Fucking neoliberal capitalist brain worms.
Also, stop calling it post-scarcity we are already post-scarcity in the 21st century. Star Trek’s future is post-capitalism, not post-scarcity. You can’t have post-scarcity without eliminating capitalism because capitalism just creates artificial scarcity. You can’t have a society like The Federation without some form of communism.
And don’t get me started on the Ferengi. The Star Trek Wiki says:
However, the Ferengi managed to avoid many of the worst aspects of an evolving culture and their social history was notable for the absence of atrocities such as slavery or genocide, a distinction the Ferengi felt made them morally superior (though their definition of “slavery” clearly did not extend to their treatment of women). Ferengi culture slowly grew out of its early stages by introducing a remarkable economic system that developed from early bartering systems to become one of the leading cultures in interstellar commerce.
This is impossible. You cannot have a hyper-capitalistic society without slavery, imperialism and genocide. That’s like having a Nazi society without wars of conquest. It’s built into how capitalism functions.
The Ferengi would never be accepted by the Federation or Starfleet without giving up capitalism. Most Farengi would live exploited under the threat of poverty like most people in current day capitalist Earth do. Starfleet in Nutrek also seems to have no problem doing capitalism with alien societies that still use money, which kind of flies in the face of their ethics, as to a “post-money” society partaking in capitalism would most likely be considered unethical akin to partaking in slavery. “It’s their culture.” can only take you so far.
“Oh but they’re just a fun silly greedy jerks!” yeah ok sure. Tee hee they’re funny little guys that exploit and starve their poor and don’t treat their sick. So goofy and wacky.
And as much as I love Lower Decks, it still suffers from that same liberalism, and seems to mandate that every episode needs at least one action scene.
Giving too much control to rich producers is a mistake.
One of the most lib brainworm moments in tng is when Picard tolerates a farcical trial about datas personhood instead of immediately going John Brown on that one asshole. New Trek took it a million steps worse by saying “remember that stuff about not creating a slave race? Psych we did that shit.”
Fuck new trek.
fuck jj abrams fuck alex kurtzman fuck intellectual property law
That was the first episode of TNG I learned about and it made me not want to watch the series.
I can see the episode working to introduce the concepts and legal consequences of artificial personhood to an audience that may not have thought about topics like it before, but yeah from an in-universe angle there are definitely a few people Picard should’ve set phasers on “obliterate” for instead of going on a big morality lawyer speech.