> Ever notice that there's basically no culture, music, or art?
No culture? What are you talking about? You've got Sir Patrick Stewart performing the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Shakespeare, et cetera. Culture!!! ;)
More seriously: proper cultural artifacts from the future are really hard to convincingly fabricate in the context of a cultural artifact of the present. Most of the time people just toy with the world's current trends, like the gritty downtown Los Angeles nightlife of Blade Runner or the self-parody of the 1980s in The Fifth Element. Star Trek's "culture" is a shallow reflection of 1990s Hollywood trends. Witness the fetish for tribal artifacts from distant alien peoples, cherry-picked for display by the ostensibly erudite, stripped from anything resembling the visceral reality of their original context, and pseudo-analyzed in order to support some trite lesson upholding only purely modern values.
But it's okay, since we're all understanding, empathetic, tolerant, and perfectly inoffensive people, and our introspective self-examination will never reveal otherwise. :P
It'd be easier to pull off today due to the fragmentation and fractalization of modern culture. By mining smallish, fringe, and new aesthetic movements you could portray a convincing future aesthetic to a mostly naive audience.
Toss this on the Enterprise and it'd be convincingly 24th century:
No culture? What are you talking about? You've got Sir Patrick Stewart performing the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Shakespeare, et cetera. Culture!!! ;)
More seriously: proper cultural artifacts from the future are really hard to convincingly fabricate in the context of a cultural artifact of the present. Most of the time people just toy with the world's current trends, like the gritty downtown Los Angeles nightlife of Blade Runner or the self-parody of the 1980s in The Fifth Element. Star Trek's "culture" is a shallow reflection of 1990s Hollywood trends. Witness the fetish for tribal artifacts from distant alien peoples, cherry-picked for display by the ostensibly erudite, stripped from anything resembling the visceral reality of their original context, and pseudo-analyzed in order to support some trite lesson upholding only purely modern values.
But it's okay, since we're all understanding, empathetic, tolerant, and perfectly inoffensive people, and our introspective self-examination will never reveal otherwise. :P