How the fuck can Elon Musk claim to be a Trekkie? When he is against everything Star Trek stands for?!
The psychological dissonance of that man is insane!He also claims to love the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book series where technology corporations are absolutely loathed and every AI is either a broken or an asshole or both.
And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.
Meanwhile his old friend from PayPal seems to have a thing for the villains from The Lord of the Rings universe.
Ah yes, that too.
I wonder if he ever read the 5th book, Mostly Harmless. In that book there’s an aside which describes how the people of the planet Golgafrincham tricked all the useless members of their society (management consultants, etc) into thinking the planet was doomed and getting on a ship to escape the planet which they programmed to fly to another salary system and crash into one of the planets there. That part of the book always stuck with me, and more and more I wish there was a way we could do the same to Musk and his billionaire cronies.
Of course I don’t think Musk has actually read any of the HHGTTG novels, especially not the 5th one so maybe there’s still a chance?
Those people ended up dying because the people they got rid of had a use after all, though.
I dunno. Hang out around Trekkies and you can meet some real knuckleheads. People who seem to have missed the whole point.
I think he didn’t really get that “Picard gets a neurological link to the Borg” == “not good”…
Imagine he’s developing the Neurolink because he thought it was good.
To be fair there would be some interesting consequences to a hive mind, it’s almost like having perfect empathy. You would have no desire to harm anyone else, because you’d be literally harming yourself.
I was hoping the plot in Picard was going to kinda go this route, and just like the Borg were in part a critique of Soviet communism, it could have presented a more anarchism inspired idealistic version of communism framing a queen-less Borg collective as a perfect consensus-building cooperative community.
But if they were queen-less, how would they come to any decision?
how do you come to a decision reconciling your many internal perspectives and various senses? it’s just a higher scale consciousness after all!
I think that version of a hive mind is way more powerful and interesting than the Queen/drone metaphor. But I guess Trek needed to be able to defeat them somehow.
It’s a common theme. There are a lot of conservatives who are still somehow fans of Star Trek because they the lack media literacy needed to figure out that they’re values are not shared by the good guys on the show.
Remember how conservatives think that Rage Against The Machine is on their side. There’s no delusion too great after that.
It’s not about values, it’s about image and symbolism. And the fact that a white dude got to go all over the universe telling aliens they’re wrong and they need to accept the American… uhhm Federation way!
Yep. The whole utopian future of Star Trek is mostly off-screen. They talk about how they don’t need money anymore and have abolished hunger, etc. but we never see that in the actual episodes. What we do see is people who are absolutely certain that their way of life is superior to everyone else’s, that the status quo must not be questioned and that the military represents the pinnacle of society.
I have to disagree a little bit on some of that.
What we do see is people who are absolutely certain that their way of life is superior to everyone else’s,
I’d say we see a hell of a lot more than that. We see within the named characters their drive to become better versions of themselves. We see people doing cheesy acts of self sacrifice for the good of others without an expectation of payment, gifts, etc. We see terraforming doing their job for the sake of it. There is a multitude of scenes that take place on earth and various colonies, all in which people are well fed, and live in walkable communities in which quality of life is the primary purpose of production.
I’ve only read two of the Star Trek books at this point (The first two in the Picard series), and we see humanitarian aid missions. We see how production facilities on Mars/Earth operate.
that the status quo must not be questioned
Could you give an example?
and that the military represents the pinnacle of society.
Star Fleet is definitely a military organization, but it is not solely a military organization by a long shot. It seems few people join for the military aspect of it, it always seems to be a decision based on family tradition, or exploration. And when they’re jerking themselves off over the values of Star Fleet, it’s never about the military aspect.
Also they seem to have gotten rid of the enlisted portion of the ranks. Everyone in Starfleet is an officer.
But all of this is either compatible with a conservative reading, or requires more analysis than most conservatives are putting in. I mean I doubt Musk read the Picard books.
But then you go on to mention stuff like family tradition, which is literally a key value for conservatives, especially when it involves joining the military.
Or people being well fed, or valuing self-improvement? Think about all the rightwing grifters who go on about self improvement all the time, or how they claim that communism killed 15 vigintillion people from starvation and only CAPITALISM can feed the world. Conservatives don’t want people to be starving, starving citizens are the sign of a poor society. It’s okay that the Federation doesn’t use money because it is post-scarcity thanks to replicators, a technological solution to the issue of feeding the poor. This is perfectly compatible with the techbro mindset that tech is the solution to all our problems, and isn’t challenging to those who believe that socialism is impossible without advanced post-scarcity technology.
What I’m trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology, in much the same way that a liberal will read it as a triumph of liberalism or a leftist can interpret it as socialist. It isn’t challenging to those ideologies, because it’s vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.
What I’m trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology
I agree that’s the case. What I disagree on is the vagueness of the values of Star Fleet/The Federation, and how much of it we see in effect. There is plenty both on screen and off screen to see.
vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.
Sure, it doesn’t map one to one. But it also makes it very clear that conservatives values are wholely incompatible with Federation philosophy. It’s a psuedo democratic socialist state.
I agree that democratic socialism is probably the closest IRL system, I just think it’s fairly vague about it and any assertions are easily glossed over or disregarded as fiction, or attributed to the advanced tech.
It comes back to the disconnection of tech, the vagueness, the allegory. You don’t see queer people, you just see allegories for queer people that are either safer to accept or just aren’t acknowledged as allegories. You don’t see Federation imperialism being questioned that much, they’re pretty much always right. The only meaningful people who question it are the Maquis, and Sisko loses himself in his vengeance and pursuit of them (but is never humbled for it—from the audience’s perspective, he’s right). And then there’s S31, which is fascist to begin with.
And I’m just talking about canon here. Not the books or anything like that.
Technically money was abolished prior to the invention of the replicator, but we never hear any details about that. The most detail we get is a one off line in Voyager about a “New World Economy”.
They don’t flesh out what the economy actually looks like, or how we got here without replicators. The “without replicators” is an important bit, which might seem like a random thing for me to be focusing on but I’ve talked to conservative fans who will often cite replicators as something that would be required for the Federation’s socialism. Even liberal fans often think that. The message of the show is about post-scarcity, not workers owning the means of production. It’s not socialism in the ways that it exists on earth, and so conservatives don’t hate it.
The same way so many idiot fans seem to think star trek is “too woke” now lol
What I think is that because they are incapable of empathetic thought, the message gets lost.
TNG’s Time’s Arrow, DS9’s Past Tense, VOY’s Life Line are all just made up stories to them. No human condition there.
I think this is indeed it, unfortunately.
To such sociopaths incapable of empathetic thought, Star Trek is awesome because future and technology and winning battles. So if you’re a tech bro and you’re winning (money) and pushing technology forward regardless of the costs, and everybody knows who you are because of it, well then you must be an awesome human that’s winning at life! Because obviously good life = victorious life.
I think the closest thing Elon is to Star Trek would be a Romulan/Ferengi hybrid wannabe. Dreaming of having a star ship to manipulate, conquer and extort the galaxy.
He’s TOS Star Trek. Be a cowboy, cheat and be venerated for it, white man is in charge.
TOS had the same basic values, even if they weren’t quite as refined.
The show from the 60s with a black female bridge officer who was part of television’s first interracial kiss? The one with the utopian society where race and religion were unimportant, people worked as they were able to benefit society without capital, and episodes centered on things like the silliness of prejudice and hoarding wealth?
The one where the greatest villain was a 20th century human who had tried to establish a stratified society based on genetic superiority?
That show?
I agree with your point, but FYI that was far from television’s first interracial kiss. The BBC in the UK has them beat by 14 years on that one (British man and Maori kissing).
If you specifically mean black/white kiss, then the BBC in the UK again would take it, this time 13 years earlier, when a black man repeatedly kissed a white woman in a screening of Shakespeare’s Othello.
That is not TOS. That is a person like Elon’s idea of TOS. I grew up on TOS before any other Star Trek existed. It helped shape my values- made me cherish ideas like inclusion and diversity and equality. It also helped teach me to talk things out rather than just come in guns blazing.
Yes, there was a cowboy element to TOS considering Gene sold it to executives as “Wagon Train to the stars,” but it doesn’t have the typical morality of a Western. At all.
In fact, if you want to talk specifically about indigenous Americans, the episode The Paradise Syndrome had a far more positive view of them than pretty much anything else on TV at the time.
People (Elon) see what they want to see.
Cowboy in this sense is not a good thing. It’s the do whatever the fuck I want to thing.
cowboy /kou′boi″/
A reckless person, such as a driver, pilot, or manager, who ignores potential risks.
Kirk was absolutely not about “I’ll do whatever I want to.” If anything, he was less like that than Picard. He was much more by-the-book even though he had a reputation as a maverick. But he was overall pretty strict about adhering to Starfleet regulations.
Obligatory comparison:
of course THEN, we get to the next layer, which is that Spock is the dude who told the Vulcan Science Academy to fuck itself, while Riker plays the trombone.
Hahaha, the Federation is indeed a confusing place.
Janeway on it https://youtu.be/MexLAmWe9NQ
