I’ve been making my way through Star Trek Voyager for the first time and its made me realize that the technology in the various Star Treks isn’t the really fantastical thing, it’s the ethics, decency and such of the humans that seems the most implausible.
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Gene Roddenbury was very progressive- much of Star Trek is loosely communist in nature. Note that nobody from Earth is ever buying anything.
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Yes, I only realized about the money thing just the other day but sadly, I would probably be pre-occupied trying to fenagle some gold plated latinum if I was on DS9, to buy synths with of course… I’ve always wanted a Ferengi lobe modulator.
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Absolutely. And, IMO, the reason those shows are so vital. 100s of episodes of exploration of those ideas, out there in the mainstream western media. It’s a fantastic subversion.
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If you work with the Federation, you can have all the synths you want. And pursue a life learning how to use them, without being poor or cold.
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Yea, to be honest it can be sort of depressing watching Star Trek, like waking up from a good dream knowing it will never be true. Maybe I just need to cheer myself up with a dose of dystopian PKD…
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Those are fabulous. Lucky you! Well done to your gf!
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Impressive work, for a female
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Thanks 
I’m hoping to find a Garak in my stocking this year 
Super plus plus!
We’re currently very far off the topic of Neo Luddites here, but I’m happy to continue this dialogue in private if you’re interested.
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The discussion is apropos; Luddite is a cultural movement. This is the culture against which the Luddite mindset is opposed. Despite the undeniable connection between social media and social isolation some.validate this with the breadth of distraction available in this abyss of virtual reality- “this poison tastes great!”
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Well, I am the OP and I would prefer if people would just like my original post and comment below how much they like it. DM if you would like to collab. Thanks!
I think people are just straight up getting BORED of social media.
We see it clearly for what it is now, in all its shallowness. It’s a formula, and the different iterations of it are very much just incremental differences in the formula. You can’t get high on the same amount of mental meth forever. You build up tolerance, and you need bigger and bigger hits to satisfy or the shallow and unsatisfying nature is seen in clear light. But nothing from big tech or VC-funded startups is going to satisfy, and what are we garnering all these likes for anyway? And I don’t know a single person who is genuinely excited about metaverse supposedly being the next big hit.
Instead of “what’s a good alternative to Twitter once it’s razed to the ground”, I just wonder whether I actually need a good alternative. I’ve been through enough “invite-only” social media only to quickly lose interest, to know that the next big thing that comes along will be more of the same. How many new apps with dumb names are we going to throw on our phones before deciding to spend our time on better stuff. I mostly just use my phone these days for GPS navigation, staying on top of work email, and reading novels in an ebook reader. The novels feel like a balm compared to the pint-sized bullshit of twitter and facebook. It’s been over 10 years now since I first joined twitter. I’ve seen every iteration of every funny tweet, every political tweet, and every provocative tweet there has ever been or ever will be, more or less, and I’ve written those tweets myself countless times. I feel like it’s run its course and outlasted its welcome.
When I was a teen I ran in the opposite direction of shallowness and vapidness. It hurt my soul to participate in that stuff. These days, social media is where all the shallowness and vapidness is. I have high faith in the enduring ability of young people to reject the shallow bullshit that boring people my age foist on them.
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today almost all of the socials after a couple of flicks veer off into a modern version of Funniest Home Videos. I guess, that’s the part I never really signed up for - if I was in front of my TV I wouldn’t set up in front of a show like that, yet on a mobile device its basically plastered in front of you. its easy for us oldies to look back to myspace and say what a golden era that was, but that was a place where Music was the centrepiece of the network. I remember when someone first showed me Facebook in all its banal cardboard blandness and I just remember thinking and saying “why?”. in all the ways the businesspeople and the marketers came home to roost on every platform post myspace, and the entrepreneurial salesperson has replaced the artist, and even the coder, as the modern rock star - as has its product - tools sell better than art. Facebook and instagram are inextricably linked to a successful and humming business in this day and age, although I do know a few folks bucking the trend and moving away from online sales, I wonder how that is going for them. But I think there’s also an effect in play we haven’t seen before - the first gen of social media folks are now old, and with being old can come disdain, being jaded, disconnection, reassessing values etc etc. So we’ll never ‘go back’ - because we’re not the same people anymore, going through those growing experiences. Remember when no one had phones yet, but people would ask ‘do you mind if I quickly check my Facebook on your PC’ - but they would forget to log out, lol, leaving them vulnerable for an inevitable troll post by yours truly. That stuff was a time and a place
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In a way the shitty IG algorithm they implemented a few years ago was a good thing as I slowly got less and less interested in looking or participating and now I check maybe once a week or so and move on rather quickly but it seems like a lot of the people I once knew pretty much maintain their accounts in the same formulaic way that has become standard in the last several years. I do see the similarities to other sorts of addiction, like alcohol which when you are trying to stop just seems impossible even if you no longer enjoy it… the IG algorithm is sort of like cheap Korean soju it gives you such a bad hangover that you can’t help but to hate it and yourself for indulging.
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one thing I’m grateful for is forums, like this one. they’re a bit old hat, but they have that old school gated community thing, in the least that the people here want to be here, and I don’t have my mum or high school friends looking over my shoulder at every post. that’s the thing that’s so unbearable about the socials, its a free for all, the whole privacy thing etc. forums buck that trend, the avatar still reigns supreme, its essentially anonymous, and by and large is a respectful welcoming place, without any kind of marketing, monestiation or what have you. granted this community has a parent company, but you don’t have to own a product to participate. honestly Nauts is probably it for me
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Aren’t forums like, the original social media handed down from Caligula or Socrates or whoever?
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