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Well that's another interpretation of the economics of the Federation that could be equally valid as the rest, seeing as how the internal structure of the Federation is never actually defined. They just kinda assumed that humanity would (usually) have some kind of moral high ground when dealing with all those weird aliens. And then they just kinda threw in a bunch of relatable cultural touchstones. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:star trek's greatest value as a setting was its attempt to depict individuals who came from a substantially more just society It's because of how the power of branding will make people buy into a product that has the brand they like on it, even if they hate everything about it otherwise. You'll see people struggling through Voyager and Enterprise, complaining all the way, but they'll never jump over to something else like Babylon 5 or...I dunno, Seaquest? In fact, if your brand is powerful enough to be a big huge pop culture touchstone and a huge fanbase to consume whatever content under its heading, it might even make more sense to divert as much as possible from the brand's old material in order to maximize appeals by drawing in both fans and non-fans, although that equation only sometimes works. If this sounds like branding/franchises/IP management are inherently bad, it's because they are, and under pre-disney IP law, Star Trek would've entered public domain in 1994, and everyone would be able to make their own interpretations of Star Trek. Although I have no idea what it'd be like for a big huge multimedia franchise to be public domain.
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Feb 26, 2020 18:23
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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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SuperMechagodzilla posted:“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.” 
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Feb 27, 2020 15:05
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The federation preaches tolerance, yet every time anyone meets a ferengi they open with something like "Your duplicitous schemes and beady eyes won't work on me! You were born from slime on a planet of mud. Begone from my sight!" Quark saves deep space nine like 20 times before Sisko even looks him in the eye. What's up with that?
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Feb 28, 2020 02:46
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FunkyAl posted:The federation preaches tolerance, yet every time anyone meets a ferengi they open with something like "Your duplicitous schemes and beady eyes won't work on me! You were born from slime on a planet of mud. Begone from my sight!" Quark saves deep space nine like 20 times before Sisko even looks him in the eye. What's up with that? ds9 is all about how the federation are sanctimonious racists, ferengi and cardassians the 2 big examples
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Feb 28, 2020 03:05
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Federation includes Vulcans who are the biggest racists in the Galaxy.
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Feb 28, 2020 04:56
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Turns out that using alien races as allegories for real-world issues meant making the human explorers always have the high ground over the rest of the alien filth.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:49
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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.
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Feb 28, 2020 14:38
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"Ferengi" is pretty obviously derived "Ferengi," a Turkish term for "white person" that has variations as far away as Malaysia. It's derived from "Frank," referring to the French crusaders, but definitely gets used to refer to Jews (oddly, a derivative is used as a pejorative for Mizrahi Jews in Israel).
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Feb 28, 2020 14:49
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Tulip posted:"Ferengi" is pretty obviously derived "Ferengi," a Turkish term for "white person" that has variations as far away as Malaysia. It's derived from "Frank," referring to the French crusaders, but definitely gets used to refer to Jews (oddly, a derivative is used as a pejorative for Mizrahi Jews in Israel). lol
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Feb 28, 2020 15:22
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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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SuperMechagodzilla posted: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. Now compare and contrast it with Janeway's treatment of the Doctor in the episode "Latent Image."
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Feb 28, 2020 18:14
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What is a "sonic shower" and how does it work? Does it make you clean? Can you ever even get anything wet on a starship? How bad does everyone smell?
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Feb 28, 2020 19:42
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FunkyAl posted:What is a "sonic shower" and how does it work? Does it make you clean? Can you ever even get anything wet on a starship? How bad does everyone smell? i want sonic toilets
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Feb 29, 2020 01:28
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for when you gotta go fast
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Feb 29, 2020 01:28
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Squizzle posted:i want sonic toilets Sonic toilets decompile your poop and turn it into matter for the replicators
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Feb 29, 2020 01:40
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Tulip posted:"Ferengi" is pretty obviously derived "Ferengi," a Turkish term for "white person" that has variations as far away as Malaysia. It's derived from "Frank," referring to the French crusaders, but definitely gets used to refer to Jews (oddly, a derivative is used as a pejorative for Mizrahi Jews in Israel). I was feeling it until that took a sudden turn from satire (white person) to antisemitism and now I feel really uncomfortable about Star Trek.
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Feb 29, 2020 05:59
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FunkyAl posted:What is a "sonic shower" and how does it work? Does it make you clean? Can you ever even get anything wet on a starship? How bad does everyone smell? If you ask a Vulcan--pretty bad
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Feb 29, 2020 06:44
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Hodgepodge posted:in real life it turns out that the carefully measured tapering plan to be administered by qualified professionals party suffered repeated loses to the nah this poo poo is good for you here ill attach a hose directly to your brain party I mentioned it in some Star Trek thread but it wouldn’t surprise me if civilians in the Star Trek universe lived in huge project style apartment blocks and all the units are holodeck cubicles, so you can “live” in whatever style house you want and have it be as “big” as you want, but in reality you’re crammed into a box along with everyone else.
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Feb 29, 2020 07:39
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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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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
That's not how the transporter works tho.
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Feb 29, 2020 23:18
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CainFortea posted:That's not how the transporter works tho. yes it is
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Feb 29, 2020 23:31
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They say it's not so it's not because that's how fiction works. It moves your atoms from point to point with scifi magic through an energy beam just like a car moves your atoms from point to point with an engine through somebody's backyard. Sometimes something weird like cosmic rays and space clouds can do weird things to the process, forking it in two or even shunting the people through a video game, but it's much like how cosmic rays and space clouds are always doing weird things in Star Trek. Potentially the transporter is more prone to that from being itself a weird cosmic ray.
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Feb 29, 2020 23:41
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SlothfulCobra posted:They say it's not so it's not because that's how fiction works. It moves your atoms from point to point with scifi magic through an energy beam just like a car moves your atoms from point to point with an engine through somebody's backyard. Thats not how it works no
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Feb 29, 2020 23:49
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hakimashou is finishing a postdoc in fake magic for idiots who cant understand fiction. youd better defer to him on this before you embarrass yrself
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Mar 1, 2020 00:01
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there are two Rikers because he was accidentally cloned by the teleporter. every character in star trek is the ship of theseus
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Mar 1, 2020 00:46
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Squizzle posted:hakimashou is finishing a postdoc in fake magic for idiots who cant understand fiction. youd better defer to him on this before you embarrass yrself thats Dr. hakimashou please
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Mar 1, 2020 00:46
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hakimashou posted:yes it is No it isn't.
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Mar 1, 2020 07:18
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9VIswgcU4 What we got back, didn't live long....fortunately
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Mar 1, 2020 07:27
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Someone needs to go find that GIF of Barclay's POV from that one TNG episode with the worms that abduct people while teleporting and he remains fully conscious through the whole process so we can shut up the whole "But the Transporter kills you!" brigade. edit: Between the worms, FunkyAI's clip, and the problems that occur every third episode there are a ton more sensible reasons to disavow transporters for pure safety reasons. galagazombie fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 1, 2020 |
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Mar 1, 2020 16:20
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Yeah, it's literally shown on screen that there's no discontinuity of consciousness. You can argue that this blatant physical impossibility indicates that the Federation also has mind uploading that it's leaving on the table along with biological enhancements but the meme that transporters are simple kill-and-clone machines is harder to justify. The Federation's record on sapient rights is the easy way out given that everything down to holodeck programs can end up sapient (Data makes one just by asking the holodeck to give him a Moriarty that'd be challenging for him) if you're bad at phrasing instructions - they obviously have a ton of one-off sapients that'd be incredibly inconvenient to deal with if they couldn't just kill them without repercussion. This is appropriately hilarious for a nominally egalitarian and rights respecting 'utopia', but even in one of those you can't just expect the elite to give up their self insert fantasy machines just because their continued use involves atrocities. I wonder how many children asked a holodeck for a friend.
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Mar 1, 2020 19:46
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Are the holodeck creations independently sapient or are they characters being played by the holodeck?
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Mar 1, 2020 19:57
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Tulip posted:Are the holodeck creations independently sapient or are they characters being played by the holodeck? Data's Moriarty was independently sapient. They ended up unplugging his module from the holodeck and inserting it into an 'extended memory' module which was supposed to have enough hard drive space to run him indefinitely. I'd assume the former.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:07
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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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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The ‘transporter’ turns all your atoms into energy, which is what you might call a controlled detonation. This read requires deliberately discarding the text.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:17
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The ‘transporter’ turns all your atoms into energy, which is what you might call a controlled detonation. Tons isn't a unit of energy.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:39
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Gotta say I’m not to concerned about the transporter problem, but I understand that it’s very distressing to some people
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Mar 1, 2020 20:42
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They should have just made the transporters magic doors you step through, thus bypassing this whole discussion
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Mar 1, 2020 20:42
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True but also it’s not their fault this triggers some people’s anxiety and desire to articulate their concerns
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Mar 1, 2020 20:44
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2house2fly posted:They should have just made the transporters magic doors you step through, thus bypassing this whole discussion You'd think that would be true, but going by the last thread, it would not be true at all.
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Mar 1, 2020 20:45
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