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Zane posted:why would there be a necessary division of labour of any kind? why would there be labour or capital? all the categories of classically derivative political economy are irrelevant. a replicator can just make it. It cannot make more land on earth, which is why the human military and political elite is dominated by earth landowning families.
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Mar 3, 2020 10:49
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the star trek land doesn't serve any productive function though. which is where the feudalism analogy sort of halfway falls down. it's a status distinction (in weberian terms) not a class distinction.
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Mar 3, 2020 10:53
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hakimashou posted:It cannot make more land on earth, which is why the human military and political elite is dominated by earth landowning families. You can simulate more land.
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Mar 3, 2020 16:21
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It's hard to draw conclusions about Star Trek as a cohesive whole, since it was never conceived as such. It was just pieced together by a bunch of different writers with only vague guidelines. Even when the new series came out with a bigger budget where Gene Roddenberry was king poo poo with much more creative control, half of his big crazy ideas got ignored. He didn't even want there to be the reuse of species and elements of the original series.
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Mar 3, 2020 18:50
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Zane posted:why would there be a necessary division of labour of any kind? why would there be labour or capital? all the categories of classically derivative political economy are irrelevant. a replicator can just make it. You’re being thrown off by all the spectacular technology, when the question is who controls the means of production. For over a year now, there’s been a thing called Amazon Go. Registered Amazon customers can walk into the Amazon Go convenience store and just grab what they want. Sensors and tracking software in their phones automatically track the purchases and charge the customers’ credit accounts. There are few employees on-site. This is “prosumption”, where the customer is simultaneously the worker and the consumer. When you bag your own groceries at an automated kiosk, you are a prosumer. Replace the shelves of products with a 3-D printer, and you have Star Trek. The trend with people buying Amazon Alexas is to set them to respond to “Computer”: “Computer, buy Doritos.” While this is all very ‘nifty’ and ‘futuristic’, it ultimately means that you are paying to work for Amazon, and anyplace companies are eliminating paid workers (e.g. cashiers). Prosumption is everywhere online; you do free work for Facebook when you post content and allow your data to be mined, etc. Prosumption is often spun as hobbyism, but there’s no mistaking the power dynamic here. NG Trek is extremely ‘online’. It’s overwhelmingly preoccupied with scanners, virtual reality, 3D printing, etc. The transporter fantasy is very much the fantasy of digital immortality through mind-uploads. Influenced by early-90s concepts of ‘cyberspace’, reality in Star Trek increasingly resembles a lovely videogame. Thanks to the utility fog generated by the various replicator technologies, we have invisible walls, respawning, infinite ammo.... But is no such thing as free energy, even in Star Trek’s ‘postindustrial’ fantasy. As established earlier, replicators are immensely wasteful - and power to run them comes from dilithium, which comes from mines run by mining corporations. Also, there is still intellectual property in space (see the Voyager episode where Doctor orders a recall of his holonovel, and it has to be passed around illegally as subversive literature). It’s likely that even Picard can’t afford the licence to replicate Dorito brand nachos - and creating something too similar in recipe could constitute infringement and get his account flagged by an algorithm. The unavoidable fact is that, if you want some potassium, it is infinitely cheaper to mine for potassium the ‘old-fashioned’ way. This is why there are still mining operations dedicated to resources other than dilithium. It’s why there’s still agriculture: replicated goods are purely luxury items. Two cups of Earl Grey tea, identical in every way, but one took vastly more resources to produce. Using the transporter-replicator is like launching a space shuttle to cross the street.
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Mar 3, 2020 19:50
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You’re being thrown off by all the spectacular technology, when the question is who controls the means of production. Zane fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Mar 4, 2020 |
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Mar 3, 2020 21:02
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You’re being thrown off by all the spectacular technology, when the question is who controls the means of production. The Federation represents the bulk of humanity, but there are certainly elements of humanity, and a whole lot of non-humanity, who aren't part of the Federation. The Federation controls the means of production, and if you're in it and abide by its internal structures, you are, from the dock sweeper to the captain of the enterprise, a member of the bourgeoisie. Who mines the dilithium? Same as does it now. Aliens (foreigners). Only instead of nation-state or ethinicity based lines of distinction, you have Federation/non-federation lines of distinction. You mention a federation licenced mining corp, ostensibly that license to operate contains vague alien rights rules that corporation must abide by, but if people within the federation are not required to labour to reap the benefits of the infinite energy mined by this corporation, that's ok, the corporation can use robots and aliens and whoever else who isn't part of the Federation to do it. They probably subcontract the whole operation out to the Ferengi. Point is, if you're looking for exploitation in star trek, you won't find it, because within their world, it essentially doesn't exist. Like, you can have a cup of earl grey tea, hot, right now, without actively engaging in exploitation. You may have a vague suspicion that there might be starving bloody fingered orphans in Assam who picked those leaves for you, but probably not. When you're telling your story of how you were nearly late because your Uber driver couldn't figure out the address, you don't necessarily include that he is a refugee from a war which your people started because they required the resources possessed by his people, and now his home and all the people he knew are dead and destroyed. And so it is with Star Trek.
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Mar 3, 2020 21:22
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Man, Star Trek is all hosed up.
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Mar 3, 2020 22:12
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The Federation can say it only uses ethically sourced, sustainably harvested fair trade reclaimed matter for use in its replicators, and everyone in the Federation basically has to take their word for it. But maybe if you dig a lot deeper, the magic crystals inside the replicator that make the devices possible are actually the egg sacs of a sentient crystalline alien species from beyond the outer rim, who absolutely did not consent to their theft. And they were traded through various 3rd parties and wholesalers, so nobody knew, though maybe a few suspected and turned a blind eye. And when it was found out, the federation citizens were aghast, and the enterprise was dispatched to find the truth, and the crew has to wrestle the moral conundrum of relying wholly on replicator technology, but knowing it is unethical because of its source. And they can wrap the whole thing up to everyone's satisfaction in a single one hour (45 minutes without commercials) time slot. Hey that sounds like a good plot for a Star Trek episode.
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Mar 3, 2020 22:42
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Corporations are a huge part of Star Trek’s Federation setting, though kept conspicuously offscreen along with nearly everything else unrelated to military service. What does a space-miner look like? What does their work entail? In all the hours of New Generation media, we never really find out. In Voyager's "Author, Author" we see outdated medical holograms have been re-purposed as slaves to mine dilithium. Zane posted:why would there be a necessary division of labour of any kind? why would there be labour or capital? all the categories of classical political economy--to say nothing of the derivative division between a state sector and a private sector--are irrelevant. a replicator can just make it. They can't replicate dilithium.
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Mar 4, 2020 03:07
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You know our researchers are showing some promising results in the field of Trilithium research.
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Mar 4, 2020 03:34
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reignofevil posted:You know our researchers are showing some promising results in the field of Trilithium research. too dangerous imo remember the baryon sweep!!
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Mar 4, 2020 03:48
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Whenever we see Starfleet we see adrmials almost exclusively as humans. On rare occasions we'll get an episode where the Enterprise or the show's flagship runs across an inevitably destroyed vessel crewed by aliens - like the several destroyed Vulcan starships. Additionally, we see that Federation ships all follow the human design aesthetic (starting from the show Enterprise) rather than any of the other races'. The Federation is centered on Earth. Its main (only?) shipyards are around Mars. The vast majority of Starfleet personnel are human. This despite Earth being a comparative latecomer to everybody else's interstellar presence. The Maquis, those colonies that clashed with the Cardassians? The vast majority is human. Especially the military side. Star Wars is no better what with the Rebels and Empire being nearly all humans fighting with a few aliens sprinkled into one side. The Empire? Humans. The Rebels? Started by humans, run and manned by humans. Alliance High Command, for reference. Also, yes, fuckin' everybody's white. Of course out of universe this is because who can be arsed applying makeup to extras if you don't specifically have to and in Star Wars' case because CGI is still a drain on the bottom line. But still. Uncomfortable implications abound.
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Mar 4, 2020 04:47
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Researching some scenes from the episode where Data's right to self-determination is put on trial, it's kind of funny how obvious it is that the admiral lady set the whole thing up so she could be the one who got to make the landmark ruling in favour of android rights.
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Mar 4, 2020 07:57
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Zane posted:if replication is incredibly inefficient then the enterprise has an enormous surplus of power for it to be used so carelessly. other than personnel, ships like the enterprise--esp the voyager--don't in fact seem to have any logistical needs at all. to what extent do the same conditions obtain more broadly throughout federation society? This is fairly easy to figure out. Take the total social product and substract the necessary product - the goods and services needed: -to maintain the basic standard of living for the working population. -to maintain strategic reserves (insurance against possible disasters, etc.) -to account for population growth. -to provide for the unemployed (welfare). What remains is the surplus product. The total energy production of the entire United States in 2018 was 3.5 gigatons. If an average starship captain replicates two 8oz cups of tea every day, that’s spending roughly the same amount of energy (not including the mug and saucer, which are ‘recycled’). I’m not really doing precise math at this point because it’s obviously just ludicrous amounts of energy. At the other end of the spectrum, Federation territory contains a significant number of pre-warp civilizations, which do not qualify for Federation citizenship. Under the ‘protection’ of the Prime Directive, these people receive absolutely nothing. Whatever strife, like if there’s a Holocaust going on, the Federation will spend nothing to intervene (this is rationalized as preventing imperialism). In the event that a pre-warp civilization ever achieves warp technology, they will find that literally everything outside their atmosphere has already been colonized by the Federation. Imagine humanity finally getting to Mars and discovering that the entire solar system is already owned by some intergalactic real-estate company. At the same time, the Prime Directive saves the Federation from having to spend anything to preserve the welfare of these non-citizens. And that’s just the non-citizens. The Federation therefore has pretty much all the traits of an economically decadent society. I’ll quote the rest of this post from Wikipedia: Marxian theory suggests decadence involves a clear waste of a large part of the surplus product from any balanced or nuanced human point of view, and it typically goes together with a growing indifference to the wellbeing and fate of other human beings; to survive, people are forced to shut out from their consciousness those horrors which are seemingly beyond their ability to do anything about anymore. Marx & Engels suggest in The German Ideology that in this case the productive forces are transformed into destructive forces. According to Marxian theory, decaying or decadent societies are defined mainly by the fact that: -The gap between what is produced and what could potentially (or technically) be produced (sometimes called the "GDP gap" or "output gap") grows sharply. -A very large proportion of the surplus product is squandered, or devoted to luxury consumption, speculative activity, or military expenditures. -All sorts of activities and products appear which are really useless or even harmful from the point of view of improving human life, to the detriment of activities which are more healthy for human life as a whole. -Enormous wealth and gruesome poverty and squalor exist side by side, suggesting that society has lost its sense of moral and economic priorities. -The ruling elite no longer cares for the welfare of the population it rules, and may be divided within itself. -A consensual morality and sense of trust has broken down, criminality increases, and the ruling elite has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the people, so that it can maintain power only by the crudest of methods (violence, propaganda, and intimidation whereby people are cowed into submission). -A regression occurs to the ideas, values, and practices of an earlier period of human history, which may involve the treatment of other people as less than human. -The society "fouls its own nest" in the sense of undermining the very conditions of its own reproduction. Lord Krangdar posted:In Voyager's "Author, Author" we see outdated medical holograms have been re-purposed as slaves to mine dilithium.
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Mar 4, 2020 10:12
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Hodgepodge posted:Researching some scenes from the episode where Data's right to self-determination is put on trial, it's kind of funny how obvious it is that the admiral lady set the whole thing up so she could be the one who got to make the landmark ruling in favour of android rights. I've always felt the setup to this episode was amazingly strong but the payoff is basically Picard in court saying 'Well are you SURE he isn't conscious? Are you sure you're suuuuuuuure????" And that wins the case.
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Mar 4, 2020 12:17
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hakimashou posted:It cannot make more land on earth, which is why the human military and political elite is dominated by earth landowning families. Like, one captain has a vineyard. Drawin an awful lot from one dude.
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Mar 4, 2020 16:01
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Obviously Granpa Sisko's Gumbo Bar makes him a brutal bourgeois overlord straight out of Warhammer 40K.
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Mar 4, 2020 18:40
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everyone in the federation is a PMC, the biggest conflicts and fall from graces in the show among humans are all about respectability and losing professional status
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Mar 4, 2020 20:20
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a race of malevolent cyborgs are trying to wipe out earth but the real conflict is why hasn't riker moved on from the enterprise yet??
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Mar 4, 2020 20:24
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CainFortea posted:Like, one captain has a vineyard. Read the thread op!
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Mar 4, 2020 20:49
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galagazombie posted:Obviously Granpa Sisko's Gumbo Bar makes him a brutal bourgeois overlord straight out of Warhammer 40K. The restaurant actually helps illustrate a lot of things. First off, even the name "Sisko's Creole Kitchen" highlights the fact that Grandpa Sisko is the owner of a private establishment. Grandpa refers to his patrons as customers, so he doesn't give away food for free - and probably can't. None of the food is replicated - which we're told is a hipster preference, but is really undoubtedly because Grandpa Sisko can't afford it. "Credits" are changing hands, which is what he uses to buy ingredients and pay his cooks and waitstaff. Though it's implied that Grandpa grows most of his own vegetables, he also obtains ingredients from nearby markets and suppliers. Just the fact that he serves seafood means that there are definitely fishermen and/or farmers. Some ingredients are shipped to him from across the galaxy, including from non-Federation planets. But don't be fooled: even though Grandpa Sisko is the owner of a gourmet restaurant, you can get a sense of the overall disparity. He definitely doesn't have access to resources equivalent the GDP of the united states. "Ben, at my age, staying healthy is a full time job, and I am too old to work two jobs." Why doesn't he have enough free time to get medical treatment?
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Mar 4, 2020 21:13
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is fairly easy to figure out. Zane fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 4, 2020 |
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Mar 4, 2020 21:33
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hakimashou posted:Read the thread op! lol "Someone in Janeway's family past owned land at some point" does not support these theories as much as you might think it does.
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Mar 4, 2020 21:36
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Dreylad posted:everyone in the federation is a PMC, the biggest conflicts and fall from graces in the show among humans are all about respectability and losing professional status I don't know what PMC stands for, but I think you're right. In a post-capitalist, post-accumulation of wealth world, the only thing left to reward high achievers with is rank. That's why you've got an admiral making rulings on Data's rights, not a civilian supreme court. Starfleet is where the overachievers go, because there you can get rank and by rising through the ranks, you can indicate your status and degree of expected respect to everyone else. Senior Director, Vice President, CEO no longer have meaning. Commander, Captain, and Admiral do. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The restaurant actually helps illustrate a lot of things. Maybe the distinction here is between Starfleet and the Federation. Within Starfleet, with its dilithium powered starships and their infinite energy supply, you can replicate your tea as often as you like. Outside of Starfleet, where you probably don't have dilithium powered replicators, or they're maybe centrally controlled, or their output is metered, you still have to work for a living. Perhaps not under the same conditions as now, but you still have to do it. Like Grandpa Sisko is working under what sounds like late 20th/early 21st century conditions, in the 24th century. Maybe contextually that's like an Indian labourer building skyscrapers in Dubai, working under 17th century conditions now.
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Mar 4, 2020 21:58
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CainFortea posted:lol I looked it up and you're super wrong about this. "Kathryn Janeway was born on May 20 in Bloomington, Indiana, on Earth. Her father was Vice Admiral Janeway" "She grew up on the great plains surrounding her grandfather's farm in Indiana." Its a fantastic example and extremely strong support. They are an earth landowning family that are also hereditary political/military elites.
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Mar 4, 2020 22:00
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She lived near her grandpa's farm. This, a landed elite does not create.
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Mar 4, 2020 22:12
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Zane posted:theoretical diagnosis in search for empirical social referents. androids and holograms aren't humans. if they are human then all fundamental values are transvaluated since you can create and destroy theoretically infinite androids and holograms from moment to moment by mere caprice. They are people. But even in the realm of humanity, Grandpa Sisko suffers from a very mundane heart disease, yet can only afford a very rudimentary and time-consuming “vascular regeneration” procedure. A transporter beam from an orbiting medical starship could instantly beam the plaque from his arteries and repair any damage. The Federation has had full-fledged age-reversal technology for years. The only explanation is that this superior medical procedure is prohibitively expensive and/or illegal. What do you mean by “fundamental values” and why are they exclusive to human persons?
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Mar 4, 2020 22:12
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I think the most significant conclusion of this thread is that Star Trek is a fun, campy sci fi serial with a bit of light moralizing thrown in, and trying to shoehorn deep significance from its very superficially written universe is what's all hosed up. To paraphrase what someone once said about what made Babylon 5 great; "if I'm going to sit through an hour of moralizing, at least give me a rad space battle at the end of it". Maybe why people think star trek is all hosed up is they were pretty light on the rad space battles so for some reason people took the show more seriously. At least you could count on Kirk for some rollicking fisticuffs.
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Mar 4, 2020 22:35
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Dismissing major aspects of the narrative to merely bad writing is no different from attributing them to magic. Again: if it’s all a fantasy, why this fantasy? Why do we fantasize that Sisko’s dad has untreated heart disease?
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Mar 4, 2020 22:43
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Dismissing major aspects of the narrative to merely bad writing is no different from attributing them to magic. Are you really asking why TV writers write stories audiences can relate to?
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Mar 4, 2020 23:18
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CainFortea posted:lol ssshh. shush. you dont try to convince smg and haki that theyre wrong—they exist to post funny misunderstandings of nerd pop media. you engage them by riffing off their posts,.or by giving them new material to bounce off of. trying to engage them directly in discourse is just going to lead you in circles
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Mar 4, 2020 23:18
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Finger Prince posted:Are you really asking why TV writers write stories audiences can relate to? Far be it from me to give SMG any credit but I think what he is trying to ask is why we as audiences can relate to the circumstances of a family member with untreated heart disease. To which the answer is life sucks for most of the humans on the earth right now and so we have a lot of untreated heart disease going around.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:23
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Squizzle posted:ssshh. shush. you dont try to convince smg and haki that theyre wrong—they exist to post funny misunderstandings of nerd pop media. you engage them by riffing off their posts,.or by giving them new material to bounce off of. trying to engage them directly in discourse is just going to lead you in circles Its not a misunderstanding, its a fact. The human part of the federation is run by a landowning elite from earth. There are countless billions of people all around the galaxy, and scarcity has been eliminated for almost everything, everything except land on earth. And since there is no money or commerce, the land isnt bought or sold but inherited by blood from generation to generation. Inside the idealized post scarcity social utopia of star trek is another idealized utopia, a utopia of allodial blood title to land, a utopia without burghers or nouveau riche. A different dream come true. And what do we see again and again in the tv show? Humans in positions of power come from earth landowning families.
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Mar 4, 2020 23:52
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the picards make such incredibly good wine that the people of earth have decided its a good use of the land to enable them to keep making it as long as they are still willing. people are there to help w the harvest and winemaking because they want to meet picard himself, want to enjoy some demanding but not exceptionally strenuous outdoor activity, and/or want to learn how to make wine
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Mar 5, 2020 00:23
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Dismissing major aspects of the narrative to merely bad writing is no different from attributing them to magic. Well, by DS9 the fantasy was very firmly that nothing had actually changed after the End of History in the late 1980s. I'm not sure that deconstruction of yet another utopia is actually contrary to that agenda, though.
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Mar 5, 2020 00:40
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Wasn't there an episode about how warp drives were permanently polluting the galaxy? edit: lmbo quote:Later, the Federation Council issues a new directive limiting all Federation vessels to a speed of warp five except in extreme emergencies. In addition, they have informed every known species capable of warp travel of the newly discovered dangers of its use. Worf asserts that the Klingon Empire will agree to the limitations, but it is uncertain whether the Romulan Star Empire, Ferengi Alliance, and Cardassian Union would also follow suit. Floor is lava fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Mar 5, 2020 |
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Mar 5, 2020 01:00
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Finger Prince posted:Are you really asking why TV writers write stories audiences can relate to? A writer can make anything relatable, provided they get the psychology right. Cronenberg’s The Fly is one of the best films ever made, despite being about a fictional disease caused by a transporter accident (or because it’s abstracted away from any particular real-world disease like cancer or whatever. In this case, as reign of evil points out, the relatable scenario is a black small-business owner being arbitrarily denied access to healthcare. Of course the writers were probably just relying on cliches like “Grandpa is just too stubborn to retire”, and put him in a generic 20th-Century restaurant setting due to a failure of imagination. But that means they failed to imagine a utopia - and Star Trek is consequently not a utopia. They could have made a communally-owned restaurant relatable, but didn’t.
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Mar 5, 2020 02:03
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hakimashou posted:I looked it up and you're super wrong about this. Janeway and Picard growing up on farms is just a literary tool to give them a backstory that sounds authentic and grounded in a folksy sort of way. It's not supposed to be a statement of the socioeconomic status of Federation members.
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Mar 5, 2020 02:19
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:Janeway and Picard growing up on farms is just a literary tool to give them a backstory that sounds authentic and grounded in a folksy sort of way. It's not supposed to be a statement of the socioeconomic status of Federation members. I fuckin’ hate Star Trek, but I nonetheless have difficulty imagining that the writers are that incompetent.
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Mar 5, 2020 02:25
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