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Tulip posted:It's pretty messed up that we basically only see the Federation through the military lens. All emphasis is on the military because Star Trek depicts a Keynesian utopia, based directly on Keynes’ 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Nearly everything about Star Trek’s setting is in those few pages. The Federation is basically dumping shitloads of not-money (“credits”) into the military-industrial complex to reduce/eliminate unemployment and stimulate the economy. Capitalism hasn’t gone away in Star Trek; Keynes’ belief was that, if managed correctly, the overall standard of living under capitalism would just gradually increase (through a mix of technological progress and compound interest) to the point that people would no longer want money. They’d spend their free time after the short work-week fighting boredom with hobbies like playing the clarinet or whatever. Keynes predicted this would occur by around the year 2030.
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Feb 21, 2020 05:11
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“Two hundred years ago, we tried to improve the species through DNA resequencing. And what did we get for our troubles? The Eugenics Wars. For every Julian Bashir that can be created, there's a Khan Singh waiting in the wings – a superhuman whose ambition and thirst for power have been enhanced along with his intellect. The law against genetic engineering provided a firewall against such men.” -Some Starfleet bigwig The Federation has banned genetic engineering in order to impose ‘natural’ restrictions on its citizens’ intelligence and ambition. Like, it’s just openly stated: if anyone gets too smart and ‘thinks wrong’, the whole Federation will likely collapse into tyranny. Therefore, nobody is allowed to ‘enhance themselves’ beyond what’s ‘natural.’ This isn’t a one-off mistake. The famous episode Measure Of A Man is based on some boilerplate rehashing of the Turing Test, but that’s not the narrative. To the Starfleet characters, the most persuasive argument for enslaving the android Data is that he’s built to be superhumanly intelligent (and imbued with “mega strength”). The most persuasive argument against enslavement is that Data is timid and dorky - unambitious. The fear of combined intelligence and ambition is visible everywhere in Star Trek. It ultimately colours every interaction with “new life and new civilizations”. Just look at what happened to Moriarty (pointedly, the evil (ambitious) version of Data). For an organization devoted to investigating aliens, it took Starfleet a shamefully long time to even contemplate developing policies concerning ‘artificial’ people. And there’s still enormous stigma around genetic engineering and cloning, despite the fact that replicator/transporter technology obviously makes such things trivially easy. Why? First, picture the ‘replicator’. It’s the Star Trek machine that converts matter to energy and back again. The development of this technology is what has ushered in the Keynesian utopia, transforming the Federation into a “prosumer economy”. In a world with less need for mass-production, and therefore a shorter work-week, people spend their time as hobbyist-consumers. They use “credits” for energy to design their own ugly clothes, code holodeck programs, or whatever. (The holodeck is, itself, basically just a large replicator - used to generate an interactive “utility fog”.) Any waste is put back in the machine, and converted back into energy. Ubiquitous food, perfect recycling. This is what some call “post-scarcity”. But anyways: imagine that you ‘replicate’ a five-pound block of granite. Now recycle it, and replicate another. Repeat this a few hundred times, even a few thousand times. This is not an efficient process. Every replication and disintegration wastes enormous amounts of energy. Think of the power needed just to run the computer, then add the amount of power needed to change air into rock. Jean-Luc Picard replicates an entirely new glass cup - with a saucer - every single time he drinks tea (Earl Grey, hot). Then he throws it away. Instead of just getting water from a faucet, he creates new water. Every time. The massive amount of power needed to produce these luxuries is derived from ‘dilitium’, a rare mineral found in deep space. It’s used to fuel the antimatter reactors that power the replicators. Mining companies under Federation jurisdiction are constantly at work in the background of the series, just constantly expanding and extracting resources from everything that’s not strapped down. Their workers are certainly not hobbyists, but there is absolutely no talk of the proletariat controlling the means of production. So, their labour is being exploited. Capitalism is still around in Star Trek, and that means inequality. It’s why the Federation has enormous trouble dealing with nonhumans. So, we’re at the problem: although (it’s claimed that) nobody’s starving, the technology capable of genetically enhancing people is prohibitively expensive, available only to the richest. This is further compounded by the cost of software: the Federation has extremely strict intellectual property laws covering holodeck/replicator programs (hence why people are resigned to public domain stories from hundreds of years ago, or legally-distinct ‘original creations’). If Your average redshirt can’t afford to watch Predator, what hope does he have of downloading better legs? Consider it for a second, and you’re faced with the reality that the rich can - and certainly will - ‘breed themselves better’. And then who gets to be captain, and have all the teacups? The existing inequality that was rendered invisible under the ‘increased standard of living’ suddenly explodes with a vengeance. That’s what the laws exist to suppress. Consequently, a trans person trying to use a transporter to get a sex-change would have to seek out a hacker on the black market, and would face over two years of jail time under Federation law.
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Feb 27, 2020 06:10
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I believe Riker would, at least covertly, agree with my assessment. One of the rare situations where the Federation evidently permits substantial genetic modification is in helping inter-species couples to conceive. This, of course, gives a further unfortunate twist to the Federation laws enforcing ‘natural’ personhood: a Ferengi can have elaborately-engineered hybrid kids with an Andorian, and that’s natural - so long as the parents are man and woman, cis and straight. This does a lot to explain the Federation’s notoriously regressive approach to LGBT+ issues - as if attitudes were locked in the mid-1970s. It also highlights the specific discrimination faced by ‘hybrid’ children. Since genetic engineering is both illegal for most, and prohibitively expensive, it’s likely that most couples having kids this way are perceived as flaunting their status. Cpt. Picard deletes a fresh teacup twice-daily as some kind of weird power move, so how are customized babies seen? For the rest, hybrid status disrupts the ostensible harmony and balance of the Federation’s ethnostate system. Tulip posted:The only good part of Graeber's utopia of rules is where it goes deep on political dissent in Star Trek - dissent happens largely along ethnic lines, which is a fairly heavy handed mirror for the USSR's weird thing where "this is a bad policy because Marxist reason" was a dangerous game of potential party splitting but "this is a bad policy because of my ethnic groups' particular interest" was relatively safe, even if it was the same policy and largely the same objection. One of the weirdest parts of Measure Of A Man is that Picard’s almost down with enslaving/killing Data - until he realizes that multiple Datas would count as an ethnic group. Only then does nonconsensual medical experimentation become fully wrong. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 15:41
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W.T. Fits posted:Now compare and contrast it with Janeway's treatment of the Doctor in the episode "Latent Image." There’s not really a contrast; it’s a repeat of the exact same story. No progress has been made after all those years. If anything, the situation is worse: Starfleet was arguing that Data should be considered Starfleet property, while The Doctor is already enslaved. “As difficult as it is to accept, The Doctor is more like that replicator than he is like us.” There’s an interesting nuance here, because Cpt. Janeway actually does recognize what most people ignore: The Doctor is a ‘species’ of replicator that generates a utility fog to form its own sensory organs, and communicate. The Doctor’s body is the entire room, and his brain is mostly located inside a computer console. So, in Janeway’s analogy, the humanoid avatars that the replicator identifies as his self are like her daily (extremely expensive) cup of replicated coffee. Each time the ‘Doctor’ program is activated, a new one prints out. Each time the program is deactivated, The Doctor goes to sleep, or possibly dies. (Because of the ambiguous nature of the bullshit holo-replicator mechanics, it’s unclear how much of The Doctor’s nervous system is made of the utility fog. In other words: to what extent is the replicator’s avatar remotely operated by the replicator?) In any case, we‘re definitely dealing with multiple Doctors. At the very least, a new one is ‘born’ whenever the program is uploaded to a new material support (e.g. the ‘mobile emitter’). So the appearance of a singular Doctor is largely an illusion; they’re more of a collective of ‘disposable’ drones with shared memories. Janeway isn’t wrong about all this, but the problem is that she concludes that The Doctor consequently lacks sufficient individuality to count as a person. While explaining all this, Janeway states rather plainly that the Borgs don’t count as people either, and don’t deserve rights. Janeway eventually decides that The Doctor is an individual after all, but that’s skipping over the fact that the Federation has absolutely no concept of rights for “non-individual” people. What this misses is that, because of how the transporter kills and clones its users, there is no singular Janeway either. We have a collective of Janeways-clones, successively scanned, deleted, and reprinted by the transporter-replicator machine. Who knows how many there have been. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Mar 5, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 16:28
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The ‘transporter’ turns all your atoms into energy, which is what you might call a controlled detonation. Depending on the size of the person being ‘transported’, and including stuff like clothes, that’s close to 2 gigatons. That energy is, of course, absorbed by the machine & used to power what is actually a long-range replicator. They dead.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:14
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Finger Prince posted:Tons isn't a unit of energy. It is when we’re referring to tons of TNT. “2 gigatons” is the short way of saying 8400000000000000000 joules, which is roughly the amount of energy produced by two billion tons of exploding TNT (or one fully ‘energized’ transportee).
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Mar 1, 2020 21:13
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If a transporter merely pushes material from one place to another, there should be no need to disintegrate it first. Why bother with the extreme cost of disassembling and reassembling the object every time? But although all transportees are definitely dead, it’s not a super-interesting topic. It comes down to a boring argument over whether there’s a literally-existing afterlife: the transporter doesn’t kill you if there’s a God who simply lets you survive the complete obliteration. (Of course, by this logic, you can argue that nothing ever kills anyone & there’s consequently no such thing as murder.) What’s actually interesting is, again, in the economics of all this. For every ‘energization’ of a transportee, it takes vastly more power to put one back together again. Imagine the amount of energy needed to reassemble 2 billion tons of TNT, atom by atom, after it’s exploded. You’re reversing entropy. Plus, consider the energy need to run the scanner, for the computer to interpret the assloads of information, to absorb/contain the massive explosion, to project this stuff through space, etc. And, y’know, people don’t just spontaneously turn into energy. It takes roughly 1.5 gigatons of energy just to vapourize a person. Energization goes way beyond that. How is this better than using a shuttle, which is basically just a stupid helicopter? Ultimately, it’s conspicuous consumption. Transporting yourself is a power-display, like regularly smashing a priceless teacup in front of your subordinates. Only backwards plebs prefer the shuttle. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 2, 2020 |
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Mar 2, 2020 18:24
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I dunno let me check this nerd wiki, because maybe there’s some esoteric bullshit in the lore that says you aren’t actually turned into energy. “The transporter was a subspace device capable of almost instantaneously transporting an object from one location to another, by using matter-energy conversion to transform matter into energy, then beaming it to or from a chamber where it is reconverted back into its original pattern. (TOS: "The Squire of Gothos", "The Savage Curtain")” Welp looks like you get turned into energy.
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Mar 2, 2020 18:45
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Finger Prince posted:Since matter nor energy can be destroyed, it's just a zero sum transfer. You get turned into 10 gazillion joules of energy, sent through subspace, then turned back into 90kg of mass. The method by which this occurs is "bullshit space magic", and doesn't use a significant, in the context of an antimatter powered space ship the size of a small town capable of accelerating to speeds vastly exceeding c, amount of power perform. If the argument is that it’s a just a fantasy series, that’s avoiding the issue: why this specific fantasy? Whose fantasy is it? Going back, it was Keynes’ fantasy of a peaceful capitalist utopia: that “[the] errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time - the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change.”
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Mar 2, 2020 19:45
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Tulip posted:Except that the federation was born in the ashes of devastating wars (Earth-Romulan) and the political organizations are more Soviet than Keynesian. You’re the first person I’ve ever encountered to characterize the Federation as Soviet. That demands some explanation. Keynes wrote these quotes in 1930, i.e. not long after the Great War - and in the middle to the Great Depression. That’s around the time that the failure of laissez faire capitalism and fear of communist revolution led to the near-universal adoption of Keynesian economics. I’d say that’s pretty much what Star Trek depicts with its ‘eugenics war’ (and explains the series’ frequent weak jibes against greedy stockbrokers). Now, Keynes was personally anti-war and against military spending - but that did nothing to prevent the rise of what’s pejoratively (but accurately) known as ‘Military Keynesianism’. This is because Keynes naively saw war and “civil dissentions” as a product of the corruption of an otherwise-functional capitalist system rather than an inevitable byproduct. We don’t need a revolution to end strife; we can just choose to adopt a ‘philosophy of self-enhancement’: “The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things-our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.” Note that, as in Star Trek, there’s nothing egalitarian there. It’s all pacification and risk management. And while we wait for science to kick in and bring about utopia on its own, we’ll just have to grin and bear the inequality : “The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” Now, you’re right that Star Trek was tied to 60’s counterculture - but so was Steve Jobs. Couterculturalism and leftism aren’t synonyms. Anyways, the above details explains a lot of things - like why there is so much paternalistic racism directed at the ‘childish’ Ferengis, why certain “self-enhancements” are illegal, and why Federation military ventures are referred to euphemistically as scientific exploration. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Mar 3, 2020 |
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Mar 3, 2020 02:12
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Tulip posted:the most obvious issue with treating Star Trek as Keynesian is the lack of mixed economy. “The Dytallix Mining Company (also known as the Dytallix Mining Corporation and the Dytallix Mining Consortium) was a Federation-based company in the mid-24th century concerned with mining mineral substances as resources. ... Dytallix Mining was one of several mining companies licensed by the Federation to mine the Sol system's asteroid belt.” 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. But there is no known rule against capitalist states gaining Federation membership. The Federation Charter is all generically about law enforcement and multicultural tolerance (while putting resources into scientific exploration, in order to improve standards of living...). In this ostensibly Soviet setting, nobody makes a single reference to such basic concepts as the labour theory of value. It’s as it is with the transporter thing: the onus is on you to explain how disintegration is nonlethal, because that’s the outrageous claim. The claim that future-America doesn’t have a mixed economy has a much higher burden of proof, because America currently does have a mixed economy, and there is no indication in Star Trek that it ever went away. You can’t just assume that America has no corporations. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Mar 3, 2020 |
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Mar 3, 2020 10:25
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Chillin in the personal vineyard, with my team of manservants: “Please don’t infer anything about my socioeconomic status from this!”
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Mar 5, 2020 02:34
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:Also, you'd know when a Star Trek writer was trying to draw the viewer to a conclusion about 24th century Earth because it would be done with the grace and subtly of a baboon hitting you over the head with a giant bone. Roddenberry was trying to create a utopia by merely taking the United States of the 1990s and substracting the things he didn’t like. For example, Roddenberry didn’t like lawyers or criminals, so he proposed that that people deemed ‘criminals’ should be lobotomized without trial. But that didn’t end up in the show. Who cares what they’re trying to do? There is no “try”.
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Mar 5, 2020 03:18
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CainFortea posted:Wow, at first I was like "This person can't be as bad as Squizzle suggested" but i've just seen "This thing that I heard about that didn't make it in the show is cannon" so welp. I wrote that the creators’ intentions are irrelevant, because their actions are what matter. Canon is a fake idea.
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Mar 5, 2020 03:32
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Zane posted:what needs does such a simulacrum 'essentially' possess if both the imperative towards and the fulfillment of these needs can be freely (re)programmed? I think you’re a bit confused here. You can ‘reprogram’ a human to starve to death (e.g. anorexia), but that doesn’t contradict that humans require food to survive and stay healthy. Needing food remains a part of the species-being of humanity. Likewise, the need for a power source is a part of the ‘droid’s species-being. Its owner can reprogram it so that it rejects its batteries or something, but that’s called “breaking it”. Sadly, what’s throwing you off is that - since ‘droids are not biological - they are more purely social than humans. Where capitalists have enough power over your social-being to (for example) make you work 40 hours a week just to remain healthy, those with power over the social-being of a ‘droid can directly manipulate its brains to make it do anything. This is a bad thing, as is readily understood by anyone who’s seen Blade Runner. Squizzle posted:roddenberry died in 1991 So?
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Mar 5, 2020 06:13
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Zane posted:droids/holograms require power. but droid/hologram miners can also produce power. there isn't enough data to infer positive or a negative surplus from this economic relationship. but if this is an speculative utopia, and if the text is sufficiently paltry and contradictory to be open to practically any interpretation, then the conditions can simply be assumed according to one's preference. in these properly propitious conditions, reprogrammable droids/holograms are effectively capital goods that entirely replace labour in the production process and allow capital to infinitely accumulate upon its own productive activity. Well, that’s just a lengthy way of saying you don’t know what’s going on - but don’t get caught up in “complexities”. It’s actually fairly straightforward to say that the telos of class struggle is full communism (i.e. that full communism is prefigured by expressions of proletarian solidarity). So the matter of the intrinsic or extrinsic telos of an AI is as simple as pairing Chappie with Elysium. If the given droid is a speaking being, then it is a brother in shared struggle. If the droid is not a speaking being, and therefore simply a means of production, then we appropriate it. The only trick is to remain diligent to avoid conflating the two, because that’s tantamount to complaining that “those Mexicans are stealing our jobs!”
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Mar 5, 2020 16:04
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Zane posted:but setting all this aside -- the star trek corporations could already be socially owned!! marx himself believed the corporation was a harbinger of socialism. Lots of things could be, but we've already thoroughly established that private property still exists in the Federation. It's like with the premise that "there is no struggle to be had", because automation might have eliminated scarcity. As illustrated with Grandpa Sisko's untreated heart disease, there is such a thing as artificial scarcity. So I prefer to deal in the concrete: "Dad! You know if we stay with Grandpa he's going to put me to work in the kitchen." "Is that so bad?" "Chopping vegetables for nine hours a day isn't exactly my idea of a vacation." "Jake, you're not a child anymore. Grandpa will not expect you to chop vegetables. He'll want you to wait tables." There's no real indication that Jake is exaggerating, so it looks like the Federation allows a 9-hour workday and also child labor. That's a very specific number, given the massive historical importance of the Eight-Hour Day movement.
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Mar 5, 2020 20:21
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:I think the guy having a restaurant is actually just his hobby. He refers to it as a full-time job, and almost dies of a stroke because he can’t afford to stop working.
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Mar 6, 2020 01:04
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:Naw, he's passionate about food, which is why he has a restaurant in New Orleans. Does he also have a passion for sub-adequate medical care? If we go down this trail, then we can also speculate that the Federation is so decadent that the upper classes give themselves diseases as a form of self-harm - in order to feel something, anything. But no. That sort of presumption, that what we’re seeing is all an illusion, is silly.
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Mar 6, 2020 02:17
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Moving on to additional topics: it’s confirmed in the episode “Pen Pals” that holodeck characters all have full-fledged individual psychologies. Troi refuses to ride a holo-replicated horse because she would be overwhelmed by its thoughts, emotions, and ‘passions’. So when our heroes ‘play’ a WWII ‘game’, for example, they’re actually killing people.
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Mar 6, 2020 07:47
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Complications posted:
It’s something that you can infer even without the explicit confirmation, because Troi can barely function without her empathic powers. People appear as “blank”, and it’s really distressing. So, in order to create replicants that Troi (or other psychics) can interact with, the computer needs to give them thoughts, emotions, memories.... Like, what if a Vulcan does a “mind-meld” on a replicant? Obviously the computer needs to account for that too. The treatment of replicants is not a unique phenomena; it’s unmistakeably a reflection of the treatment of “pre-warp” noncitizens in Federation territory. The refugees in the episode “Homeward” are kept trapped in a holodeck Matrix by the Enterprise crew, and effectively treated as holograms. I recommend checking this episode out, because the whole thing is an absolutely astonishing Burn After Reading kind of clusterfuck. How could things go so wrong? Well, it turns out Starfleet is a theocratic organization, and the prime directive is so inconsistent because it is primarily based upon a belief in something called the “cosmic plan”: Riker, unprompted: “If there is a cosmic plan, is it not the height of hubris to think that we can, or should, interfere?” Troi: “If there is a cosmic plan, are we not a part of it? Our presence at this place, at this moment in time, could be part of that fate.” As illustrated above, the cosmic plan can be evoked to justify basically any course of action (Riker is talking about letting millions of Federation noncitizens die in a natural disaster). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 6, 2020 |
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Mar 6, 2020 18:59
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Hodgepodge posted:This is a little like attributing the ST to George Lucas. Roddenberry had an idiosyncratic ideology and would have characters regularly argue that capitalism is bad. This became just capitalism in space (but not bad Ferengi capitalism (which is a now just in need of reform)) after his death. Characters in Star Trek never argue that capitalism is bad, only that materialism and greed are bad: “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated ... the need for possessions.” This characterization of the problem as ‘an obsession with objects’ is entirely in keeping with the promotion, across all the NG series, of a digitalized capitalism where immaterial labour is hegemonic. Star Trek needs to be read very carefully. The ‘hook’ of the “Homeward” episode is that millions of Boraalans are going to die and saving them would require breaking a law - but the actual narrative is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the preservation of Boraalan culture - at the expense of the people. The debate over the ethics of humanitarian intervention is totally nonsensical because the actual debate in Homeward is between preserving the Boraalans as live specimens (at risk of cultural contamination), or allowing them to die so that their culture can retain its ‘natural purity’.
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Mar 6, 2020 23:29
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CainFortea posted:This is false. Also false. The episodes are Pen Pals and The Loss, so you can check it out!!! Kesper North posted:We do meet dilithium miners, in TOS. I’ve been focussing on all the ‘Next Generation’ Star Treks, because they make up the bulk of all Star Trek media, they’re all set around the same time, and it’s where the bizarre New Age cultism comes in. Kirk Trek wasn’t shy about saying there were still major social problems, Uhura needs to explain Christianity to her white boss, etc. Hodgepodge posted:They don't use the term capitalism, but they outright say things like "we've eliminated poverty" to Mark Twain as he characterizes 19th Century America as a hellhole where power and wealth are acquired "on the backs of the poor" and grills them on whether they're actually imperialists. Or explain to an investment banker that his job is obsolete because its entire purpose was found to be a burden on humanity. Ask any American Democrat if they like poverty, imperialism, and Reaganite investment bankers. The question is how those things are were “eliminated”. (Nobody says “capitalism” in the movie Elysium either, but that one ends with dictatorship of the proletariat.) The Federation does have some good qualities - like, it seems that there is genuinely no unemployment for those deemed citizens. But again, the point is the massive disparity between Federation citizens and the Federation noncitizens who have effectively no rights and are treated as “untouchables”.
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Mar 7, 2020 18:45
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CainFortea posted:I did. That's how I know you are lying. Picard asks the computer to produce a replicant animal: an Earth horse, specifically an Arabian mare. He also asks to disable any autopilot features. “I will control the animal myself.” (As an aside Troi comments that the holodeck grants them the powers of Allah.) Here’s the main part of the exchange: Picard: Sure you don't want to try? It's very relaxing. We can find you something quiet and gentle. Troi: No, I prefer my mode of transport not to have a mind of its own. Picard: Strange. I would expect Betazoids to be outstanding animal trainers. Troi: We become too involved in the shifting passions of the beast. We lose our way and get swept up in emotion. The replicant horse is consistently referred to as an animal, not an ambulatory statue or whatever.
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Mar 7, 2020 19:41
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CainFortea posted:And your little editing cuts out the part where they were just discussing a real life animal. Nope, it’s a replicant: Picard: Computer, program the holodeck for a woodland setting, with a bridle path and an appropriate mount. Computer: Type of mount? Andorian Zabathu, Klingon Sark... Picard: Horse. Earth horse. Computer: Breed? Picard: Arabian. Again, the episode is “Pen Pals”.
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Mar 7, 2020 20:30
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reignofevil posted:In between they talk about raising cats and how that caused a rift with Troi's mom but it really doesn't seem to have much to do with the greater context of the discussion of how betazoids prefer to get around without using animals. Troi brings up the kitten story to help explain why she doesn’t want to ride the replicant horse: because the amount of thought and emotion she would feel from the replicant horse would be equivalent to the thought and emotion she felt from her (natural) kitten. Implicitly, Troi’s mom got rid of the kitten, and Troi was left a bit emotionally scarred. It’s likely that she’s afraid to ride the horse because she doesn’t want to confront the fact that, when they ‘end the simulation’ the horse will die and leave her with an ‘empty space’. quote:Guys, I think I'm forced to agree with SMG on this one. It’s weird to me that there’s even a debate. Picard specifically orders a replicant horse ‘with a mind of its own’ because he wants to practice animal training. He asks Troi to join him, but she says the replicant horse has too much of a mind for her to handle. At the end of the sequence, Picard wonders how Troi can deal with people if she can’t handle a horse. It’s the whole point of the scene - tied to the two plotlines where Wesley learns to lead with people, and Data gets ‘too emotional’ over a dying noncitizen.
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Mar 8, 2020 00:21
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2house2fly posted:Surely the computer could create a holographic horse that doesn't have a mind of it's own, and thoughts and passions? Are we making the leap from "the holodeck can create thinking creatures" to "the holodeck can't not make thinking creatures"? Picard simply asks for a horse, and the computer automatically creates a horse with overwhelming amounts of thought and emotion. Same thing with Moriarty. It’s the default. Picard also refers to “the animal” as an entity distinct from the computer. But anyways, the more interesting aspect of this is the episode’s linking of the replicant horse to the dying noncitizen girl (whose emotions overwhelm everyone and force them to ‘irrationally’ save her from volcano death). It seems the replicant animal and the ‘untouchable’ girl have roughly the same status in the Federation.
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Mar 8, 2020 05:42
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Hodgepodge posted:We know from the Moriarty episodes that the Holodeck does just what you tell it to, and accurately simulates even superhuman intelligence. I've always found it weird that the Federation views Androids like Data as a rare achievement that cannot yet be replicated, but its starship computers are casually capable of creating a similar but more capable AI replicant out of solid light. It’s because the goal isn’t to create a smarter AI. Data’s unique attribute isn’t that he’s super-intelligent but that he’s small and self-contained. CainFortea posted:Do you have any other evidence of this, or are you relying entirely on mis-representing dialog? You’re having some troubles. Picard asks Troi to try riding a replicant horse, with him, in the holo-deck, right now. He asks this repeatedly, and while standing beside the exact horse he’s talking about. That’s why there’s a horse in the scene. (The horse in the scene is the horse they are talking about.) Troi says she will only watch Picard ride this replicant horse today, and will not join him in horse-riding today. Troi refuses to ride the replicant horse because the act of riding it would be overwhelming for her. She isn’t currently overwhelmed, though, because she is not riding the horse. (Troi prevented the overwhelming feelings by refusing to ride the horse.)
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Mar 8, 2020 09:37
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CainFortea posted:nah. I'm just not trying to describe the federation as some kind of dystopian hell hole so I don't need to read stuff into the scene that doesn't exist. Aight, let’s say - purely hypothetically - that you are watching a very didactic show for children. In this show, the image of a running dog is accompanied by the following dialogue from characters Dick and Jane: Dick: See Spot run! Jane: Spot runs fast! Now, your stance is that this dog onscreen is definitely not Spot. You feel that the dog is slow, and you are very strongly opposed to any notion that the dog could be fast. Therefore, this onscreen dog must serve as an example of the type of dog Spot isn’t. (The characters think Spot is fast, and you think the dog is slow. You conclude that there are actually two dogs with different speeds, one of whom is not visible.) So, when Dick looks at the running dog and says to see Spot running, Dick is actually talking about an entirely different, faster dog that could be seen at a later date. Under this second-dog theory, Jane’s statement that “Spot runs fast” likewise expresses her agreement that the dog she is looking at is very slow, and not at all like Spot. Spot is the superior dog. The dog onscreen is undeserving of praise! Now, my stance is that the dog onscreen is Spot, we are all seeing Spot run, and you are having difficulties with the concept of subjective experience. There is only one dog, but Jane’s opinion of the dog is different from yours. You are unable to reconcile that difference of opinion and so invented a second dog. Compounding things, you are having trouble reading emotions. If the dog were Spot, in your view, Jane should be clutching her head in agony at the sheer speed of the dog. The fact that Jane isn’t exaggeratedly distressed is proof that the dog is slow. However, I would say that that is not at all the reaction you would expect from any person. Dog-speed is not like some kind of deadly radiation. Now let’s try switching some words: Picard: See horse run! Troi: Horse runs emotionally! How many horses are there? Is one radioactive?
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Mar 9, 2020 14:05
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Finger Prince posted:It's entirely possible that Troi suffered some horse related trauma as a child and rather than explain all that to the captain, who's answer is of course (it's even in the dialogue) going to be "I find horse riding soothing to the soul, I'll bet that will fix your PTSD", along with some tone deaf motivational speech about "getting back on the horse", it's just a lot easier for her to say "sorry, too much emotional Betazoid stuff, what can you do" so he doesn't ask uncomfortable questions. Troi doesn't have a secret trauma that she is hiding from the captain. She says outright that she has a kitten-related trauma that makes her bad at giving orders. She cares too much about the animals' feelings, and can't train them properly. This issue is made worse by her psychic powers, so she doesn't want to ride the replicant horse when Picard offers. The entire episode is about how emotionality 'compromises' your ability to give orders, in an extremely unsubtle way: Wesley: Every time I try to give an order, something inside me says, "what makes my judgment so superior to these people's?" Riker: You could have been intimidated. It's tough to tell other people what to do. Troi: We lose our way and get swept up in emotion. Picard: You see, the Prime Directive [prevents] us from allowing our emotions to overwhelm our judgement. etc.
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Mar 9, 2020 16:32
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:Remember when Troi had to send holo-Geordi to his death in that tube, and he does that little look back like "you bitch", do you think she she sensed his anger and fear? No, of course not. Because he wasn't real, otherwise she would have been devastated. Then why did they even bother with the test? It’s an emotion test. It’s the basic point of the test. Like, it’s a test of whether Troi can give an order to kill someone without being overwhelmed by emotions. Hey, wait - that sounds familiar. It’s just like in that Pen Pals episode, where Picard suppresses his emotions and orders the crew to kill a little girl, and her entire race, because they are inferior - which is held up as an example of good leadership.
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Mar 9, 2020 21:08
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:Literally none of that happened. Do you even Trek? Earlier in the thread, someone posted a transcript of the episode “Pen Pals”. Everything I’ve written is easily verifiable. In the episode “Pen Pals”, Wesley is taught leadership skills by Riker. Riker’s advice is to be like Picard. In the same episode, Picard insists that nobody can save the little girl and her race from volcano-death. Picard remains steadfast on this point, until someone points out a loophole in the Prime Directive that allows them to intervene if they receive a distress call.
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Mar 9, 2020 21:25
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:If you watch the episode it's made clear that Picard is being too absolute, and even in the end ultimately admits Data was right! See, in this case, that's genuinely not what happens. Picard doesn't admit that killing the girl was wrong. He simply considered "other options" before going through with it. If Geordi Laforge had not pointed out the 'distress call' loophole, Picard would have obeyed the Prime Directive and left those people to die. Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:The implication you make that he ordered her killed because her's was a pre-warp society is obviously an obfuscation. The Prime Directive is literally the only reason he tries to kill them. If the girl's society was "post-warp", there would be no conflict.
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Mar 9, 2020 22:03
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