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."
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.. :-)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think I disagree. To me, good science fiction proposes some future technology, then explores what the ramifications are for society and/or individuals. It is relevant to us now, because it explores how our lives would be different if something new was introduced.
A great example is a short story by Asimov about someone who creates a television that can look into the past. The government in the story has known for a long time that such a thing was possible, but kept it secret because of a simple unintended consequence: the elimination of personal privacy. If you can look into the arbitrary past, then you can look into anyone's past of 5 seconds ago. The consequences are society-shifting.
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.
> 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.
The first season of TOS had an episode, "Shore Leave," where the Enterprise makes a stop over at a planet for the sole purpose of wasting time and relaxing.
I think you're right, though. It's not so much that there's no time wasting, but the show was about the adventures of the Enterprise and its crew. For all we know the crew in TOS spent 99% of the time screwing around, and the show was about the 1% of the time they spent working.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I watched the first episode of that arc last week (and the next next week, due to scheduling issues with my watching group).
I was struck by how incredibly plausible it was (here in 2012) that this could happen by 2024. Do I think that things will continue to get worse, economically, for 12 more years? No, not really. But we already have the Occupy camps -- I mean, Sanctuaries, it's just that they're being resisted by the authorities rather than institutionalized, so far. But things being resisted by the government and then institutionalized is what often happens with things like that. It's one of the few ST things that looks more plausible closer to the time than it did when it was written, in my opinion.
Surely the writers worked on some sort of network at their office.
In 1994? I would expect that at least some of them were writing on typewriters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> One such person whom I know actually watches Shakespeare productions for entertainment.
You make it sound like this is some kind of rarity. That’s ridiculous: Shakespeare plays are incredibly common and popular, and lots of people watch them for fun – because they’re fun! You can probably find one in any major metropolitan area on any given weekend.
>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.
I totally agree. Not only is it specifically discussed that man has begun to evolve in a way that they can better themselves, through cooperation and self discovery, but it's also a mindset I see quite often. People who work tirelessly, and do incredible work, and then enjoy the small hobbies they have? Sounds like a lot of people I know, though not nearly in as large a quantity that one might find in a star trekesque future.
>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.
This goes directly against how Facebook got started on college campuses. Campuses are already hypersocial places, are self-contained to some extent, and you constantly run into everyone you know - but this environment proved to be the most fertile ground for social networking.
> 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.
This kind of discussion always makes me think of how in the Star Trek universe, Baseball is no longer a professional sport, the final World Series being played in 2042[1] due to a lack of interest from the public.
So what kind of social changes could possibly have the by-product of turning Baseball into a niche, amateur sport? I don't know, but I'd wager the changes would have to be pretty sweeping. And from there, would it be such a leap to think that perhaps similar sweeping changes might also massively alter the trajectory of social media and/or other apparently 'too big to fail' juggernauts in this fictionalised and hypothetical future?
Disclaimer: I'm not a rabid trekker trying to retcon so that my fondly remembered childhood reality can remain intact. I just like to think about this stuff sometimes because I was/am just a trekker.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] arethuza|14 years ago|reply
Then I saw a comment that explains it:
"Star Trek and the Federation actually depict a Space Amish splinter group from the Culture."
[+] [-] petercooper|14 years ago|reply
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.. :-)
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lnanek|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] barrkel|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
A great example is a short story by Asimov about someone who creates a television that can look into the past. The government in the story has known for a long time that such a thing was possible, but kept it secret because of a simple unintended consequence: the elimination of personal privacy. If you can look into the arbitrary past, then you can look into anyone's past of 5 seconds ago. The consequences are society-shifting.
[+] [-] gaius|14 years ago|reply
"technological advancements and people in the real world that were inspired by the Star Trek phenomenon"
[+] [-] mhurron|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jlarocco|14 years ago|reply
I think you're right, though. It's not so much that there's no time wasting, but the show was about the adventures of the Enterprise and its crew. For all we know the crew in TOS spent 99% of the time screwing around, and the show was about the 1% of the time they spent working.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
Well, the theme was "To boldly stay where no person has stayed before," after all.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
... 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.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
That's more or less explicitly the point. I think that's almost word-for-word what Roddenberry wrote in the series bibles, for TNG if not TOS.
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] warfangle|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kirbysayshi|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randallsquared|14 years ago|reply
I was struck by how incredibly plausible it was (here in 2012) that this could happen by 2024. Do I think that things will continue to get worse, economically, for 12 more years? No, not really. But we already have the Occupy camps -- I mean, Sanctuaries, it's just that they're being resisted by the authorities rather than institutionalized, so far. But things being resisted by the government and then institutionalized is what often happens with things like that. It's one of the few ST things that looks more plausible closer to the time than it did when it was written, in my opinion.
Surely the writers worked on some sort of network at their office.
In 1994? I would expect that at least some of them were writing on typewriters.
[+] [-] daedalus_j|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gee_totes|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noblethrasher|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jacobolus|14 years ago|reply
You make it sound like this is some kind of rarity. That’s ridiculous: Shakespeare plays are incredibly common and popular, and lots of people watch them for fun – because they’re fun! You can probably find one in any major metropolitan area on any given weekend.
[+] [-] CoughlinJ|14 years ago|reply
>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.
I totally agree. Not only is it specifically discussed that man has begun to evolve in a way that they can better themselves, through cooperation and self discovery, but it's also a mindset I see quite often. People who work tirelessly, and do incredible work, and then enjoy the small hobbies they have? Sounds like a lot of people I know, though not nearly in as large a quantity that one might find in a star trekesque future.
[+] [-] alex_c|14 years ago|reply
This goes directly against how Facebook got started on college campuses. Campuses are already hypersocial places, are self-contained to some extent, and you constantly run into everyone you know - but this environment proved to be the most fertile ground for social networking.
[+] [-] gaelian|14 years ago|reply
This kind of discussion always makes me think of how in the Star Trek universe, Baseball is no longer a professional sport, the final World Series being played in 2042[1] due to a lack of interest from the public.
So what kind of social changes could possibly have the by-product of turning Baseball into a niche, amateur sport? I don't know, but I'd wager the changes would have to be pretty sweeping. And from there, would it be such a leap to think that perhaps similar sweeping changes might also massively alter the trajectory of social media and/or other apparently 'too big to fail' juggernauts in this fictionalised and hypothetical future?
Disclaimer: I'm not a rabid trekker trying to retcon so that my fondly remembered childhood reality can remain intact. I just like to think about this stuff sometimes because I was/am just a trekker.
1. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Baseball
[+] [-] parfe|14 years ago|reply
While it's no Clockwork Orange Star Trek had rape scenes like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... Plenty disturbing.
Then you have the roving rape gangs that were a big part of Tasha Yar's back story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasha_Yar
[+] [-] narag|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] DannoHung|14 years ago|reply
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.
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[+] [-] xiaoma|14 years ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
Man, I'm feeling old.
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