I just don’t get it. What is the freaking problem of those directors, trying to rewrite federation into some kind of dystopian tech fascism?
I was annoyed by the first Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, with those police cops. I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard. I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode, because the main protagonist was sent to some kind of labor prison for disobedience, where prisoners regularly die. I didn’t think it could get any worse but just watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise [edit: and stopped watching]. Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner. How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?
Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.
Fortunately there is still Strange New Worlds.
Please spoiler me, when this bullshit in Starfleet Academy gets turned around in some twist, because otherwise I will just ignore the show.
I always figured that some folks are writing, reading, arting, or farming, and then theres dudes using the replicator to make dank space weed or the holodeck to get blowie joeys from helen of troy.
I legitimately don’t know:
But would just every random human have access to a replicator 24/7?
Like, that would be a tally in the Utopia column, but even then, the amount of waste and trash produced would be a problem.
Even in an absolutely ideal situation like that, it would end like The Good Place where getting anything you want burns out your dopamine system.
I dunno. Like I said I’m not a Star Trek expert, I just don’t trust a bunch of rich people working for the one world government telling us the 99.99% of humans we never see are living perfect lives.
It’s fictional so it could be real if the writers want it to be. But it’s a lot more realistic if not everything was as perfect as we’re told, or even Starfleet officers believe.
Star Trek is written from the perspective of post-scarcity. There is unlimited free energy, replicators that can create virtually any object from base materials, and an abolishment of money (there is no need for it in post-scarcity, as money is ostensibly just a way to distribute resources).
Rowan J Coleman explores the practical ramifications of that in a 3 part series here, if you’re interested.
Perhaps you should start watching trek instead of commenting on it from a distance, you know, so you know what you are taking about.
The federation (in the TNG era which i would count as the most beloved and accepted by fans) is a post scarcity society, the populations indeed do have full and free access to replication technology, which also solves the waste problem you suggest since replicated goods can also be reclaimed by the devices. Make whatever you need, use it, vanish the leftovers when youre done.
So indeed people are beyond our concepts of material need and property. Individuals may also indulge in commerce if they are of the mercantile inclination, nobody cares, but any citizen can acquire any material resource required or desired in their lives regardless, and for free.
Buddy, if you think someone who’s watched all of Star Trek once is an “expert” than it’s more likely I know a lot more about it than you…
I just understand some people have all this shit memorized, and you are overconfident in your knowledge of the show.
Which is something that goes beyond Star Trek, often the people who know the most say they don’t know everything, and the people who say they know it all. Just aren’t aware of how much there is to know.
Have fun being overconfident tho.
Waste and trash also aren’t an issue because of the aforementioned replicators. Waste and trash become the food. Energy is cheap, next to free, and about as clean as can be.
Why would you live in squalor when you can just as easily push a button and teleport the trash and grime into the nothing?
Education is cheap and easy because we have both plenty of educated people, and sentient AI. Same for medicine.
It’s one of the few pieces of media that has traditionally outright agreed with the spirit of what you’re saying. There’s no need to shit on its message that if we find the cause to work together, we have it within us to develop fully automated luxury gay space communism because we’re more alike than we are different, and an exploration of those differences will bring us together.
The difference between a post scarcity society and the good place is that it’s not that there’s no problems, it’s that there’s no significant material problems. And it’s not like the entire galaxy was like that.
Cynicism becoming conflated with realism is boring.
At it’s heart, the expanse was explicitly not post scarcity, so comparing it’s treatment of inequality with one where those problems have been solved is silly. It’s like saying the expanse is unrealistic because their spaceships are too fast, and Apollo 13 is a more realistic portrayal.
It’s definitely easy to poke holes in the logic and suspend disbelief for so long. At the end of the day it’s an idea that if all basic human needs are taken care of then what would we do?
The replicator is also the trash collector and dish washer. When you’re done with your food you just put the left overs back into the replicator and when you “relieve yourself” it goes back into the replicator. Want new furniture? Replicator. Want new clothes? Replicator. So on so forth.
The only thing that is in short supply is energy, so there have been occasional mention of energy rations or credits that can be traded for services. There are still some resource limitations and you have to work or be productive and contributing member of society to gain access. But if you wish to sit around until you get bed sores then you can do that, you will probably be ignored and be an outsider and get visits from healthcare workers.
And yet wine snobs still insist on working at a vineyard so they can have non-replicated wine, because it “tastes better”.
Truly, I wish I had their problems.
Thing is, replicator food works from standard sets. Think of it like getting McDonalds. You get Maccas in the U.K.? Tastes like McD’s in Japan or Korea or India. It gets tiresome. Hence why they have Neelix, Guinan, or Quark running bars, kitchens, or lounges to put the human (Well… you know what I mean.) touch on things.
So yeah, deffo wish my biggest problem was my unlimited sauvignon blanc was only 8/10 so I decided to take up winemaking as a hobby to try and one up it.
Yeah exactly, it’s about what goes in, not what comes out.