by dozens upon dozens of writers mostly focused on how the current episode will turn out.
mhurron 15y ago
People are wasting time in Star Trek all the time, more so in the Next Generation spinoffs than in the Original Series. DS9 probably showed the most time wasting of them all. Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. Those holodeck/holosuite episodes? They weren't there for training. Picard is always reading or trying to read a book, Sisco does baseball and Janeway paints and whatnot with Da Vinci. Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it. Keeping the show interesting is basically the most important thing for the writers, so its probably best not too look too deeply at what is portrayed as if it is some realistic situation.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. It's even full of people gambling, and the gambling tables are run by busty women in cleavagey outfits. And in the first few seasons, it's pretty obvious that the holosuites are for porn.
- davidw 15y ago
  > Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it. Right. No one wants the cameras to follow Kirk as he gets a worried look on his face, sticks a copy of Space Sports Illustrated under his arm and runs for the head after eating a bad batch of Rigelian Sarklon worms. Presumably, however, it does happen from time to time.
- brudgers 15y ago
  >"DS9 probably showed the most time wasting of them all." Well, the theme was "To boldly stay where no person has stayed before," after all.
  - laconian 15y ago
    Sounds like you stopped midway through Season 1!
- deleted 15y ago
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narag 15y ago
War is what I found more anachronistic in most sci-fi. And I believe it works as a justification: showing advanced civilizations at war makes us forget the shame that we're still primitive enough to kill one another in highly organized ways. It's always been like that, it always will. Really?
- philwelch 15y ago
  Well Earth has been at peace for centuries, it's just those damn aliens that start it, who are either warrior races or fascist imperialists or Borg.
barrkel 15y ago
SF shouldn't see itself as being in the business of predicting anything; or if it does so, then that's a niche subcategory of minority interest. I don't want to read about SF predicting Facebook, and nor do I want to watch compelling dramas played out on comment threads. SF is always an artifact of the time in which it was written. It's not about the future. It's about the present with a frame shift, and what that tells us about ourselves here and now, from a different perspective. Prognostication - especially about the future - is a fool's game. A compelling story should relate to the reader / viewer here and now, not in 20 or 40 years on the haphazard chance that a bunch of predictions play out.
- gaius 15y ago
  Counterpoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the_World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the... "technological advancements and people in the real world that were inspired by the Star Trek phenomenon"
  - barrkel 15y ago
    That sounds more like an exercise in bias confirmation, to be frank; assume a premise, then look for evidence. Inspiration comes from lots of places, not least culture, fiction, nature, chance, etc. Finding the particular bits of inspiration influenced by a particular niche of fiction is a funny way of arguing that the purpose of a niche of fiction is to generate inspiration.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  SF isn't about predicting the future, it's about predicting our reactions to possible futures. A book that predicted Facebook would be interesting as a coincidence; a book that predicted Facebook and accurately showed some of the advantages and pitfalls that it presented would have been a worthwhile thing to read.
  - barrkel 15y ago
    All fiction (not just SF) is about predicting reactions of a set of characters to set of circumstances. There are really only two kinds of drama: ordinary things happen to extraordinary people, or extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. (And for extra comic-book style bombast, I guess you could include extraordinary things and people.) The way Philip K Dick put it, in SF the ideas (or circumstances) are the main character(s), rather than the people.
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warfangle 15y ago
I /just/ finished re-watching "Past Tense" last night - a two-episode arc where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir get stuck in 2024 San Francisco. Everyone poor is isolated into ghettos - those without ID, those with no job, those with mental illness. They aren't allowed to leave, and thugs rob people of their ration cards all the time. It's hard (but possible) to see this kind of future in the US. What struck me about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it been suspended? why? I mean, this is only set 29 years after it aired. All communication is semi-internet, but done over channels - like cable tv. The user interface for it looks like the graphics used in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?". The internet wasn't quite commercialized, yet - that would come the year after air. But we already had BBS' and other connectivity. Surely the writers worked on some sort of network at their office. We also already had user interfaces more interactive than what they showed - giant desk-size consoles, a 5" monochrome screen and a series of menu options. Is this what people thought of computers, even in 1994? The entire premise seemed to be 24th-century Federation, but regressed ~200 years -- instead of present-day, progressed 30 years.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > What struck me about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it been suspended? why? I don't want to get too far into this, but eh...in 1996, people would look at legislation like SOPA, NDAA, and the Patriot Act and ask the same question. I think "Past Tense" is being borne out rather than repudiated by recent events, especially depending on your level of pessimism about the economy. Funny enough though, some of the DS9 writers actually went on the internet to communicate with their fans.
- kirbysayshi 15y ago
  Keep this in mind too: Star Trek, while originally attempting to portray humanity in the future, inevitably created canon. Thus, there is a world war 3 in the star trek universe that occurs around 1999 (I can't remember the exact time frame). So It makes sense that 20 years after the world "ended", people would be pretty scared and do anything to try to right civilization. In the end, as the original post implies, Star Trek is no longer a vision of the future, but rather a sandbox to put humanity into and see how they react.
philwelch 15y ago
I think the main point to remember is that Star Trek, even DS9, mostly portrays the lives of idealized people in, effectively, the military. When I think of the most talented and driven people I know (and surely it takes driven and talented people to make it in Starfleet), I think of people who work long hours, spend much of their spare time cultivating their talents, and generally don't waste much time. One such person whom I know actually watches Shakespeare productions for entertainment. Some particular examples strike true--O'Brien's always tinkering with things when he isn't drinking and carousing with Bashir, Bashir has an endless supply of research projects to work on when he isn't drinking and carousing with O'Brien, Odo is an introverted workaholic. The prevalence of things like Shakespeare and classical music is mostly a writing conceit--it always comes off as contrived and awkward when Star Trek writers either invent futuristic forms of art or awkwardly shoehorn in the 20th century. I would posit that the world of Star Trek eliminates the alienation of everyday life on Earth that leads one to social networking in the first place. Furthermore, and this is admittedly handwavy, but any analog to the internet would either only cover the station itself (in which case why bother, because the whole station hangs out at the bar anyway) or require subspace radio to communicate with thousands of planets at once, which is very plausibly impractical if not outright prevented by security requirements. More nitpicks: > 90s! YOU WERE THE BEST! With your adorable WE ARE SO DARK plots that seem like Strawberry Shortcake Goes to Space by today's standards. Well, compared to BSG I guess there's no on-camera rape scenes, but all the rest, torture and genocide included, is there. It isn't portrayed with the same realism, granted. > In fact, the war correspondence he so longs to write--and he believes he is the only one who can write it--would be one of many, many voices escaping from occupied DS9 in the post Arab Spring networked news hivemind. Well they evacuated nearly all the civilians. Jake is quite possibly the only civilian left who doesn't have anything better to do than to be a war correspondent. Quark has his bar, Rom has his undercover mission, and the Bajoran crew are still military officers who have to run the station and pretend to collaborate with the Dominion. To the point that "nobody blogs", the actual crew all keep "personal logs", and while they're classified and not shared to the world (more on that later), it's not that far off. > Can you imagine the subreddit for the station? How many atheists would tear down Sisko the messiah, how every decision would be questioned, mocked, dissected where the actors and the acted upon could see it? Who, exactly? The crew? No, that would be insubordination. The crew's families? Not technically insubordination but still awkward. The business owners on the Promenade? Right, Quark and the owner of the Klingon restaurant are going to openly criticize the one thing that makes DS9 a tourist destination for Bajoran pilgrims. > Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to deliberately take action to achieve in my world. Even when we are alone, most of us check a number of communication vectors and leave them live--Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds. We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels. To be alone as profoundly (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a decision to shut down all of those streams. These people are living in space. Only the highest ranking officers have their own quarters, and the unmarried ones seem to spend half their leisure time dating or hanging out in the bar. Even the station commander's son has to have a roommate when he moves out of his dad's quarters. There's even a scene where Worf and Odo, the introverted loners of the cast, discuss their respective strategies for getting away from it all to finally spend some time alone. EDIT: Come to think of it, the station does have a network. Quark is constantly hacking into it, probably with Rom's help. In one amusing scene, he does it to spam everybody with poorly produced advertisements for his bar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9tw2mx_gE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9tw2mx_gE
arctangent 15y ago
You could argue that a lot of sci-fi isn't really meant to be a description of events in the future: instead it's often a thinly-disguised morality play set in the then-present.
daedalus_j 15y ago
I always assumed this was because in the Star Trek universe people were freed from a lot of the drudgery by the systems, and used the time to go do the interesting things that they wanted to do. I suppose it's because I see reddit and facebook as a weird form of escapism from reality. I know that when I don't have any pressing issues I'm much more likely to sit down and read. reddit/hn is for when I need a quick "don't think about work" break, never for when I have the whole weekend stretching out in front of me. The utopian dream of Star Trek is a never-ending weekend where _you_ get to decide what's important without being overly concerned that you'll starve to death on Monday.
- jff 15y ago
  Star Trek, especially TOS, are all about drudgery. As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button. Even in the more recent episodes, you constantly had people hauling around those little pads in order to give information to somebody, rather than transmitting it via the (presumably) incredibly advanced computer which is linked to and controlling the entire ship.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    Also, Chief O'Brien's attempts to keep DS9 running, albeit that's Cardassian technology. > As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button. HELM 108!
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    If I email you my report, you can ignore it. If I hand you a pad locked on the report till you acknowledge that you read it, your attention has been put to the task at hand. If I were putting together the social organization scheme for running a space ship, I might take advantage of that. In TOS, pads were first used by the captains for reviewing and acknowledging that they had seen various reports.
noblethrasher 15y ago
At some point, there will be a generation whose entire life history, from cradle to grave, will be documented online. Soon thereafter, the archives containing all of that data will be made public. At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. By the 23rd century personal logs would tend to stay more personal, parents would think more carefully about putting their child's life-story into the public domain, and willfully living in social silos may come to be seen as pathetically parochial.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  First, 23rd century is a very long shot. It's like trying to predict 20th century from 17th. You can only realistically figure out something about mid-21st. And I bet the events described by you would cause people to start caring even less about privacy. What's the big deal about data becoming public if it's old and nobody reads it any more? Because each second produces more data than you can possibly care?
  - noblethrasher 15y ago
    I was being a little tongue-in-cheek as far as predicting the 23rd century (the article was about the DS9 era of Star Trek). My thesis is that people do care about privacy but are motivated to share in order to portray a certain image. They don't want all of the ugly stuff revealed. So I don't see how people will start caring less about privacy when they realize that they don't have any control over their image.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. That's a fairly tame prediction. Most of the benefit we get from keeping secrets is either temporary (I don't want my boss to know I'm looking for another job; I don't want my wife to know I'm having an affair) or only benefits us if everyone else keeps the same secrets so it becomes a taboo (I'm gay; I don't believe in God; I have embarrassing sexual fetishes; I have fringe political beliefs). The first kind we don't care about keeping after death unless we're especially vain and famous enough people would care, and the second kind is only work keeping secret if everyone else keeps it secret. I can't imagine a huge backlash against sharing and social networking once it becomes culturally engrained; instead, insistence on privacy will be seen as suspicious and eccentric.
mathattack 15y ago
All Science Fiction writers miss big trends. Asimov missed computers. Whoops! This makes it all the more impressive when they do hit it. And the greatest science fiction renders technology irrelevant. When Star Trek broke racial stereotypes and attacked bigotry - that was a cultural message.
- groby_b 15y ago
  Uh, what? Asimov writes a _lot_ about U.S. Robots and positronic brains amongst other things. He's exploring the idea of increasingly powerful computers in 'The Last Question'. And those are just off the top of my head. I really don't see how you can claim Asimov missed computers///
  - snowwrestler 15y ago
    The robots in Asimov's stories don't much resemble computers as we know them--they're more like characters. His computers tend to be massive centralized things, as computers were in his day. Compare to the pocket computers in The Mote in God's Eye, which are eerily similar to today's smartphones. Niven apparently thought the idea was one of the most fantastical aspects of the book.
    - groby_b 15y ago
      Unless I'm mistaken, at the very least "The End of Eternity" features pocket computers, too. And to say robot brains don't count because their AI is so advanced that they are more like characters is kind of disingenuous :)
brudgers 15y ago
I read "Star Trek" and thought of the show with female aliens wearing push-up bras and a computer with large blinking lights. Man, I'm feeling old.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Turns out, it hasn't changed all that much.
lnanek 15y ago
The article says no one wastes time and just kicks back and watches videos all day and how unrealistic that is. I think there was a character that did that, though. Lt. Barclay (sp?) or something like that got addicted to the holodeck to the degree where it interfered with his work. Additionally, it's a very different world. Didn't they get rid of money in the federation, for example? Surely living in a no money environment where everyone has their basic needs covered for free would change how people behave. Also having super smart computers. Maybe no one posts on Facebook because they can just talk outloud to a computer or a badge and it will get deliver to the recipient as text, newsfeed, or voice - whatever their preference. I already know people who prefer I always call them instead of text. If they are there we can have a conversation with some back and forth, if not, Google Voice transcribes the message and it is the same as a text message anyway. Lastly, being in the tech industry and the US I tend to run into some blindingly smart immigrants. I think part of why they are that way is that they already had the money or education or talent to be able to get to the US when they wanted to. Many people are too poor to leave their home. So the people we mainly see in Star Trek could be similar, they are the people who had all the opportunities or talent to let them go out into the universe or become super well known politicians or doctors on the planets we visit, etc.. Making assumptions about everyday live based on the people we usually see might be like making assumptions about everyday life in the real world by only looking at Wall Street.
- leot 15y ago
  I am hoping that addiction is too big and important a problem to persist much longer, at least within wealthy societies. There will, perhaps even within the next 20 years, be treatments that quickly and reliably improve executive function (indeed, there are already such therapies, but they are slow, time consuming, and expensive).
petercooper 15y ago
My favorite comment on there: What, no mention of the Borg? They have constant awareness of each other and consider it jarring when someone "drops off the grid"... they suffer real problems with an environment that fosters "epistemic closure"... better analog for social networking than the Great Link, IMHO. I think we might be heading more to being like the Borg.. :-)
- tomjen3 15y ago
  It has its advantages -- I could use nano upgrades for quite a few things. But there is a key difference between the internet and the Borg technology. Borg tech was based on voice (e.g the episode in which the first officer of Voyager is temporarily connected to some subgroup of borgs) whereas the internet is based on text (we have video, but even on Facebook, most of what people share is text-based) and where the Borg is synchronous, we are mostly asynchronous. In both cases this helps us to scale the networks better.
  - vl 15y ago
    Internet is based on the transmission of thought. The reason text is used for thought encoding right now is that at the current level of technology text offers very good price/performance for ease of production, delivery and retaining and at same time provides reasonable accuracy and information density. At the era of brain implants when you will "look" at the website, you'll "see" thoughts, ideas and memories, not text, pictures and video.
    - Helianthus 15y ago
      text, pictures, and video _constitute_ thoughts, ideas, and memories. ;)
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  the borg make most sense as wireheads who, from a certain type of utilitarian standpoint, are engaged in a great moral crusade.
bluekeybox 15y ago
When it comes to retro-futurism, I'm having a hard time finding a more uncannily accurate past prediction than this one by Andy Warhol: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Star Trek is an interesting example of Science Fiction, as it's actually only quasi science fictional, but in a very fascinating way. The foundation of speculative fiction is exploring the implications of certain ideas that represent deviations from the way the world works today. (Aside: also, the difference between fantasy and scifi is that the former is teleological while the latter is mechanistic, but that doesn't bear on this discussion.) However, Star Trek is rarely about exploring the implications of the setting of Star Trek. This is because that's not what Star Trek is about. Instead, Star Trek is about creating a setting with certain character archetypes that we grow to care about, a familiar setting, and a world where almost anything can happen. This allows Star Trek to dedicate each episode to vignettes where different individual premises are explored in true scifi fashion. In short, Star Trek is not a scifi series per se it's more of a scifi anthology. The constant aspects of Star Trek (the world, the crew, the ship, and the associated technology) are just stage setting that enable and make more meaningful individual stories from the anthology.
DannoHung 15y ago
Presumably the new Star Trek universe introduced with the Abrams film can allow for some of this cruft to be broken off. I still think it's kinda charming that people read the classics in the future though. I mean, I don't always read high falutin' books, but I try to read something from the English cannon every once in a while. Also, you have to consider that since they have replicators, why not read on a real book? You can just toss it in the replicator whenever you want and get a fresh copy when you sit down to read.
- pjscott 15y ago
  I actually prefer the physical form of an ebook reader, most of the time. It's lightweight and always lies flat, even when held at a weird angle that I would never even attempt with a dead-tree book.
otakucode 15y ago
Star Trek was always a very fascist dictatorship-esque vision of the future. What you wear is dictated by a central authority. "Primitive" cultures are deemed too inferior to be permitted to decide their own future, so it is decided for them by the Federation. Most of the worst anti-human flaws of current time are not simply maintained, they are amplified and made so oppressively constant that they disappear unless you're looking for them. And, as is actually said directly several times, humanity has 'improved' to the point where they are perfectly happy to live with extreme restrictions on even the most mundane freedoms, so long as they are handed down by a militaristic hierarchical power structure. There is a degree of limitation imposed on anyone trying to create popular entertainment. You can't be too imaginative. There are many aspects of human society that modern people believe are 'natural' and endemic to human nature, even though even cursory glances at history show those exact things to not only be 'not natural', but exceedingly bizarre. If you line up the social mores and values and the like of every culture that we know has ever existed, you can spot things which are common to all cultures, and you can spot things that are strange aberrations that emerged and eventually went away. And, you can see several aspects of our culture that are so diametrically opposed to the common components of every culture ever that it's very foolish to imagine that our wholly unique take on the matter will endure for long. Science Fiction is fascinating, but often disappointing when presented for a popular audience. For a popular audience, you can't question their basic assumptions. You would not get too far presenting a decentralized society which understands that centralized control of power is a guarantee of abuse and tragedy. You can't show a society where sex is used as a basic social interaction. And a society where eating is treated as stigmatized and for-marriage-only as many see sex today would simply be confusing (even though there are tribes which adopted exactly this practice, believing eating around others to be inherently extremely shameful, something only to be shared with someone you are married to). And, if the creators look at history and they see the aesthetic of military organizations doing a lot, it makes sense that they would presume that in the future all of the 'important' stuff would be handed over to militaristic agencies. That smacks of a complete lack of understanding of WHY military agencies are structured in the way they are. The military does not adhere to rigorous discipline because that is an effective way to accomplish general human endeavors. They do it because committing violence against other human beings is extremely difficult to get human beings to do. And when they do it, they are torn apart with post-traumatic stress disorders, depression, anxiety, and all sorts of negative effects. In order to be able to overcome the conscious brains prohibition on violence, soldiers must be trained so that their muscle memory can kill before their conscious mind can prevent them from doing it. And sticking to a simple routine with no allowance for individual diversity and the like makes it easiest to continue functioning in traumatic situations. These techniques don't work in any other human endeavor at all. They are exclusively useful for the purpose of getting human beings to kill other human beings. That is certainly an arguably useful thing (another topic entirely), but the techniques do not extend to non-soldiers. Humans function very poorly in situations where their freedom is significantly hindered. This is why there has never been a successful dictatorship or fascist regime that lasted. People naturally, even subconsciously, resist being controlled. And people put in control of others suffer just as many negative psychological effects as those they dominate. The reasoning, or sensibility, of the rules do not seem to matter. Whether you are preventing someone from drinking a bottle of poison, or forbidding them from considering an alternative political ideology, the result is the same. On the societal scale, restriction leads to self destructive behavior, gang behavior, and eventually revolution. We see this in prisons, we see it in restrictive nations, etc. The same pattern repeats over and over again, and mostly people take away 'oh well, that wouldn't happen if the people involved were better people' or 'that wouldn't happen if the rules were better'. It would. It always would. No system, no matter how complex, can possibly account for human behavior. Anyhow, older scifi is at least slightly better than modern. Watch a modern scifi show. See how many episodes follow this pattern: 'Smart' character has idea. 'Not smart' but intuitive character warns that the idea might be dangerous. 'Smart' character ignores the warning, and leads everyone into lethal danger. A character, usually military, follows his gut and saves the day. You'll find it difficult to find any modern scifi that does not fit this formula. The hero is always the person who is "reasonable" by ignoring reason, and who refuses to carefully consider the situation, just going with their gut. And, of course, pretty much every single scifi show presents the military as the savior of all humanity. I especially loved watching the first episode of that new terrible show 'Terra Nova'. They go back in time to 'start over' and right all the wrong choices humanity made. This time they're not going to screw it up. Oh, and how is this announced? By an unelected military god-king who controls every facet of the lives of every person there. Right, off to a roaring start, throwing away all that 'democracy' hoo-ha and giving all control to people whose training was designed solely to teach them to kill most effectively when needed.
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prawn 15y ago
Has any (mainstream) sci-fi besides Wall-E shown a future where laziness and preoccupation with the mundane is the norm?
- bengl3rt 15y ago
  Do you consider Idiocracy science fiction?
- philwelch 15y ago
  Futurama?
- pjscott 15y ago
  How mainstream are you looking for? The Culture is pretty lazy, for the most part.
xiaoma 15y ago
>All of the episodes involving Jake's incipient writer-hood (besides being pretty weaksauce in general)... The most critically acclaimed episode of the entire 7 seasons and my personal favorite was about Jake becoming a writer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_...

215 points by CountHackulus 15y ago

The observation about nobody wasting time in Star Trek made me think of the Culture - where 99.9999% of the human population are effectively doing nothing other than "wasting time" - having a jolly good time along the way, of course. Then I saw a comment that explains it: "Star Trek and the Federation actually depict a Space Amish splinter group from the Culture."

dasmoth 15y ago
Plausible, but the Aubrey/Maturin LARP seems even more likely.
- tsunamifury 15y ago
  This seems to apply -- as most of the episodes show earth citizens goofing off all day or working hobby jobs.

gee_totes 15y ago

I agree with the author that the social subtext on DS9 (and Star Trek in general) was very old fashioned (i.e. no gay crewmen). But to it's credit, DS9 had a very modern political subtext. DS9 was a show set in space dealing with an occupied peoples that suffered decades of repression and were trying to regain their sovereignty. The show was filmed as the first Intifada and Oslo peace process happened in the real world, and I feel the a major part of the series arc is about Israel/Palestine. I have not seen a show on TV since that attempts to have a smart political discussion about this issue.

tontomurphy 15y ago
I'd rather think that outside of episodes devoted to gay issues that many characters could be interpreted as gay or straight. Essentially that it was a non issue in the future. I partly agree with your second point. I think the Cardassians are clearly the Nazis and the Bajorans as the oppressed Jews.

pavel_lishin 15y ago

> Battle re-enactments are eminently useful for military officers But what good are they for a doctor and an engineer? To paraphrase Ender's Game, how do you apply the lessons learned at The Alamo, or on the fields of ancient Ireland to three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space? Another thing that struck me is that perhaps nobody wastes time because of the culture the Federation has become. They don't have money, either, and don't seem to particularly miss it. Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level. Or perhaps when anything is accessible via subspace radio, holodecks and replicators, the only thing that truly brings peace and a sense of accomplishment is actually accomplishing something instead of clicking on cows.

jerf 15y ago
"three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?" ... well... if you take Star Trek seriously, for some mysterious reason, space battle in their universe isn't actually 3 dimensional. At best it's 2.5, taking place on a two-dimensional plane with a few hundred meters of play in the third. Also, everything takes place at what would, even with modern military hardware, be considered point-blank range. Not only is Star Trek combat modeled on naval warfare, it's modeled on 17th century naval warfare. To your next paragraph, I would point out that we are following the elite of the elite. Sisko is the officer, out of all the presumably billions-if-not-trillions of people in the Federation, who is considered most suitable to be in charge of an incredibly strategic station. Odds are he's not a typical sample of humanity, nor any other officers there. I suspect our best officers today similarly do not "waste" much time either. Otherwise... I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working. I particularly enjoy playing this game with Futurama, something you're not "supposed" to do that with. But having spent some time on Star Trek, I find it's really, really hard to square the stated philosophy of the Federation with what seems to be the reality of the Federation. It just doesn't make sense. Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action). And I just find that in the end, there's no practical way to actually put together the pieces into anything like a coherent whole. Almost as if Star Trek was written over the course of decades by dozens upon dozens of writers mostly focused on how the current episode will turn out.

mhurron 15y ago

People are wasting time in Star Trek all the time, more so in the Next Generation spinoffs than in the Original Series. DS9 probably showed the most time wasting of them all. Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. Those holodeck/holosuite episodes? They weren't there for training. Picard is always reading or trying to read a book, Sisco does baseball and Janeway paints and whatnot with Da Vinci. Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it. Keeping the show interesting is basically the most important thing for the writers, so its probably best not too look too deeply at what is portrayed as if it is some realistic situation.

philwelch 15y ago
> Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. It's even full of people gambling, and the gambling tables are run by busty women in cleavagey outfits. And in the first few seasons, it's pretty obvious that the holosuites are for porn.
davidw 15y ago
> Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it. Right. No one wants the cameras to follow Kirk as he gets a worried look on his face, sticks a copy of Space Sports Illustrated under his arm and runs for the head after eating a bad batch of Rigelian Sarklon worms. Presumably, however, it does happen from time to time.
brudgers 15y ago
>"DS9 probably showed the most time wasting of them all." Well, the theme was "To boldly stay where no person has stayed before," after all.
- laconian 15y ago
  Sounds like you stopped midway through Season 1!
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narag 15y ago

War is what I found more anachronistic in most sci-fi. And I believe it works as a justification: showing advanced civilizations at war makes us forget the shame that we're still primitive enough to kill one another in highly organized ways. It's always been like that, it always will. Really?

philwelch 15y ago
Well Earth has been at peace for centuries, it's just those damn aliens that start it, who are either warrior races or fascist imperialists or Borg.

barrkel 15y ago

SF shouldn't see itself as being in the business of predicting anything; or if it does so, then that's a niche subcategory of minority interest. I don't want to read about SF predicting Facebook, and nor do I want to watch compelling dramas played out on comment threads. SF is always an artifact of the time in which it was written. It's not about the future. It's about the present with a frame shift, and what that tells us about ourselves here and now, from a different perspective. Prognostication - especially about the future - is a fool's game. A compelling story should relate to the reader / viewer here and now, not in 20 or 40 years on the haphazard chance that a bunch of predictions play out.

gaius 15y ago
Counterpoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the_World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the... "technological advancements and people in the real world that were inspired by the Star Trek phenomenon"
- barrkel 15y ago
  That sounds more like an exercise in bias confirmation, to be frank; assume a premise, then look for evidence. Inspiration comes from lots of places, not least culture, fiction, nature, chance, etc. Finding the particular bits of inspiration influenced by a particular niche of fiction is a funny way of arguing that the purpose of a niche of fiction is to generate inspiration.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
SF isn't about predicting the future, it's about predicting our reactions to possible futures. A book that predicted Facebook would be interesting as a coincidence; a book that predicted Facebook and accurately showed some of the advantages and pitfalls that it presented would have been a worthwhile thing to read.
- barrkel 15y ago
  All fiction (not just SF) is about predicting reactions of a set of characters to set of circumstances. There are really only two kinds of drama: ordinary things happen to extraordinary people, or extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. (And for extra comic-book style bombast, I guess you could include extraordinary things and people.) The way Philip K Dick put it, in SF the ideas (or circumstances) are the main character(s), rather than the people.

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warfangle 15y ago

I /just/ finished re-watching "Past Tense" last night - a two-episode arc where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir get stuck in 2024 San Francisco. Everyone poor is isolated into ghettos - those without ID, those with no job, those with mental illness. They aren't allowed to leave, and thugs rob people of their ration cards all the time. It's hard (but possible) to see this kind of future in the US. What struck me about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it been suspended? why? I mean, this is only set 29 years after it aired. All communication is semi-internet, but done over channels - like cable tv. The user interface for it looks like the graphics used in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?". The internet wasn't quite commercialized, yet - that would come the year after air. But we already had BBS' and other connectivity. Surely the writers worked on some sort of network at their office. We also already had user interfaces more interactive than what they showed - giant desk-size consoles, a 5" monochrome screen and a series of menu options. Is this what people thought of computers, even in 1994? The entire premise seemed to be 24th-century Federation, but regressed ~200 years -- instead of present-day, progressed 30 years.

philwelch 15y ago
> What struck me about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it been suspended? why? I don't want to get too far into this, but eh...in 1996, people would look at legislation like SOPA, NDAA, and the Patriot Act and ask the same question. I think "Past Tense" is being borne out rather than repudiated by recent events, especially depending on your level of pessimism about the economy. Funny enough though, some of the DS9 writers actually went on the internet to communicate with their fans.
kirbysayshi 15y ago
Keep this in mind too: Star Trek, while originally attempting to portray humanity in the future, inevitably created canon. Thus, there is a world war 3 in the star trek universe that occurs around 1999 (I can't remember the exact time frame). So It makes sense that 20 years after the world "ended", people would be pretty scared and do anything to try to right civilization. In the end, as the original post implies, Star Trek is no longer a vision of the future, but rather a sandbox to put humanity into and see how they react.

philwelch 15y ago

I think the main point to remember is that Star Trek, even DS9, mostly portrays the lives of idealized people in, effectively, the military. When I think of the most talented and driven people I know (and surely it takes driven and talented people to make it in Starfleet), I think of people who work long hours, spend much of their spare time cultivating their talents, and generally don't waste much time. One such person whom I know actually watches Shakespeare productions for entertainment. Some particular examples strike true--O'Brien's always tinkering with things when he isn't drinking and carousing with Bashir, Bashir has an endless supply of research projects to work on when he isn't drinking and carousing with O'Brien, Odo is an introverted workaholic. The prevalence of things like Shakespeare and classical music is mostly a writing conceit--it always comes off as contrived and awkward when Star Trek writers either invent futuristic forms of art or awkwardly shoehorn in the 20th century. I would posit that the world of Star Trek eliminates the alienation of everyday life on Earth that leads one to social networking in the first place. Furthermore, and this is admittedly handwavy, but any analog to the internet would either only cover the station itself (in which case why bother, because the whole station hangs out at the bar anyway) or require subspace radio to communicate with thousands of planets at once, which is very plausibly impractical if not outright prevented by security requirements. More nitpicks: > 90s! YOU WERE THE BEST! With your adorable WE ARE SO DARK plots that seem like Strawberry Shortcake Goes to Space by today's standards. Well, compared to BSG I guess there's no on-camera rape scenes, but all the rest, torture and genocide included, is there. It isn't portrayed with the same realism, granted. > In fact, the war correspondence he so longs to write--and he believes he is the only one who can write it--would be one of many, many voices escaping from occupied DS9 in the post Arab Spring networked news hivemind. Well they evacuated nearly all the civilians. Jake is quite possibly the only civilian left who doesn't have anything better to do than to be a war correspondent. Quark has his bar, Rom has his undercover mission, and the Bajoran crew are still military officers who have to run the station and pretend to collaborate with the Dominion. To the point that "nobody blogs", the actual crew all keep "personal logs", and while they're classified and not shared to the world (more on that later), it's not that far off. > Can you imagine the subreddit for the station? How many atheists would tear down Sisko the messiah, how every decision would be questioned, mocked, dissected where the actors and the acted upon could see it? Who, exactly? The crew? No, that would be insubordination. The crew's families? Not technically insubordination but still awkward. The business owners on the Promenade? Right, Quark and the owner of the Klingon restaurant are going to openly criticize the one thing that makes DS9 a tourist destination for Bajoran pilgrims. > Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to deliberately take action to achieve in my world. Even when we are alone, most of us check a number of communication vectors and leave them live--Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds. We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels. To be alone as profoundly (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a decision to shut down all of those streams. These people are living in space. Only the highest ranking officers have their own quarters, and the unmarried ones seem to spend half their leisure time dating or hanging out in the bar. Even the station commander's son has to have a roommate when he moves out of his dad's quarters. There's even a scene where Worf and Odo, the introverted loners of the cast, discuss their respective strategies for getting away from it all to finally spend some time alone. EDIT: Come to think of it, the station does have a network. Quark is constantly hacking into it, probably with Rom's help. In one amusing scene, he does it to spam everybody with poorly produced advertisements for his bar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9tw2mx_gE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9tw2mx_gE

arctangent 15y ago

You could argue that a lot of sci-fi isn't really meant to be a description of events in the future: instead it's often a thinly-disguised morality play set in the then-present.

daedalus_j 15y ago

I always assumed this was because in the Star Trek universe people were freed from a lot of the drudgery by the systems, and used the time to go do the interesting things that they wanted to do. I suppose it's because I see reddit and facebook as a weird form of escapism from reality. I know that when I don't have any pressing issues I'm much more likely to sit down and read. reddit/hn is for when I need a quick "don't think about work" break, never for when I have the whole weekend stretching out in front of me. The utopian dream of Star Trek is a never-ending weekend where _you_ get to decide what's important without being overly concerned that you'll starve to death on Monday.

jff 15y ago
Star Trek, especially TOS, are all about drudgery. As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button. Even in the more recent episodes, you constantly had people hauling around those little pads in order to give information to somebody, rather than transmitting it via the (presumably) incredibly advanced computer which is linked to and controlling the entire ship.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Also, Chief O'Brien's attempts to keep DS9 running, albeit that's Cardassian technology. > As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button. HELM 108!
- nooneelse 15y ago
  If I email you my report, you can ignore it. If I hand you a pad locked on the report till you acknowledge that you read it, your attention has been put to the task at hand. If I were putting together the social organization scheme for running a space ship, I might take advantage of that. In TOS, pads were first used by the captains for reviewing and acknowledging that they had seen various reports.

noblethrasher 15y ago

At some point, there will be a generation whose entire life history, from cradle to grave, will be documented online. Soon thereafter, the archives containing all of that data will be made public. At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. By the 23rd century personal logs would tend to stay more personal, parents would think more carefully about putting their child's life-story into the public domain, and willfully living in social silos may come to be seen as pathetically parochial.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
First, 23rd century is a very long shot. It's like trying to predict 20th century from 17th. You can only realistically figure out something about mid-21st. And I bet the events described by you would cause people to start caring even less about privacy. What's the big deal about data becoming public if it's old and nobody reads it any more? Because each second produces more data than you can possibly care?
- noblethrasher 15y ago
  I was being a little tongue-in-cheek as far as predicting the 23rd century (the article was about the DS9 era of Star Trek). My thesis is that people do care about privacy but are motivated to share in order to portray a certain image. They don't want all of the ugly stuff revealed. So I don't see how people will start caring less about privacy when they realize that they don't have any control over their image.
philwelch 15y ago
> At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. That's a fairly tame prediction. Most of the benefit we get from keeping secrets is either temporary (I don't want my boss to know I'm looking for another job; I don't want my wife to know I'm having an affair) or only benefits us if everyone else keeps the same secrets so it becomes a taboo (I'm gay; I don't believe in God; I have embarrassing sexual fetishes; I have fringe political beliefs). The first kind we don't care about keeping after death unless we're especially vain and famous enough people would care, and the second kind is only work keeping secret if everyone else keeps it secret. I can't imagine a huge backlash against sharing and social networking once it becomes culturally engrained; instead, insistence on privacy will be seen as suspicious and eccentric.

mathattack 15y ago

All Science Fiction writers miss big trends. Asimov missed computers. Whoops! This makes it all the more impressive when they do hit it. And the greatest science fiction renders technology irrelevant. When Star Trek broke racial stereotypes and attacked bigotry - that was a cultural message.

groby_b 15y ago
Uh, what? Asimov writes a _lot_ about U.S. Robots and positronic brains amongst other things. He's exploring the idea of increasingly powerful computers in 'The Last Question'. And those are just off the top of my head. I really don't see how you can claim Asimov missed computers///
- snowwrestler 15y ago
  The robots in Asimov's stories don't much resemble computers as we know them--they're more like characters. His computers tend to be massive centralized things, as computers were in his day. Compare to the pocket computers in The Mote in God's Eye, which are eerily similar to today's smartphones. Niven apparently thought the idea was one of the most fantastical aspects of the book.
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Unless I'm mistaken, at the very least "The End of Eternity" features pocket computers, too. And to say robot brains don't count because their AI is so advanced that they are more like characters is kind of disingenuous :)

brudgers 15y ago

I read "Star Trek" and thought of the show with female aliens wearing push-up bras and a computer with large blinking lights. Man, I'm feeling old.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Turns out, it hasn't changed all that much.

lnanek 15y ago

The article says no one wastes time and just kicks back and watches videos all day and how unrealistic that is. I think there was a character that did that, though. Lt. Barclay (sp?) or something like that got addicted to the holodeck to the degree where it interfered with his work. Additionally, it's a very different world. Didn't they get rid of money in the federation, for example? Surely living in a no money environment where everyone has their basic needs covered for free would change how people behave. Also having super smart computers. Maybe no one posts on Facebook because they can just talk outloud to a computer or a badge and it will get deliver to the recipient as text, newsfeed, or voice - whatever their preference. I already know people who prefer I always call them instead of text. If they are there we can have a conversation with some back and forth, if not, Google Voice transcribes the message and it is the same as a text message anyway. Lastly, being in the tech industry and the US I tend to run into some blindingly smart immigrants. I think part of why they are that way is that they already had the money or education or talent to be able to get to the US when they wanted to. Many people are too poor to leave their home. So the people we mainly see in Star Trek could be similar, they are the people who had all the opportunities or talent to let them go out into the universe or become super well known politicians or doctors on the planets we visit, etc.. Making assumptions about everyday live based on the people we usually see might be like making assumptions about everyday life in the real world by only looking at Wall Street.

leot 15y ago
I am hoping that addiction is too big and important a problem to persist much longer, at least within wealthy societies. There will, perhaps even within the next 20 years, be treatments that quickly and reliably improve executive function (indeed, there are already such therapies, but they are slow, time consuming, and expensive).

petercooper 15y ago

My favorite comment on there: What, no mention of the Borg? They have constant awareness of each other and consider it jarring when someone "drops off the grid"... they suffer real problems with an environment that fosters "epistemic closure"... better analog for social networking than the Great Link, IMHO. I think we might be heading more to being like the Borg.. :-)

tomjen3 15y ago
It has its advantages -- I could use nano upgrades for quite a few things. But there is a key difference between the internet and the Borg technology. Borg tech was based on voice (e.g the episode in which the first officer of Voyager is temporarily connected to some subgroup of borgs) whereas the internet is based on text (we have video, but even on Facebook, most of what people share is text-based) and where the Borg is synchronous, we are mostly asynchronous. In both cases this helps us to scale the networks better.
- vl 15y ago
  Internet is based on the transmission of thought. The reason text is used for thought encoding right now is that at the current level of technology text offers very good price/performance for ease of production, delivery and retaining and at same time provides reasonable accuracy and information density. At the era of brain implants when you will "look" at the website, you'll "see" thoughts, ideas and memories, not text, pictures and video.
  - Helianthus 15y ago
    text, pictures, and video _constitute_ thoughts, ideas, and memories. ;)
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
the borg make most sense as wireheads who, from a certain type of utilitarian standpoint, are engaged in a great moral crusade.

bluekeybox 15y ago

When it comes to retro-futurism, I'm having a hard time finding a more uncannily accurate past prediction than this one by Andy Warhol: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Star Trek is an interesting example of Science Fiction, as it's actually only quasi science fictional, but in a very fascinating way. The foundation of speculative fiction is exploring the implications of certain ideas that represent deviations from the way the world works today. (Aside: also, the difference between fantasy and scifi is that the former is teleological while the latter is mechanistic, but that doesn't bear on this discussion.) However, Star Trek is rarely about exploring the implications of the setting of Star Trek. This is because that's not what Star Trek is about. Instead, Star Trek is about creating a setting with certain character archetypes that we grow to care about, a familiar setting, and a world where almost anything can happen. This allows Star Trek to dedicate each episode to vignettes where different individual premises are explored in true scifi fashion. In short, Star Trek is not a scifi series per se it's more of a scifi anthology. The constant aspects of Star Trek (the world, the crew, the ship, and the associated technology) are just stage setting that enable and make more meaningful individual stories from the anthology.

DannoHung 15y ago

Presumably the new Star Trek universe introduced with the Abrams film can allow for some of this cruft to be broken off. I still think it's kinda charming that people read the classics in the future though. I mean, I don't always read high falutin' books, but I try to read something from the English cannon every once in a while. Also, you have to consider that since they have replicators, why not read on a real book? You can just toss it in the replicator whenever you want and get a fresh copy when you sit down to read.

pjscott 15y ago
I actually prefer the physical form of an ebook reader, most of the time. It's lightweight and always lies flat, even when held at a weird angle that I would never even attempt with a dead-tree book.

otakucode 15y ago

Star Trek was always a very fascist dictatorship-esque vision of the future. What you wear is dictated by a central authority. "Primitive" cultures are deemed too inferior to be permitted to decide their own future, so it is decided for them by the Federation. Most of the worst anti-human flaws of current time are not simply maintained, they are amplified and made so oppressively constant that they disappear unless you're looking for them. And, as is actually said directly several times, humanity has 'improved' to the point where they are perfectly happy to live with extreme restrictions on even the most mundane freedoms, so long as they are handed down by a militaristic hierarchical power structure. There is a degree of limitation imposed on anyone trying to create popular entertainment. You can't be too imaginative. There are many aspects of human society that modern people believe are 'natural' and endemic to human nature, even though even cursory glances at history show those exact things to not only be 'not natural', but exceedingly bizarre. If you line up the social mores and values and the like of every culture that we know has ever existed, you can spot things which are common to all cultures, and you can spot things that are strange aberrations that emerged and eventually went away. And, you can see several aspects of our culture that are so diametrically opposed to the common components of every culture ever that it's very foolish to imagine that our wholly unique take on the matter will endure for long. Science Fiction is fascinating, but often disappointing when presented for a popular audience. For a popular audience, you can't question their basic assumptions. You would not get too far presenting a decentralized society which understands that centralized control of power is a guarantee of abuse and tragedy. You can't show a society where sex is used as a basic social interaction. And a society where eating is treated as stigmatized and for-marriage-only as many see sex today would simply be confusing (even though there are tribes which adopted exactly this practice, believing eating around others to be inherently extremely shameful, something only to be shared with someone you are married to). And, if the creators look at history and they see the aesthetic of military organizations doing a lot, it makes sense that they would presume that in the future all of the 'important' stuff would be handed over to militaristic agencies. That smacks of a complete lack of understanding of WHY military agencies are structured in the way they are. The military does not adhere to rigorous discipline because that is an effective way to accomplish general human endeavors. They do it because committing violence against other human beings is extremely difficult to get human beings to do. And when they do it, they are torn apart with post-traumatic stress disorders, depression, anxiety, and all sorts of negative effects. In order to be able to overcome the conscious brains prohibition on violence, soldiers must be trained so that their muscle memory can kill before their conscious mind can prevent them from doing it. And sticking to a simple routine with no allowance for individual diversity and the like makes it easiest to continue functioning in traumatic situations. These techniques don't work in any other human endeavor at all. They are exclusively useful for the purpose of getting human beings to kill other human beings. That is certainly an arguably useful thing (another topic entirely), but the techniques do not extend to non-soldiers. Humans function very poorly in situations where their freedom is significantly hindered. This is why there has never been a successful dictatorship or fascist regime that lasted. People naturally, even subconsciously, resist being controlled. And people put in control of others suffer just as many negative psychological effects as those they dominate. The reasoning, or sensibility, of the rules do not seem to matter. Whether you are preventing someone from drinking a bottle of poison, or forbidding them from considering an alternative political ideology, the result is the same. On the societal scale, restriction leads to self destructive behavior, gang behavior, and eventually revolution. We see this in prisons, we see it in restrictive nations, etc. The same pattern repeats over and over again, and mostly people take away 'oh well, that wouldn't happen if the people involved were better people' or 'that wouldn't happen if the rules were better'. It would. It always would. No system, no matter how complex, can possibly account for human behavior. Anyhow, older scifi is at least slightly better than modern. Watch a modern scifi show. See how many episodes follow this pattern: 'Smart' character has idea. 'Not smart' but intuitive character warns that the idea might be dangerous. 'Smart' character ignores the warning, and leads everyone into lethal danger. A character, usually military, follows his gut and saves the day. You'll find it difficult to find any modern scifi that does not fit this formula. The hero is always the person who is "reasonable" by ignoring reason, and who refuses to carefully consider the situation, just going with their gut. And, of course, pretty much every single scifi show presents the military as the savior of all humanity. I especially loved watching the first episode of that new terrible show 'Terra Nova'. They go back in time to 'start over' and right all the wrong choices humanity made. This time they're not going to screw it up. Oh, and how is this announced? By an unelected military god-king who controls every facet of the lives of every person there. Right, off to a roaring start, throwing away all that 'democracy' hoo-ha and giving all control to people whose training was designed solely to teach them to kill most effectively when needed.

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prawn 15y ago

Has any (mainstream) sci-fi besides Wall-E shown a future where laziness and preoccupation with the mundane is the norm?

bengl3rt 15y ago
Do you consider Idiocracy science fiction?
philwelch 15y ago
Futurama?
pjscott 15y ago
How mainstream are you looking for? The Culture is pretty lazy, for the most part.

xiaoma 15y ago

>All of the episodes involving Jake's incipient writer-hood (besides being pretty weaksauce in general)... The most critically acclaimed episode of the entire 7 seasons and my personal favorite was about Jake becoming a writer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_...