1560
But they love him in the mirror universe.
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
1560 points (100.0% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
3917 readers
814 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Honorary Badbitch:
@jawa21@startrek.website for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
How the fuck can Elon Musk claim to be a Trekkie? When he is against everything Star Trek stands for?!
The psychological dissonance of that man is insane!
He also claims to love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book series where technology corporations are absolutely loathed and every AI is either a broken or an asshole or both.
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." '
We lost Douglas Adams way too soon.
Ah yes, that too.
I wonder if he ever read the 5th book, Mostly Harmless. In that book there's an aside which describes how the people of the planet Golgafrincham tricked all the useless members of their society (management consultants, etc) into thinking the planet was doomed and getting on a ship to escape the planet which they programmed to fly to another salary system and crash into one of the planets there. That part of the book always stuck with me, and more and more I wish there was a way we could do the same to Musk and his billionaire cronies.
Of course I don't think Musk has actually read any of the HHGTTG novels, especially not the 5th one so maybe there's still a chance?
I think he likes it because he identifies with the tech corpos and wants to bring that piece of it, complete with shit broken AI to life
$10 says he loves the wiki brief of the mos def version.
Or he claimed to be hugely into trek and hhgttg to fit in when in uni and now can't untangle himself from the lie without an ego blow
The more he says about these things, the less I'm convinced he's ever watched an episode of Star Trek or any version of HHGTTG. He also thought that Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner was named Bladerunner.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-main-character-blade-runner
What I think is that because they are incapable of empathetic thought, the message gets lost.
TNG’s Time’s Arrow, DS9’s Past Tense, VOY’s Life Line are all just made up stories to them. No human condition there.
I think this is indeed it, unfortunately.
To such sociopaths incapable of empathetic thought, Star Trek is awesome because future and technology and winning battles. So if you’re a tech bro and you’re winning (money) and pushing technology forward regardless of the costs, and everybody knows who you are because of it, well then you must be an awesome human that’s winning at life! Because obviously good life = victorious life.
It's a common theme. There are a lot of conservatives who are still somehow fans of Star Trek because they the lack media literacy needed to figure out that they're values are not shared by the good guys on the show.
Remember how conservatives think that Rage Against The Machine is on their side. There's no delusion too great after that.
It's not deusion. It's a cooption narrative. 'All the cool things came from us!' Because they don't create anything of worth of their own
It's not about values, it's about image and symbolism. And the fact that a white dude got to go all over the universe telling aliens they're wrong and they need to accept the American... uhhm Federation way!
Yep. The whole utopian future of Star Trek is mostly off-screen. They talk about how they don't need money anymore and have abolished hunger, etc. but we never see that in the actual episodes. What we do see is people who are absolutely certain that their way of life is superior to everyone else's, that the status quo must not be questioned and that the military represents the pinnacle of society.
I have to disagree a little bit on some of that.
I'd say we see a hell of a lot more than that. We see within the named characters their drive to become better versions of themselves. We see people doing cheesy acts of self sacrifice for the good of others without an expectation of payment, gifts, etc. We see terraforming doing their job for the sake of it. There is a multitude of scenes that take place on earth and various colonies, all in which people are well fed, and live in walkable communities in which quality of life is the primary purpose of production.
I've only read two of the Star Trek books at this point (The first two in the Picard series), and we see humanitarian aid missions. We see how production facilities on Mars/Earth operate.
Could you give an example?
Star Fleet is definitely a military organization, but it is not solely a military organization by a long shot. It seems few people join for the military aspect of it, it always seems to be a decision based on family tradition, or exploration. And when they're jerking themselves off over the values of Star Fleet, it's never about the military aspect.
But all of this is either compatible with a conservative reading, or requires more analysis than most conservatives are putting in. I mean I doubt Musk read the Picard books.
But then you go on to mention stuff like family tradition, which is literally a key value for conservatives, especially when it involves joining the military.
Or people being well fed, or valuing self-improvement? Think about all the rightwing grifters who go on about self improvement all the time, or how they claim that communism killed 15 vigintillion people from starvation and only CAPITALISM can feed the world. Conservatives don't want people to be starving, starving citizens are the sign of a poor society. It's okay that the Federation doesn't use money because it is post-scarcity thanks to replicators, a technological solution to the issue of feeding the poor. This is perfectly compatible with the techbro mindset that tech is the solution to all our problems, and isn't challenging to those who believe that socialism is impossible without advanced post-scarcity technology.
What I'm trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology, in much the same way that a liberal will read it as a triumph of liberalism or a leftist can interpret it as socialist. It isn't challenging to those ideologies, because it's vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.
Starving citizens are required. They're there to keep those that aren't currently starving terrified of becoming that person. (And also to be someone to look down on.)
Okay, but that's capitalism. There's the classic cope of "this is simply a requirement because scarcity exists." They think it's necessary and unavoidable.
The conservative read of Star Trek is that feeding all its citizens is a sign of the Federation being so rich that it can feed all its citizens without the need for capitalism as we know it. True post-scarcity.
It doesn't challenge their belief that starving citizens are required in the modern day. If anything, to a conservative techbro like Musk, it reaffirms their beliefs because it's all about how rich the Federation is and how feeding the whole world would require massive advances in technology like replicators. It's even a common plot point how other civilizations want access to Federation replicators and other tech.
I think he didn't really get that "Picard gets a neurological link to the Borg" == "not good"...
Imagine he's developing the Neurolink because he thought it was good.
To be fair there would be some interesting consequences to a hive mind, it's almost like having perfect empathy. You would have no desire to harm anyone else, because you'd be literally harming yourself.
I was hoping the plot in Picard was going to kinda go this route, and just like the Borg were in part a critique of Soviet communism, it could have presented a more anarchism inspired idealistic version of communism framing a queen-less Borg collective as a perfect consensus-building cooperative community.
But if they were queen-less, how would they come to any decision?
In ants the queen doesn't make the decisions the hive mind makes the decisions. No one individual makes the decisions any more than any particular brain cell is in charge of you.
I'm very fond of the idea of the Borg and having their hive mind nature be a bit more at the forefront. In that current iteration the borg can't really a hive mind they're more just a bunch of zombies controlled by a single person.
I was so disappointed when they introduced the Borg queen. The hive mind concept is so interesting and it suffered greatly afterwards. Just like when in Discovery they moved the interestingly widespread Control into a single body, so that it could be easily dealt with. I see it as lazy writing and not enough fantasy.
First iteration was better "I am the borg". The single voice of the hive mind to deal with a singular protagonist.
(If you want you can play with the idea that creating a queen was a mistaaake and now the hive is ruled by petty tyrants)
how do you come to a decision reconciling your many internal perspectives and various senses? it's just a higher scale consciousness after all!
I think that version of a hive mind is way more powerful and interesting than the Queen/drone metaphor. But I guess Trek needed to be able to defeat them somehow.
I would happily be in a hive mind if there was the option to leave it whenever I wanted and if the technology was safe.
The same way so many idiot fans seem to think star trek is "too woke" now lol
...I'm sorry?
It's a thing repubs said when we got a black female captain (who btw has had the best captain arc since Picard.
You don't have to apologize. It's ok.
Why are you sorry
I dunno. Hang out around Trekkies and you can meet some real knuckleheads. People who seem to have missed the whole point.
I think the closest thing Elon is to Star Trek would be a Romulan/Ferengi hybrid wannabe. Dreaming of having a star ship to manipulate, conquer and extort the galaxy.
He's TOS Star Trek. Be a cowboy, cheat and be venerated for it, white man is in charge.
That is not TOS. That is a person like Elon's idea of TOS. I grew up on TOS before any other Star Trek existed. It helped shape my values- made me cherish ideas like inclusion and diversity and equality. It also helped teach me to talk things out rather than just come in guns blazing.
Yes, there was a cowboy element to TOS considering Gene sold it to executives as "Wagon Train to the stars," but it doesn't have the typical morality of a Western. At all.
In fact, if you want to talk specifically about indigenous Americans, the episode The Paradise Syndrome had a far more positive view of them than pretty much anything else on TV at the time.
For real, that's SNL Star Trek. The surface parody of the show based solely on a handful of Kirk's more outrageous exploits. Real Trek fans know that Kirk was a total nerd who read classic literature and studied old Earth history for fun.
People (Elon) see what they want to see.
Cowboy in this sense is not a good thing. It's the do whatever the fuck I want to thing.
Kirk was absolutely not about "I'll do whatever I want to." If anything, he was less like that than Picard. He was much more by-the-book even though he had a reputation as a maverick. But he was overall pretty strict about adhering to Starfleet regulations.
Obligatory comparison:
Hahaha, the Federation is indeed a confusing place.
Janeway on it https://youtu.be/MexLAmWe9NQ
TOS had the same basic values, even if they weren't quite as refined.
The show from the 60s with a black female bridge officer who was part of television's first interracial kiss? The one with the utopian society where race and religion were unimportant, people worked as they were able to benefit society without capital, and episodes centered on things like the silliness of prejudice and hoarding wealth?
The one where the greatest villain was a 20th century human who had tried to establish a stratified society based on genetic superiority?
That show?