
Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times - CountHackulus
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/02/shitsiskosays.html
======
arethuza
The observation about nobody wasting time in Star Trek made me think of the
Culture - where 99.9999% of the human population are effectively doing nothing
other than "wasting time" - having a jolly good time along the way, of course.

Then I saw a comment that explains it:

"Star Trek and the Federation actually depict a Space Amish splinter group
from the Culture."

~~~
dasmoth
Plausible, but the Aubrey/Maturin LARP seems even more likely.

~~~
tsunamifury
This seems to apply -- as most of the episodes show earth citizens goofing off
all day or working hobby jobs.

------
petercooper
My favorite comment on there:

 _What, no mention of the Borg? They have constant awareness of each other and
consider it jarring when someone "drops off the grid"... they suffer real
problems with an environment that fosters "epistemic closure"... better analog
for social networking than the Great Link, IMHO._

I think we might be heading more to being like the Borg.. :-)

~~~
tomjen3
It has its advantages -- I could use nano upgrades for quite a few things.

But there is a key difference between the internet and the Borg technology.
Borg tech was based on voice (e.g the episode in which the first officer of
Voyager is temporarily connected to some subgroup of borgs) whereas the
internet is based on text (we have video, but even on Facebook, most of what
people share is text-based) and where the Borg is synchronous, we are mostly
asynchronous. In both cases this helps us to scale the networks better.

~~~
vl
Internet is based on the transmission of thought.

The reason text is used for thought encoding right now is that at the current
level of technology text offers very good price/performance for ease of
production, delivery and retaining and at same time provides reasonable
accuracy and information density.

At the era of brain implants when you will "look" at the website, you'll "see"
thoughts, ideas and memories, not text, pictures and video.

~~~
Helianthus
text, pictures, and video _constitute_ thoughts, ideas, and memories.

;)

------
lnanek
The article says no one wastes time and just kicks back and watches videos all
day and how unrealistic that is. I think there was a character that did that,
though. Lt. Barclay (sp?) or something like that got addicted to the holodeck
to the degree where it interfered with his work.

Additionally, it's a very different world. Didn't they get rid of money in the
federation, for example? Surely living in a no money environment where
everyone has their basic needs covered for free would change how people
behave.

Also having super smart computers. Maybe no one posts on Facebook because they
can just talk outloud to a computer or a badge and it will get deliver to the
recipient as text, newsfeed, or voice - whatever their preference. I already
know people who prefer I always call them instead of text. If they are there
we can have a conversation with some back and forth, if not, Google Voice
transcribes the message and it is the same as a text message anyway.

Lastly, being in the tech industry and the US I tend to run into some
blindingly smart immigrants. I think part of why they are that way is that
they already had the money or education or talent to be able to get to the US
when they wanted to. Many people are too poor to leave their home. So the
people we mainly see in Star Trek could be similar, they are the people who
had all the opportunities or talent to let them go out into the universe or
become super well known politicians or doctors on the planets we visit, etc..
Making assumptions about everyday live based on the people we usually see
might be like making assumptions about everyday life in the real world by only
looking at Wall Street.

~~~
leot
I am hoping that addiction is too big and important a problem to persist much
longer, at least within wealthy societies.

There will, perhaps even within the next 20 years, be treatments that quickly
and reliably improve executive function (indeed, there are already such
therapies, but they are slow, time consuming, and expensive).

------
barrkel
SF shouldn't see itself as being in the business of predicting anything; or if
it does so, then that's a niche subcategory of minority interest. I don't want
to read about SF predicting Facebook, and nor do I want to watch compelling
dramas played out on comment threads.

SF is always an artifact of the time in which it was written. It's not about
the future. It's about the present with a frame shift, and what that tells us
about ourselves here and now, from a different perspective. Prognostication -
especially about the future - is a fool's game. A compelling story should
relate to the reader / viewer here and now, not in 20 or 40 years on the
haphazard chance that a bunch of predictions play out.

~~~
pavel_lishin
SF isn't about predicting the future, it's about predicting our reactions to
possible futures.

A book that predicted Facebook would be interesting as a coincidence; a book
that predicted Facebook and accurately showed some of the advantages and
pitfalls that it presented would have been a worthwhile thing to read.

~~~
barrkel
All fiction (not just SF) is about predicting reactions of a set of characters
to set of circumstances. There are really only two kinds of drama: ordinary
things happen to extraordinary people, or extraordinary things happen to
ordinary people. (And for extra comic-book style bombast, I guess you could
include extraordinary things and people.)

The way Philip K Dick put it, in SF the ideas (or circumstances) are the main
character(s), rather than the people.

------
mhurron
People are wasting time in Star Trek all the time, more so in the Next
Generation spinoffs than in the Original Series. DS9 probably showed the most
time wasting of them all.

Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. Those holodeck/holosuite episodes?
They weren't there for training. Picard is always reading or trying to read a
book, Sisco does baseball and Janeway paints and whatnot with Da Vinci.

Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko
tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating
it.

Keeping the show interesting is basically the most important thing for the
writers, so its probably best not too look too deeply at what is portrayed as
if it is some realistic situation.

~~~
jlarocco
The first season of TOS had an episode, "Shore Leave," where the Enterprise
makes a stop over at a planet for the sole purpose of wasting time and
relaxing.

I think you're right, though. It's not so much that there's no time wasting,
but the show was about the adventures of the Enterprise and its crew. For all
we know the crew in TOS spent 99% of the time screwing around, and the show
was about the 1% of the time they spent working.

~~~
philwelch
The only reason "Shore Leave" was even an episode is because something went
very awry on the shore leave planet and action and adventure ensued!

Which goes to show--really, the reason they don't show anyone goofing off on
Star Trek is because goofing off isn't very entertaining to watch and because
it's an action-adventure show about action and adventure, and not a show about
people's everyday lives. At least by DS9 they realized it would be
entertaining to show the crew trying to get into each other's pants.

------
pavel_lishin
> Battle re-enactments are eminently useful for military officers

But what good are they for a doctor and an engineer? To paraphrase Ender's
Game, how do you apply the lessons learned at The Alamo, or on the fields of
ancient Ireland to three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the
wormhole at this point) in space?

Another thing that struck me is that perhaps nobody wastes time because of the
culture the Federation has become. They don't have money, either, and don't
seem to particularly miss it. Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has
finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level.

Or perhaps when anything is accessible via subspace radio, holodecks and
replicators, the only thing that truly brings peace and a sense of
accomplishment is actually accomplishing something instead of clicking on
cows.

~~~
jerf
"three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this
point) in space?"

... well... if you take Star Trek seriously, for some mysterious reason, space
battle in their universe isn't actually 3 dimensional. At best it's 2.5,
taking place on a two-dimensional plane with a few hundred meters of play in
the third. Also, _everything_ takes place at what would, even with modern
military hardware, be considered point-blank range. Not only is Star Trek
combat modeled on naval warfare, it's modeled on 17th century naval warfare.

To your next paragraph, I would point out that we are following the elite of
the elite. Sisko is the officer, out of all the presumably billions-if-not-
trillions of people in the Federation, who is considered most suitable to be
in charge of an incredibly strategic station. Odds are he's not a typical
sample of humanity, nor any other officers there. I suspect our best officers
today similarly do not "waste" much time either.

Otherwise... I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out
how it could actually be working. I particularly enjoy playing this game with
Futurama, something you're not "supposed" to do that with. But having spent
some time on Star Trek, I find it's really, really hard to square the stated
philosophy of the Federation with what seems to be the reality of the
Federation. It just doesn't make sense. Even such old chestnuts like "Why did
the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because
it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time
in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least,
conventional hostile military action). And I just find that in the end,
there's no practical way to actually put together the pieces into anything
like a coherent whole.

Almost as if Star Trek was written over the course of decades by dozens upon
dozens of writers mostly focused on how the current episode will turn out.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Warfare deserves its own comment.

You can fucking reproduce historical figures with incredible fidelity, but you
can't have a swarm of tiny battleships piloted by equivalent AI? Instead, you
send your best people in a small warship right into the enemy lines, where
they can be picked off at leisure?

Why aren't you people just firing a solid wall of torpedoes at the enemy? Why
aren't you flinging black holes around like birdshot? Considering how many
ships are lost per battle, why aren't you just launching cloaked warp cores at
the enemy and decloaking & detonating when they're in their midst?

Did they completely forget about the self-replicating mines? Ignoring where
they get the energy, why not fire a wall of _those_ at the enemy? Right before
the first wave hits, it should replicate another wall right behind them, and
so on and so forth.

~~~
jerf
Yes, sort of expanding on cstross' point, real-world military technology is
also rapidly advancing well past what Star Trek has ever considered. The 1960s
heritage shines through here too. In the original series, hooking up a Big
Honking Computer that gives the Enterprise some sort of drone-like control
possibility was a Big Deal, the focus of an entire episode. And they had to
actually bring in new hardware, it wasn't just a software patch.

I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight between
our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very well
win. The Enterprise does have the ability to slag its choice of ground target,
and we'd have a hard time retaliating as long as it stayed in orbit, but that
is pretty much all they could do. It seems it would be trivial to block their
transporter, shuttles may be shielded but they seem to be slow and one imagine
we could wear them down even with conventional weaponry, and Federation ground
troops are laughably incompetent by real military doctrine standards, armed
with a single line-of-vision ray weapon that immediately gives away their
position every time they use it, somehow no air support, and their use of this
weapon is also incompetent. Any modern military would chew them up on the
ground, to say nothing of the elite ones.

Also it seems like any ol' script kiddie from real modern Earth would be able
to penetrate their computer security by accident. The Federation seems to be
incapable of writing a login screen without a cross-site scripting arbitrary
code execution attack built right in and easily accessible in seconds from the
keyboard.

~~~
ctdonath
_I've seen a moderately serious treatment that suggests that in a fight
between our modern military and the Enterprise, the modern military might very
well win._

Seems the Reddit-originated movie-bound story _Rome Sweet Rome_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome> has a similar issue with the
Roman military vs well-equipped (but no resupply) Marines gone back to that
age. Modernity works up to a point, but eventually it takes "boots on the
ground" with massive resupply chains to win.

~~~
gaius
Also see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_%28film%29>

------
InclinedPlane
Star Trek is an interesting example of Science Fiction, as it's actually only
quasi science fictional, but in a very fascinating way.

The foundation of speculative fiction is exploring the implications of certain
ideas that represent deviations from the way the world works today. (Aside:
also, the difference between fantasy and scifi is that the former is
teleological while the latter is mechanistic, but that doesn't bear on this
discussion.) However, Star Trek is rarely about exploring the implications of
the _setting_ of Star Trek. This is because that's not what Star Trek is
about. Instead, Star Trek is about creating a setting with certain character
archetypes that we grow to care about, a familiar setting, and a world where
almost anything can happen. This allows Star Trek to dedicate each episode to
vignettes where different individual premises _are_ explored in true scifi
fashion.

In short, Star Trek is not a scifi series per se it's more of a scifi
anthology. The constant aspects of Star Trek (the world, the crew, the ship,
and the associated technology) are just stage setting that enable and make
more meaningful individual stories from the anthology.

------
warfangle
I /just/ finished re-watching "Past Tense" last night - a two-episode arc
where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir get stuck in 2024 San Francisco.

Everyone poor is isolated into ghettos - those without ID, those with no job,
those with mental illness. They aren't allowed to leave, and thugs rob people
of their ration cards all the time.

It's hard (but possible) to see this kind of future in the US. What struck me
about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it
been suspended? why? I mean, this is only set 29 years after it aired.

All communication is semi-internet, but done over channels - like cable tv.
The user interface for it looks like the graphics used in "Who Wants to be a
Millionaire?". The internet wasn't quite commercialized, yet - that would come
the year after air. But we already had BBS' and other connectivity. Surely the
writers worked on some sort of network at their office.

We also already had user interfaces more interactive than what they showed -
giant desk-size consoles, a 5" monochrome screen and a series of menu options.
Is this what people thought of computers, even in 1994?

The entire premise seemed to be 24th-century Federation, but regressed ~200
years -- instead of present-day, progressed 30 years.

~~~
kirbysayshi
Keep this in mind too: Star Trek, while originally attempting to portray
humanity in the future, inevitably created canon. Thus, there is a world war 3
in the star trek universe that occurs around 1999 (I can't remember the exact
time frame). So It makes sense that 20 years after the world "ended", people
would be pretty scared and do anything to try to right civilization.

In the end, as the original post implies, Star Trek is no longer a vision of
the future, but rather a sandbox to put humanity into and see how they react.

~~~
mhurron
The Eugenics Wars ran from 1996-1999. World War III was sometime in the
mid-2000's with First Contact with Vulcans occurring in 2063.

Personally I don't remember Khan being launched into space, but it is kinda
funny when you look back and think that they sort of thought that was going to
be possible in the late '60s.

------
daedalus_j
I always assumed this was because in the Star Trek universe people were freed
from a lot of the drudgery by the systems, and used the time to go do the
interesting things that they wanted to do.

I suppose it's because I see reddit and facebook as a weird form of escapism
from reality. I know that when I don't have any pressing issues I'm much more
likely to sit down and read. reddit/hn is for when I need a quick "don't think
about work" break, never for when I have the whole weekend stretching out in
front of me.

The utopian dream of Star Trek is a never-ending weekend where _you_ get to
decide what's important without being overly concerned that you'll starve to
death on Monday.

~~~
jff
Star Trek, especially TOS, are _all about_ drudgery. As I recall, they had to
_manually_ place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers
involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons
officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a
button. Even in the more recent episodes, you constantly had people hauling
around those little pads in order to give information to somebody, rather than
transmitting it via the (presumably) incredibly advanced computer which is
linked to and controlling the entire ship.

~~~
nooneelse
If I email you my report, you can ignore it. If I hand you a pad locked on the
report till you acknowledge that you read it, your attention has been put to
the task at hand. If I were putting together the social organization scheme
for running a space ship, I might take advantage of that. In TOS, pads were
first used by the captains for reviewing and acknowledging that they had seen
various reports.

~~~
jff
I think that was the entire purpose of Yeoman Rand, well, that and the short
skirts (this is TOS, after all).

------
gee_totes
I agree with the author that the social subtext on DS9 (and Star Trek in
general) was very old fashioned (i.e. no gay crewmen). But to it's credit, DS9
had a very modern political subtext.

DS9 was a show set in space dealing with an occupied peoples that suffered
decades of repression and were trying to regain their sovereignty. The show
was filmed as the first Intifada and Oslo peace process happened in the real
world, and I feel the a major part of the series arc is about
Israel/Palestine. I have not seen a show on TV since that attempts to have a
smart political discussion about this issue.

~~~
tontomurphy
I'd rather think that outside of episodes devoted to gay issues that many
characters could be interpreted as gay or straight. Essentially that it was a
non issue in the future.

I partly agree with your second point. I think the Cardassians are clearly the
Nazis and the Bajorans as the oppressed Jews.

------
noblethrasher
At some point, there will be a generation whose entire life history, from
cradle to grave, will be documented online.

Soon thereafter, the archives containing all of that data will be made public.

At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically
different attitudes towards online sharing. By the 23rd century personal logs
would tend to stay more personal, parents would think more carefully about
putting their child's life-story into the public domain, and willfully living
in social silos may come to be seen as pathetically parochial.

~~~
philwelch
> At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically
> different attitudes towards online sharing.

That's a fairly tame prediction. Most of the benefit we get from keeping
secrets is either temporary (I don't want my boss to know I'm looking for
another job; I don't want my wife to know I'm having an affair) or only
benefits us if everyone else keeps the same secrets so it becomes a taboo (I'm
gay; I don't believe in God; I have embarrassing sexual fetishes; I have
fringe political beliefs). The first kind we don't care about keeping after
death unless we're especially vain and famous enough people would care, and
the second kind is only work keeping secret if everyone else keeps it secret.

I can't imagine a huge backlash against sharing and social networking once it
becomes culturally engrained; instead, insistence on privacy will be seen as
suspicious and eccentric.

~~~
noblethrasher
I only have anecdotal evidence but my observation has been that the set of
things people decide to share is motivated by the facade they want to create.
Once all that stuff gets analyzed in the aggregate, future historians will be
able to paint a more complete picture of people's lives. My prediction depends
on how ugly that picture turns out to be.

~~~
philwelch
Ugly is culturally relative. Fifty years ago, people would be horrified to
find out how many people were gay. Today, we're horrified to find out that gay
people felt the need to stay in the closet.

~~~
noblethrasher
Agreed, 'ugly' is culturally relative. I'm interested in what happens when
cultural norms change a lot in the span of 20 years yet everyone's _real_
history is public domain.

~~~
philwelch
That real history will itself affect the cultural norms.

~~~
noblethrasher
Maybe. But by "real history" I'm referring to the stuff that historians
produce, not popular history/myth.

------
philwelch
I think the main point to remember is that Star Trek, even DS9, mostly
portrays the lives of idealized people in, effectively, the military. When I
think of the most talented and driven people I know (and surely it takes
driven and talented people to make it in Starfleet), I think of people who
work long hours, spend much of their spare time cultivating their talents, and
generally don't waste much time. One such person whom I know actually watches
Shakespeare productions for entertainment. Some particular examples strike
true--O'Brien's always tinkering with things when he isn't drinking and
carousing with Bashir, Bashir has an endless supply of research projects to
work on when he isn't drinking and carousing with O'Brien, Odo is an
introverted workaholic.

The prevalence of things like Shakespeare and classical music is mostly a
writing conceit--it always comes off as contrived and awkward when Star Trek
writers either invent futuristic forms of art or awkwardly shoehorn in the
20th century.

I would posit that the world of Star Trek eliminates the alienation of
everyday life on Earth that leads one to social networking in the first place.
Furthermore, and this is admittedly handwavy, but any analog to the internet
would either only cover the station itself (in which case why bother, because
the whole station hangs out at the bar anyway) or require subspace radio to
communicate with thousands of planets at once, which is very plausibly
impractical if not outright prevented by security requirements.

More nitpicks:

> 90s! YOU WERE THE BEST! With your adorable WE ARE SO DARK plots that seem
> like Strawberry Shortcake Goes to Space by today's standards.

Well, compared to BSG I guess there's no on-camera rape scenes, but all the
rest, torture and genocide included, is there. It isn't portrayed with the
same realism, granted.

> In fact, the war correspondence he so longs to write--and he believes he is
> the only one who can write it--would be one of many, many voices escaping
> from occupied DS9 in the post Arab Spring networked news hivemind.

Well they evacuated nearly all the civilians. Jake is quite possibly the only
civilian left who doesn't have anything better to do than to be a war
correspondent. Quark has his bar, Rom has his undercover mission, and the
Bajoran crew are still military officers who have to run the station and
pretend to collaborate with the Dominion.

To the point that "nobody blogs", the actual crew all keep "personal logs",
and while they're classified and not shared to the world (more on that later),
it's not that far off.

> Can you imagine the subreddit for the station? How many atheists would tear
> down Sisko the messiah, how every decision would be questioned, mocked,
> dissected where the actors and the acted upon could see it?

Who, exactly? The crew? No, that would be insubordination. The crew's
families? Not technically insubordination but still awkward. The business
owners on the Promenade? Right, Quark and the owner of the Klingon restaurant
are going to openly criticize the one thing that makes DS9 a tourist
destination for Bajoran pilgrims.

> Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible
> to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to
> deliberately take action to achieve in my world. Even when we are alone,
> most of us check a number of communication vectors and leave them live--
> Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds. We
> are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels. To be alone as profoundly
> (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a
> decision to shut down all of those streams.

These people are living in _space_. Only the highest ranking officers have
their own quarters, and the unmarried ones seem to spend half their leisure
time dating or hanging out in the bar. Even the station commander's son has to
have a roommate when he moves out of his dad's quarters. There's even a scene
where Worf and Odo, the introverted loners of the cast, discuss their
respective strategies for getting away from it all to finally spend some time
alone.

EDIT: Come to think of it, the station does have a network. Quark is
constantly hacking into it, probably with Rom's help. In one amusing scene, he
does it to spam everybody with poorly produced advertisements for his bar:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-9tw2mx_gE>

~~~
alex_c
>I would posit that the world of Star Trek eliminates the alienation of
everyday life on Earth that leads one to social networking in the first place.
Furthermore, and this is admittedly handwavy, but any analog to the internet
would either only cover the station itself (in which case why bother, because
the whole station hangs out at the bar anyway) or require subspace radio to
communicate with thousands of planets at once, which is very plausibly
impractical if not outright prevented by security requirements.

This goes directly against how Facebook got started on college campuses.
Campuses are already hypersocial places, are self-contained to some extent,
and you constantly run into everyone you know - but this environment proved to
be the most fertile ground for social networking.

~~~
otakucode
People always seem to ignore one of the big factors of social networking -
it's better. It's not just another way to get the same thing done, it is
fundamentally BETTER. When you meet someone in person, and speak with them,
you are severely restricted. You can't talk to 5 other people at once. You
can't talk to anyone who is not geographically close to you. You can't stop
and think about your reply. You can't check the validity of something you're
thinking before you say it. You can't bring other people into the conversation
unless they are geographically close by.

There are many, many, many very real limitations to communication that face-
to-face communication introduces. Even most of the 'advantages' that (usually
older or hipster) people claim are actually disadvantages. 'You can tell more
what someone is feeling'. Bullshit. We know this. When you talk to someone,
you think you know what they are thinking. And you are wrong. Even the ability
of decades-experienced police officers who SWEAR they can read people only
perform as well as random chance. 50% of the time, when you think you know
what someone is feeling or thinking, you are wrong. 50% of the time you are
right, of course, but that's not much to recommend it. You are far more likely
to be mislead (not necessarily intentionally!) in person. The brain has real
biological limitations. Our technology is designed to help us work around
these limitations. There is no grace or honor in foregoing the 'assistance' of
technology any more than it is cowardice to take a vaccine.

If you want to communicate effectively with someone - do it electronically.
There's a learning curve, sure, and there are certainly social considerations
(like you don't want to propose marriage over SMS) but in the vast majority of
situations, doing it electronically will be faster, more effective, and enable
every participant to get more out of the time spent communicating.

~~~
sanderjd
You're using a subjective definition of "better" and waving off anyone with a
different definition as being either old or a hipster. Body language, tone of
voice, word emphasis, etc. is not about being able to predict what someone is
thinking or feeling, but about communicating meta-text, for which the
electronic stand-ins (lol, emoticons, caps, italics, etc.) are severely
lacking and really quite lame. Talking to someone in person even just one
time, so that you can hear their voice when you read their text adds a lot of
richness to electronic communication. If electronic communication really is
better in every way, as your first two paragraphs claim (pretty offensively -
"Bullshit", "no grace", "cowardice", "vaccine"), then why _wouldn't_ you want
to propose marriage over SMS? In-person communication is _good_. Electronic
communication is _also good_ , but in different ways, and for different
things. All this "BETTER" stuff is nonsense - if you have a short missive to
fire off, use a text, if you haven't talked to a friend or loved one for
awhile, pick up a phone or get on a plane!

Or maybe I'm just a hipster (I don't _think_ I'm old yet...)

------
narag
War is what I found more anachronistic in most sci-fi. And I believe it works
as a justification: showing advanced civilizations at war makes us forget the
shame that we're still primitive enough to kill one another in highly
organized ways. It's always been like that, it always will. Really?

~~~
philwelch
Well _Earth_ has been at peace for centuries, it's just those damn aliens that
start it, who are either warrior races or fascist imperialists or Borg.

------
DannoHung
Presumably the new Star Trek universe introduced with the Abrams film can
allow for some of this cruft to be broken off.

I still think it's kinda charming that people read the classics in the future
though. I mean, I don't always read high falutin' books, but I try to read
something from the English cannon every once in a while.

Also, you have to consider that since they have replicators, why not read on a
real book? You can just toss it in the replicator whenever you want and get a
fresh copy when you sit down to read.

~~~
pjscott
I actually prefer the physical form of an ebook reader, most of the time. It's
lightweight and always lies flat, even when held at a weird angle that I would
never even attempt with a dead-tree book.

------
arctangent
You could argue that a lot of sci-fi isn't really meant to be a description of
events in the future: instead it's often a thinly-disguised morality play set
in the then-present.

------
xiaoma
> _All of the episodes involving Jake's incipient writer-hood (besides being
> pretty weaksauce in general)..._

The most critically acclaimed episode of the entire 7 seasons and my personal
favorite was about Jake becoming a writer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_%28Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine%29)

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brudgers
I read "Star Trek" and thought of the show with female aliens wearing push-up
bras and a computer with large blinking lights.

Man, I'm feeling old.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Turns out, it hasn't changed all that much.

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prawn
Has any (mainstream) sci-fi besides Wall-E shown a future where laziness and
preoccupation with the mundane is the norm?

~~~
pjscott
How mainstream are you looking for? The Culture is pretty lazy, for the most
part.

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mathattack
All Science Fiction writers miss big trends. Asimov missed computers. Whoops!
This makes it all the more impressive when they do hit it. And the greatest
science fiction renders technology irrelevant. When Star Trek broke racial
stereotypes and attacked bigotry - that was a cultural message.

~~~
groby_b
Uh, what? Asimov writes a _lot_ about U.S. Robots and positronic brains
amongst other things. He's exploring the idea of increasingly powerful
computers in 'The Last Question'.

And those are just off the top of my head. I really don't see how you can
claim Asimov missed computers///

~~~
snowwrestler
The robots in Asimov's stories don't much resemble computers as we know them--
they're more like characters. His computers tend to be massive centralized
things, as computers were in his day. Compare to the pocket computers in The
Mote in God's Eye, which are eerily similar to today's smartphones. Niven
apparently thought the idea was one of the most fantastical aspects of the
book.

~~~
groby_b
Unless I'm mistaken, at the very least "The End of Eternity" features pocket
computers, too.

And to say robot brains don't count because their AI is so advanced that they
are more like characters is kind of disingenuous :)

------
otakucode
Star Trek was always a very fascist dictatorship-esque vision of the future.
What you wear is dictated by a central authority. "Primitive" cultures are
deemed too inferior to be permitted to decide their own future, so it is
decided for them by the Federation. Most of the worst anti-human flaws of
current time are not simply maintained, they are amplified and made so
oppressively constant that they disappear unless you're looking for them. And,
as is actually said directly several times, humanity has 'improved' to the
point where they are perfectly happy to live with extreme restrictions on even
the most mundane freedoms, so long as they are handed down by a militaristic
hierarchical power structure.

There is a degree of limitation imposed on anyone trying to create popular
entertainment. You can't be too imaginative. There are many aspects of human
society that modern people believe are 'natural' and endemic to human nature,
even though even cursory glances at history show those exact things to not
only be 'not natural', but exceedingly bizarre. If you line up the social
mores and values and the like of every culture that we know has ever existed,
you can spot things which are common to all cultures, and you can spot things
that are strange aberrations that emerged and eventually went away. And, you
can see several aspects of our culture that are so diametrically opposed to
the common components of every culture ever that it's very foolish to imagine
that our wholly unique take on the matter will endure for long.

Science Fiction is fascinating, but often disappointing when presented for a
popular audience. For a popular audience, you can't question their basic
assumptions. You would not get too far presenting a decentralized society
which understands that centralized control of power is a guarantee of abuse
and tragedy. You can't show a society where sex is used as a basic social
interaction. And a society where eating is treated as stigmatized and for-
marriage-only as many see sex today would simply be confusing (even though
there are tribes which adopted exactly this practice, believing eating around
others to be inherently extremely shameful, something only to be shared with
someone you are married to).

And, if the creators look at history and they see the aesthetic of military
organizations doing a lot, it makes sense that they would presume that in the
future all of the 'important' stuff would be handed over to militaristic
agencies. That smacks of a complete lack of understanding of WHY military
agencies are structured in the way they are. The military does not adhere to
rigorous discipline because that is an effective way to accomplish general
human endeavors. They do it because committing violence against other human
beings is extremely difficult to get human beings to do. And when they do it,
they are torn apart with post-traumatic stress disorders, depression, anxiety,
and all sorts of negative effects. In order to be able to overcome the
conscious brains prohibition on violence, soldiers must be trained so that
their muscle memory can kill before their conscious mind can prevent them from
doing it. And sticking to a simple routine with no allowance for individual
diversity and the like makes it easiest to continue functioning in traumatic
situations. These techniques don't work in any other human endeavor at all.
They are exclusively useful for the purpose of getting human beings to kill
other human beings. That is certainly an arguably useful thing (another topic
entirely), but the techniques do not extend to non-soldiers.

Humans function very poorly in situations where their freedom is significantly
hindered. This is why there has never been a successful dictatorship or
fascist regime that lasted. People naturally, even subconsciously, resist
being controlled. And people put in control of others suffer just as many
negative psychological effects as those they dominate. The reasoning, or
sensibility, of the rules do not seem to matter. Whether you are preventing
someone from drinking a bottle of poison, or forbidding them from considering
an alternative political ideology, the result is the same. On the societal
scale, restriction leads to self destructive behavior, gang behavior, and
eventually revolution. We see this in prisons, we see it in restrictive
nations, etc. The same pattern repeats over and over again, and mostly people
take away 'oh well, that wouldn't happen if the people involved were better
people' or 'that wouldn't happen if the rules were better'. It would. It
always would. No system, no matter how complex, can possibly account for human
behavior.

Anyhow, older scifi is at least slightly better than modern. Watch a modern
scifi show. See how many episodes follow this pattern: 'Smart' character has
idea. 'Not smart' but intuitive character warns that the idea might be
dangerous. 'Smart' character ignores the warning, and leads everyone into
lethal danger. A character, usually military, follows his gut and saves the
day.

You'll find it difficult to find any modern scifi that does not fit this
formula. The hero is always the person who is "reasonable" by ignoring reason,
and who refuses to carefully consider the situation, just going with their
gut. And, of course, pretty much every single scifi show presents the military
as the savior of all humanity. I especially loved watching the first episode
of that new terrible show 'Terra Nova'. They go back in time to 'start over'
and right all the wrong choices humanity made. This time they're not going to
screw it up. Oh, and how is this announced? By an unelected military god-king
who controls every facet of the lives of every person there. Right, off to a
roaring start, throwing away all that 'democracy' hoo-ha and giving all
control to people whose training was designed solely to teach them to kill
most effectively when needed.

~~~
tkahn6
> "Primitive" cultures are deemed too inferior to be permitted to decide their
> own future, so it is decided for them by the Federation

That seems like the exact opposite of the prime directive.

~~~
william42
Yeah, the Prime Directive seems to be more "we don't want to completely fuck
up a less developed culture by accident" than anything else.

------
bluekeybox
When it comes to retro-futurism, I'm having a hard time finding a more
uncannily accurate past prediction than this one by Andy Warhol: " _In the
future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes._ "

