In case you don’t know, they explicitly use the term socialist to describe the Federation economy in SNW. I was wondering if ppl liked or hated it? I like it personally since it’s not a dodge like “new world economy”
As I am not American I grew up with socialism being a positive connotation in day to day culture, so much so it’s wild to me that this needed to be veiled in Trek’s past. Star Trek should be as explicit as possible with this. “Hey, you want Utopia? This is how you earn it!”
Where are you if I may ask? And I think it may have been a dictate of Gene Roddenberry to not name which economic system won out, which is kind of a copout. But yeah it’s refreshing to see it called what it is finally
Gene Roddenberry was a Maoist. Pretty sure this was a studio thing, not a Gene thing.
Rom was in way before SNW:
Saw this episode for the first time two days ago and loved everything about it. Especially the inqusition of anti-union Ferengi, that is the FCA, captured the violence of capitalist oppression, both direct and threat thereof, beautifully.
I also liked the subtle points being made, like Odo being against the strike on basis of upholding law and order, even though this should contradict his moral compass in my opinion.
The kicker is that Rom eventually becomes Grand Nagus and starts transforming Ferengi society.
I think so, the federation is often seen and portrayed as close as you can get to a utopia (Since it’s practically impossible to achieve a “true” utopia). They still have issues, make mistakes and wrong calls, and even some (albeit greatly reduced) crime.
So having more positive association/references for the term socialist, a term that most general people can have a connection with, cant hurt.
I’ve noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a “dirty word,” though she qualifies the statement by first saying “I’m not a communist.”
The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene,
I love that scene. It’s so authentic: hearing a white American describe his successful living arrangement as literal communism but saying it’s not communism, and a black American correcting him. 100 years of Red Scare and minority struggle captured in a few lines of dialogue.
I don’t like the implication that full communism is only possible after a zombie apocalypse though lol
It was always socialist. That was blindingly obvious even from the days of TOS. Remember, Star wars universe everyone had just come out of the third world war, practically everything had been destroyed and there was virtually no infrastructure left, people were willing to take pretty much any kind of government going.
Then replicators were invented and once you’ve got that it’s pretty difficult to have anything other than a socialist government or a dictatorship.
You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.
Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.
It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.
Right but they get all that energy from atom to energy conversion. The starships get that from antimatter reactors but I’m pretty certain that planet-based installations probably just put a bunch of trees and gravel in as base material, convert that to energy and then convert that back into useful atoms.
If you can do matter conversion, then power generation is almost certainly trivially easy.
Yeah, I think in canon the curvy bit at the front of the ship (or the nacelles, sometimes) is just gathering dust to then burn into energy. It gets trickier with the transporter, because in theory the dust is going into a matter/antimatter thing, but if the transporter is fueling itself from the body it’s disintegrating… well, where’s the antimatter?
I think in their minds the transporter isn’t doing that, and is instead taking energy to both turn a person into a pattern and then build the pattern back into a person. Seems like a waste, but I guess the raw matter isn’t the real concern here.
My headcanon is that they have feedstocks and are just teleporting atoms around and gluing them together, maybe adding and electron here and there. If anything it’s the most consistent use of their transporters.
But we know that’s not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn’t be able to get “accidents” where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.
Also, that doesn’t work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don’t replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus… you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so… we’re going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.
