- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
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I suppose we have an equal chance of being one of the bizarro universes.
Loads of people go on about how “awe shucks, we’re in the Mad Max future, instead of the Star Trek future” completely unaware that Star Trek’s utopia was built on top of the ruins of a Mad Max distopia that came first.
In canon, Star Trek’s utopia only happened after Earth had a nuclear WWIII followed by the Eugenics War (and several related genocides) before first contact with the Vulcans. In fact, without those wars, we might not have gotten the tech for warp drive. In further lore, after the wars of the 21st century and before first contact, there was a concerted “never again” kind of movement globally eventually resulting in the United Earth government being founded. It then took more than a century of technological and societal progress to get to the matter replicator driven post-scarcity economy.
So we could be on track for Star Trek future… but none of us will be alive to see it.
And further more the Vulcans did not manage this rapid transition away from armed conflict and instead had thousand years of war. They were impressed and scared but the humans adapting this quickly breeding doubts in their restraints from violence.
Star Trek canon is that humans suddenly acted completely differently than they had throughout their entire history. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
The book “Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow makes a strong case that our current way of structuring society and exploiting eachother is actually an aberration from the norm based on archeological evidence, where it appears we were far more egalitarian and collective.
Here’s a summary from Wengrow himself in video form: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8SJi0sHrEI4
So the Star Trek future may in fact be a return to our previous state.
I don’t know in fairness an actual all-out nuclear war would probably do it. Mostly people are alright, the problem is governments and corporations which presumably wouldn’t survive a nuclear war.
They want the Terran Empire, but instead we have the Ferangi Commerce Authority. And only barely.
we have the Ferangi Commerce Authority. And only barely.
I feel like I’m gonna be getting a lot of mileage out of that link in the near future; this is already the second time in a few days I’ve had cause to post it.
One of the best parts of Deep Space Nine is taking the problematic Ferangi and using them to roast he shit out of Humanity for seven seasons.
It’s impressive how radical DS9 was, and yet no one complained. I don’t know if people just didn’t notice or if it was just better times then. I’m sure if it were made today you’d hear non-stop complaining from a certain segment of society about it being “woke” (which it is, in a good way) and bad. They even justify the use of terrorism as a tool against oppressive regimes!
DS9 is, by far, the best ST has ever been I think. It’s always been progressive, but almost always in a “things will just work out” sort of way. It didn’t actually deal with how we need to act to create the future we want. It just says that the ideal future is inclusive of everyone, which is great but limited. DS9 wasn’t afraid to say there’s almost no method off limits against (figurative) fascist oppressors and, like you mention, really go to town on roasting capitalists and warning us to be afraid of them.
