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October 23, 2006
Pardon me while I get my geek on
Is the Federation of Planets in Star Trek a fascist organization? Captain Ed wonders what's been going on for the last forty years outside the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
I always had some discomfort with the future that S[tar] T[rek] presented, especially on The Next Generation. It didn't take long to discover that hardly anything existed outside of Star Fleet or academia as far as Earth was concerned, and the various alien societies always contrasted against the sterile functionocracy of humanity in the 24th century. No one seemed to do anything but research or enlist in the military, which was made to appear as the pinnacle of all human endeavor -- even as the writers pressed their anti-war messages to the fore.
This week, I stumbled onto an essay by Dr. Kelley Ross of Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys that cuts to the heart of the dissonance I felt then and now about Star Trek -- and the cluelessness of Utopianism in general. In the essay "The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek", [Ross] points out the inherent contradictions in the Star Trek philosophy.
The good doctor finds some interesting parallels between the writings of 19th-century socialists and the folks trying to visualize a post-economic universe. Captain Ed later posted a response from another blogger.
The problem with Trek isn't that it's utopian; it's not -- else there wouldn't be any conflict among humans, though there is. It's that the creators of the newer series ... were groping for a depiction of a post-economic society ... and they didn't have the cinematic chops to do it right.
It all stems from replicator and holodeck technology, which is why we didn't see it in the original series. Once you have those two, then you're truly post-economic: if you get your hands on a replicator, it is essentially Aladdin's magic ring: anything else you want can be replicated, from food to machinery to great works of art. In fact, by the specs, a replicator can even replicate another replicator!
Every economic (monetary) system is ultimately based upon managing scarcity; it's a form of economic triage, shunting short resources to where they're needed. Thus, when there is no longer any shortage of any material object, any traditional material-based economy will collapse: capitalist, socialist, or barter-based.
[...]
But what the writers and producers didn't understand at all, in the beginning, and only dimly grasped even later (when they reintroduced the Ferengi as Julius Streicher-like caricatures of Jews), is that money didn't create humans; humans created money. I don't mean that simply glibly: humans will always find some way to recreate economic activity (witness prisoners exchanging sex for cigarettes). It's impossible to separate commerce from people; even in the Garden of Eden, humans will find something they can sell.
Replicators remove all material objects from the realm of commerce by making them as plentiful as leaves on the ground. So, starting from the assumption that "humans will always find something to sell," what do we get?
The most obvious thing available for selling is service: any human can sell his own services. Even if machines take the place of laborers, a person can hire himself out as a valet or butler, for those people rich enough to afford an actual human servant. It would be a lucrative profession; even now, such servants are paid far more than they were in the 19th century, when the supply of cheap human labor was more plentiful.
But creativity is also marketable: your replicator can make chicken, but it can't make my brand new chicken recipe that I just now invented! I suspect that copyright would still exist; it arose in the first place because it was necessary; creators refused to release their works without it. So a fellow could make a darned good living, even in the Star Trek post-economic society, by licensing his recipes to the replicator company. In fact, different companies would compete with different "license packs" of various dishes created by well-known chefs.
Original art would still have value (exaggerated value in a society where everyone had ample leisure time). There would still be a market for new novels, movies (holoplays, if you prefer), music, and indeed, for anything that hadn't been created yet. And naturally, a replicator cannot make a machine that has never existed before; so inventors would be rolling in green, or whatever color the "money" of that era was.
[...]
Which means, since we would still have economic energy, we would still need the units of that energy: money. A faint cognition of that inescapable fact finally penetrated the semi-simian brains of the proprietors of the newer Trek series; they introduced "gold-pressed latinum" (GPL) as the unit of currency. To get around the replicator problem, they limply declared -- without explanation -- that this substance was the only matter known that "could not be replicated." Thus, it was a commodity that had a fixed quantity -- the perfect thing to use for currency. Like gold today, it was easy to test for the quantity of GPL in a trinket or a bar, and it could not be counterfeited.
And people thought it was just a silly TV series.
Heh.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 23, 2006 12:51 PM
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