50 ms·

The most fantastic aspect of Star Trek isn't warp drive, teleportation, or replicators. It's a competent bureaucracy. Starfleet seems to be just that: competen

by api 12y ago

The most fantastic aspect of Star Trek isn't warp drive, teleportation, or replicators. It's a competent bureaucracy. Starfleet seems to be just that: competent, usually very trustworthy, fair, and honest. Almost equally unbelievable is a society that isn't incredibly emotionally dysfunctional. There is little in the way of psychopathy, narcissism, addiction, unhealthy ideological fanaticism, or depression on display among the protagonists. Cyberpunk has proven to be the most prophetic of the sci-fi genres by far. It's done that by being technologically optimistic and socially pessimistic. So far it seems right on-- technology continues to advance, but globally it looks as if the normal arc of society is from freedom to despotism followed by a decay into syndicated criminality. The mafia state -- almost exactly as depicted in the common cyberpunk setting -- looks like the ascendant future. If there are warp-driven starships in the future they will likely be flown by the various factions of the Russian mob, the American criminal overworld, Los Zetas, Chinese Triads, and of course the Yakuza. If they look like contemporary business and governmental organizations, the captain will be a narcissist/psychopath and his immediate subordinates fawning codependents.

Eliezer 12y ago
I watched "Star Trek: Into Darkness". At first I was like "Kirk should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone on the Enterprise should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone in Starfleet should be fired." Then I was like, "Wow, I've never wanted to fire an entire civilization before, and this movie has given me a new appreciation for the importance of rules and regulations in real life."
- api 12y ago
  The competent bureaucracy part is really the lynchpin. Because bureaucracies are so incompetent, criminal syndicates just run circles around them. This is why the mafia state looks like the logical endpoint-- basically anarcho-syndicalism, and it's not a utopia. I think this is also why the most bureaucratic states -- the USSR and Communist China -- have been the first into this brave new future. The criminal mammals triumphed easily over those byzantine dinosaurs. The bottom line is that we have the scientific method and we have the discipline of engineering, and those together can reliably produce progress in the technical realm. We have no set of tools or techniques that reliably produces progress in the human realm. There are no institutions charged with understanding and healing us psychologically. The closest we come is to pop pills, and even that is poorly done -- diagnosis is incredibly unscientific and haphazard. I personally blame -- directly and indirectly -- the war on drugs. I am not one of those people who thinks that dosing everyone with LSD would create some kind of utopia. I've known too many drug users to think that. But beneath the pop culture misuse of those substances, there was some really visionary research into genuinely understanding and even changing deep human psychology at work back in those days. The ridiculous moral panic that followed had the effect of shutting down almost all of that research, even some of the non-psychedlics-related stuff, and leaving us with nothing but talk-talk psychotherapy and the ham fisted pill pushing approach. To this day attempting to delve deeply into human psychology in an active way immediately leads into realms since declared utterly taboo.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    There is a point of view that Stalin and Mao were essentially criminal in a way that national leaders have not been since the 19th Century. So a Putin and whatever they have in China actually represents a modicum of progress. Russia's history at the level of empire is pretty nasty. We may never be able to get out of our own way. Who knows? Not a big pill fan ( although they've absolutely gotten better for people with real brain-chemistry problems ) but these days, it's easier than ever to identify bad sources of information and understand what's gone wrong. My parents' (Silent) generation had no idea why there was a Depression; mine actually has a few theories. The emphasis on LSD as "better living through chemistry" was as much about advertising-propaganda as anything else. Regardless of any War on Drugs, that went badly.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  That's what you got from it? I never managed to finish watching it (I love Star Trek too much to do that), and all I could see is that Abrams should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into molten lava.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  If we're talking futurists, I tend to take David Brin's trust in civilization as actually pretty well-evidenced. I mean, let me put it this way: most of the time, our so-called awful, so-called incompetent bureaucracies actually do work. Seen from the inside (of any large, complicated system that has to deal with real people's lives instead of neat database columns), the amount of dull, everyday effort necessary to stave off entropy and keep the whole system functioning is massive. The fact that it all keeps working on a daily basis is amazing. The older you get, the more you notice that for all the constant sky-is-falling talk of societal collapse, the end never hurries up and arrives. From there, anyone who remotely understands probability ought be able to update to "actually our institutions are pretty competent at their core job of keeping society going."
krapp 12y ago
They wasted a perfectly good opportunity for deconstruction when Mark Twain wound up on the Enterprise and pointed out how much the Federation looked like colonialism in space. I suppose it would have broken the timeline to have him jump ship and join the Maquis. Bear in mind that, even in-universe, the utopia that is the Federation had to be born from the ashes of a global holocaust, temporal paradox and alien intervention. > If there are warp-driven starships in the future they will likely be flown by the various factions of the Russian mob, the American criminal overworld, Los Zetas, Chinese Triads, and of course the Yakuza. If they look like contemporary business and governmental organizations, the captain will be a narcissist/psychopath and his immediate subordinates fawning codependents. I want this to be a thing. Please tell me this is a thing. If it is, it's probably an anime.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >I want this to be a thing. Please tell me this is a thing. If it is, it's probably an anime. I think that series was called Firefly.
derefr 12y ago
> Almost equally unbelievable is a society that isn't incredibly emotionally dysfunctional. There is little in the way of psychopathy, narcissism, addiction, unhealthy ideological fanaticism, or depression on display among the protagonists. In Star Trek's hypothesized post-scarcity civilization, I would think a lot of humans take the time they would have spent working, and spend it on raising their kids well--or, even more interestingly--contributing to raising one-another's kids well. Star Trek doesn't often go into what civilian life is like on Earth, but it seems like "growing healthy minds" could be a large part of it.
- waps 12y ago
  Have you ever met a few rich kids, who today effectively live in a post-scarcity world ? I am not saying there isn't anything but spoiled, cruel brats, but it's pretty damn rare (and the non-spoyiled ones tend to be the ones that weren't rich when they were kids). There are other forms of post-scarcity. E.g. the long-term unemployed of Western Europe, in England, Holland and France. People who have been unemployed for 2-3 generations. They don't have any real way to improve their situation, nor to make it worse. They spend their time being bored, watching tv, and generally doing anything they possibly can to avoid caring for their kids (just like those rich guys, just less over-the-top). I would add that this is what any intelligent algorithm would do when confronted with the situation. Outside of completely ridiculous things (like winning the lottery, or committing murder) there is nothing they can do to improve or worsen their situation : they will enter into a self-reinforcing random walk through their options.
itsboring 12y ago
There was a pretty good two-parter on DS9 where an admiral took advantage of the fear around the dominion war to over-step his bounds and implement secretive/draconian security measures until Sisko "blows the whistle." Probably came as close as any episode to showing Starfleet dysfunction. And of course there was Section 31 towards the end of the series (starfleet's NSA). There were also a couple TNG episodes: one where there was a witch hunt to find a supposed spy on board the Enterprise, and another where Starfleet claimed Data was property and not alive. There's also Star Trek 6 which exposed a Federation conspiracy to sabotage peace talks with the Klingons. Probably my favorite movie in the series after Khan. Granted it's much earlier in the Trek universe, but Enterprise also tackled xenophobic groups in the last season. I always enjoyed episodes that featured internal struggles even if they were relatively rare.
stormbrew 12y ago
I have never read a competent bureaucracy into any version of Star Trek, even at its most optimistic. The Federation has been routinely shown to be corrupt (commodores in TOS and admirals in TNG out only for their own gain), incompetent (failing to defend... anything as a group, including Earth), short-sighted (stupid orders that get ignored), and criminally cruel (the prime directive). In TOS and TNG it was usually Kirk or Picard's job to correct these failings. In that sense, Trek is actually extremely individualistic. The Borg are the Trek version of a functional bureaucracy, and are shown as terrifying for their elimination of individuality. In the more cynical DS9+ era, we even get the wonderful element of a puppetmaster (Section 31) behind the incompetence of the Federation that keeps it alive to hide its clandestine activities that keep the sheep believing in their ideals. And our heroes wind up siding with them, effectively.
fidotron 12y ago
I always subscribed to the view Starfleet was actually one of those mafias, with most participants deluded into thinking that it was doing good for the universe, when in reality it was as bad as everyone else.
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
But if you had a post-scarcity society, then a competent bureaucracy is more credible. For one, you just solved the Public Choice problem. If everybody is, by our standards, a billionaire then things will be different. Things other than material success would be the yardstick for status. Star Trek directly reflected the economic-Utopian side of Gene Roddenberry's hopes and dreams. That was explicit, deliberate and according to various documentaries, sorta drove the writers nuts. It emphasizes the positive aspects of humanity. Gene was an 8 year old in 1929 and 24 at the end of WWII, and was formed right through the teeth of the Depression. He flew 89 missions in WWII... Cyberpunk? Not my cup 'o tea.
- waps 12y ago
  There are 2 things that drive people in my experience. Wealth and power. If you close off one (e.g. by making people poor, or very rich, they go for the other one). If you do what capitalism does, and make real power very hard to come by, they go for wealth.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >There are 2 things that drive people in my experience. Wealth and power. Then your experience is woefully incomplete, as you've completely forgotten to account for sex. And, you know, all the more idealistic things I could list.
    - waps 12y ago
      In my worldview sex is effectively the same as power. It certainly is for one participant in the event, but of course that goes for all interactions where power is a significant factor. All the more idealistic things, especially in youthful participants, are just ways to get power and sex. Or have you never visited a global warming related event in San Francisco ? Can you say with a straight face that those events are about idealism ?
      - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
staunch 12y ago
Why would anyone join a mob when you can have anything a mob could ever give you? Even a sadist could have far more fun for far longer on a holodeck than hurting real people. Star Trek presents a utopian future where resources are limitless and every child grows up in a friendly and happy world with an education we can't even imagine. They have healthcare that actually works. They can fix essentially any physical or mental ailment. A bit of a sadist? Oh, let me fix that right here, your levels were extremely high. You have to imagine what happens to society when we can fix almost all the problems that divide us.
- krapp 12y ago
  The one thing it can't give you is freedom from the system. No matter how many holographic people you 'play' with, you know perfectly well it's just force fields and really good AI. Alcohol is forbidden, but everyone seems to have a bottle of something green and potent stashed away somewhere. DS9 got a bit into genetic engineering as a result of the post-apocalyptic setting of the Trek universe with Bashir, who was secretly sent offworld by his parents (IIRC I forget the reason) to be genetically modified by aliens because (thanks to the Eugenics wars) that sort of thing was forbidden on Earth. So he was essentially an Augment hiding out. The Maquis were upset with Federation politics and essentially seceded. For all it's utopian pretense, it's clear at least as it's portrayed, that the Federation is a society with limits, and laws, and wherever you have limits and laws you have crime and a desire to game the system. Even a soft prison can feel like a prison. I can easily imagine the Federation feeling like that.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - staunch 12y ago
    We will be able to do direct brain input in the future, much better than running around in a holodeck, so we will be able to fool the brain entirely. Alcohol is not forbidden, just not permitted while on duty and not served on board ship. The problem with Bashir was that he was genetically enhanced to be superior. He wasn't just treated for a medical issue. The Maquis were renegade Federation not anti-Federation though, that seems hard to avoid, you can't please everyone. The Federation has no policy against succession and no walls to act as a prison. Anyone is free to come and go. You have access to all the resources needed to live. And it's not that no one ever commits a crime, just that it's exceptionally rare, not part of regular life.

by api 12y ago

Eliezer 12y ago

I watched "Star Trek: Into Darkness". At first I was like "Kirk should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone on the Enterprise should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone in Starfleet should be fired." Then I was like, "Wow, I've never wanted to fire an entire civilization before, and this movie has given me a new appreciation for the importance of rules and regulations in real life."

api 12y ago
The competent bureaucracy part is really the lynchpin. Because bureaucracies are so incompetent, criminal syndicates just run circles around them. This is why the mafia state looks like the logical endpoint-- basically anarcho-syndicalism, and it's not a utopia. I think this is also why the most bureaucratic states -- the USSR and Communist China -- have been the first into this brave new future. The criminal mammals triumphed easily over those byzantine dinosaurs. The bottom line is that we have the scientific method and we have the discipline of engineering, and those together can reliably produce progress in the technical realm. We have no set of tools or techniques that reliably produces progress in the human realm. There are no institutions charged with understanding and healing us psychologically. The closest we come is to pop pills, and even that is poorly done -- diagnosis is incredibly unscientific and haphazard. I personally blame -- directly and indirectly -- the war on drugs. I am not one of those people who thinks that dosing everyone with LSD would create some kind of utopia. I've known too many drug users to think that. But beneath the pop culture misuse of those substances, there was some really visionary research into genuinely understanding and even changing deep human psychology at work back in those days. The ridiculous moral panic that followed had the effect of shutting down almost all of that research, even some of the non-psychedlics-related stuff, and leaving us with nothing but talk-talk psychotherapy and the ham fisted pill pushing approach. To this day attempting to delve deeply into human psychology in an active way immediately leads into realms since declared utterly taboo.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  There is a point of view that Stalin and Mao were essentially criminal in a way that national leaders have not been since the 19th Century. So a Putin and whatever they have in China actually represents a modicum of progress. Russia's history at the level of empire is pretty nasty. We may never be able to get out of our own way. Who knows? Not a big pill fan ( although they've absolutely gotten better for people with real brain-chemistry problems ) but these days, it's easier than ever to identify bad sources of information and understand what's gone wrong. My parents' (Silent) generation had no idea why there was a Depression; mine actually has a few theories. The emphasis on LSD as "better living through chemistry" was as much about advertising-propaganda as anything else. Regardless of any War on Drugs, that went badly.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
That's what you got from it? I never managed to finish watching it (I love Star Trek too much to do that), and all I could see is that Abrams should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into molten lava.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
If we're talking futurists, I tend to take David Brin's trust in civilization as actually pretty well-evidenced. I mean, let me put it this way: most of the time, our so-called awful, so-called incompetent bureaucracies actually do work. Seen from the inside (of any large, complicated system that has to deal with real people's lives instead of neat database columns), the amount of dull, everyday effort necessary to stave off entropy and keep the whole system functioning is massive. The fact that it all keeps working on a daily basis is amazing. The older you get, the more you notice that for all the constant sky-is-falling talk of societal collapse, the end never hurries up and arrives. From there, anyone who remotely understands probability ought be able to update to "actually our institutions are pretty competent at their core job of keeping society going."

krapp 12y ago

They wasted a perfectly good opportunity for deconstruction when Mark Twain wound up on the Enterprise and pointed out how much the Federation looked like colonialism in space. I suppose it would have broken the timeline to have him jump ship and join the Maquis. Bear in mind that, even in-universe, the utopia that is the Federation had to be born from the ashes of a global holocaust, temporal paradox and alien intervention. > If there are warp-driven starships in the future they will likely be flown by the various factions of the Russian mob, the American criminal overworld, Los Zetas, Chinese Triads, and of course the Yakuza. If they look like contemporary business and governmental organizations, the captain will be a narcissist/psychopath and his immediate subordinates fawning codependents. I want this to be a thing. Please tell me this is a thing. If it is, it's probably an anime.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>I want this to be a thing. Please tell me this is a thing. If it is, it's probably an anime. I think that series was called Firefly.

derefr 12y ago

> Almost equally unbelievable is a society that isn't incredibly emotionally dysfunctional. There is little in the way of psychopathy, narcissism, addiction, unhealthy ideological fanaticism, or depression on display among the protagonists. In Star Trek's hypothesized post-scarcity civilization, I would think a lot of humans take the time they would have spent working, and spend it on raising their kids well--or, even more interestingly--contributing to raising one-another's kids well. Star Trek doesn't often go into what civilian life is like on Earth, but it seems like "growing healthy minds" could be a large part of it.

waps 12y ago
Have you ever met a few rich kids, who today effectively live in a post-scarcity world ? I am not saying there isn't anything but spoiled, cruel brats, but it's pretty damn rare (and the non-spoyiled ones tend to be the ones that weren't rich when they were kids). There are other forms of post-scarcity. E.g. the long-term unemployed of Western Europe, in England, Holland and France. People who have been unemployed for 2-3 generations. They don't have any real way to improve their situation, nor to make it worse. They spend their time being bored, watching tv, and generally doing anything they possibly can to avoid caring for their kids (just like those rich guys, just less over-the-top). I would add that this is what any intelligent algorithm would do when confronted with the situation. Outside of completely ridiculous things (like winning the lottery, or committing murder) there is nothing they can do to improve or worsen their situation : they will enter into a self-reinforcing random walk through their options.

itsboring 12y ago

There was a pretty good two-parter on DS9 where an admiral took advantage of the fear around the dominion war to over-step his bounds and implement secretive/draconian security measures until Sisko "blows the whistle." Probably came as close as any episode to showing Starfleet dysfunction. And of course there was Section 31 towards the end of the series (starfleet's NSA). There were also a couple TNG episodes: one where there was a witch hunt to find a supposed spy on board the Enterprise, and another where Starfleet claimed Data was property and not alive. There's also Star Trek 6 which exposed a Federation conspiracy to sabotage peace talks with the Klingons. Probably my favorite movie in the series after Khan. Granted it's much earlier in the Trek universe, but Enterprise also tackled xenophobic groups in the last season. I always enjoyed episodes that featured internal struggles even if they were relatively rare.

stormbrew 12y ago

I have never read a competent bureaucracy into any version of Star Trek, even at its most optimistic. The Federation has been routinely shown to be corrupt (commodores in TOS and admirals in TNG out only for their own gain), incompetent (failing to defend... anything as a group, including Earth), short-sighted (stupid orders that get ignored), and criminally cruel (the prime directive). In TOS and TNG it was usually Kirk or Picard's job to correct these failings. In that sense, Trek is actually extremely individualistic. The Borg are the Trek version of a functional bureaucracy, and are shown as terrifying for their elimination of individuality. In the more cynical DS9+ era, we even get the wonderful element of a puppetmaster (Section 31) behind the incompetence of the Federation that keeps it alive to hide its clandestine activities that keep the sheep believing in their ideals. And our heroes wind up siding with them, effectively.

fidotron 12y ago

I always subscribed to the view Starfleet was actually one of those mafias, with most participants deluded into thinking that it was doing good for the universe, when in reality it was as bad as everyone else.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

But if you had a post-scarcity society, then a competent bureaucracy is more credible. For one, you just solved the Public Choice problem. If everybody is, by our standards, a billionaire then things will be different. Things other than material success would be the yardstick for status. Star Trek directly reflected the economic-Utopian side of Gene Roddenberry's hopes and dreams. That was explicit, deliberate and according to various documentaries, sorta drove the writers nuts. It emphasizes the positive aspects of humanity. Gene was an 8 year old in 1929 and 24 at the end of WWII, and was formed right through the teeth of the Depression. He flew 89 missions in WWII... Cyberpunk? Not my cup 'o tea.

waps 12y ago
There are 2 things that drive people in my experience. Wealth and power. If you close off one (e.g. by making people poor, or very rich, they go for the other one). If you do what capitalism does, and make real power very hard to come by, they go for wealth.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >There are 2 things that drive people in my experience. Wealth and power. Then your experience is woefully incomplete, as you've completely forgotten to account for sex. And, you know, all the more idealistic things I could list.
  - waps 12y ago
    In my worldview sex is effectively the same as power. It certainly is for one participant in the event, but of course that goes for all interactions where power is a significant factor. All the more idealistic things, especially in youthful participants, are just ways to get power and sex. Or have you never visited a global warming related event in San Francisco ? Can you say with a straight face that those events are about idealism ?
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago

staunch 12y ago

Why would anyone join a mob when you can have anything a mob could ever give you? Even a sadist could have far more fun for far longer on a holodeck than hurting real people. Star Trek presents a utopian future where resources are limitless and every child grows up in a friendly and happy world with an education we can't even imagine. They have healthcare that actually works. They can fix essentially any physical or mental ailment. A bit of a sadist? Oh, let me fix that right here, your levels were extremely high. You have to imagine what happens to society when we can fix almost all the problems that divide us.

krapp 12y ago
The one thing it can't give you is freedom from the system. No matter how many holographic people you 'play' with, you know perfectly well it's just force fields and really good AI. Alcohol is forbidden, but everyone seems to have a bottle of something green and potent stashed away somewhere. DS9 got a bit into genetic engineering as a result of the post-apocalyptic setting of the Trek universe with Bashir, who was secretly sent offworld by his parents (IIRC I forget the reason) to be genetically modified by aliens because (thanks to the Eugenics wars) that sort of thing was forbidden on Earth. So he was essentially an Augment hiding out. The Maquis were upset with Federation politics and essentially seceded. For all it's utopian pretense, it's clear at least as it's portrayed, that the Federation is a society with limits, and laws, and wherever you have limits and laws you have crime and a desire to game the system. Even a soft prison can feel like a prison. I can easily imagine the Federation feeling like that.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- staunch 12y ago
  We will be able to do direct brain input in the future, much better than running around in a holodeck, so we will be able to fool the brain entirely. Alcohol is not forbidden, just not permitted while on duty and not served on board ship. The problem with Bashir was that he was genetically enhanced to be superior. He wasn't just treated for a medical issue. The Maquis were renegade Federation not anti-Federation though, that seems hard to avoid, you can't please everyone. The Federation has no policy against succession and no walls to act as a prison. Anyone is free to come and go. You have access to all the resources needed to live. And it's not that no one ever commits a crime, just that it's exceptionally rare, not part of regular life.