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.
'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” ’
Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.
He also said the Cybertruck is “what Bladerunner would drive”.
he doesn’t actually know a fucking thing about sci-fi.
Given Musk’s prejudices, that surprises me – especially since in The Culture being transgender is extremely uncontroversial. (Hell, even the spacecraft are permitted to determine their roles and choose their own names; meanwhile Musk is desperately trying to wrench Grok into his own image.)
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.
$10 says he loves the wiki brief of the mos def version.
Or he claimed to be hugely into trek and hhgttg to fit in when in uni and now can’t untangle himself from the lie without an ego blow
The more he says about these things, the less I’m convinced he’s ever watched an episode of Star Trek or any version of HHGTTG. He also thought that Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner was named Bladerunner.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-main-character-blade-runner
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.
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 think he didn’t really get that “Picard gets a neurological link to the Borg” == “not 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.
I would happily be in a hive mind if there was the option to leave it whenever I wanted and if the technology was safe.
The same way so many idiot fans seem to think star trek is “too woke” now lol
It’s a thing repubs said when we got a black female captain (who btw has had the best captain arc since Picard.
He’s TOS Star Trek. Be a cowboy, cheat and be venerated for it, white man is in charge.
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.
Bub, trek was revolutionary for its time, and in some parts still is. But it is going to age as we advance, and that’s not a bad thing - we want to progress to and past that
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.
Musk wants the Terran Empire, not the Federation
People fail to realize that we’re in the mirror universe and the universe Star Trek exists in is the unattainable utopia.
I mean the Bell Riots happen in 2024 in the Prime Timeline. The 21st century sucks in Star Trek. Eugenics wars, Sanctuary Districts, WWIII, fascist dictatorships using soldiers addicted to drugs…
It’s only after a nuclear holocaust that humanity is reborn into their “hopeful era”. I mean hell, they literally had to retcon the timeline because the 90s weren’t actually as awful as the show claimed and they had to move the Eugenics Wars. The 21st century is dark in the Prime Timeline, and it’s fully believable that it was just as bad as our real 21st century or worse.
So no, as easy as it is to cave to doomerism, I think the message of Star Trek is that this too shall pass. Stuff sucks, no doubt, the world is in a dark place right now, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
I like to rewatch DS9: “Past Tense” sometimes because it really hits home how bad things are, but also gives hope for how maybe there’s a future in which we look back and wonder how things got this bad.
Robert Picardo is great
So I hate to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure Robert Picardo is a hologram…
fucking poser. every piece of media you claim to love is a protest to your entire existence.
Yeah nothing says “I support a post-scarcity economy” like a bunch of billionaires
IMO if you’re a billionaire and stay a billionaire, you’re incapable and unworthy of being called altruistic. Nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody even needs a tenth of that. There should be a $1 million annual asset cap on all income sources, full stop. Everything else should go to social services, infrastructure, etc. and NOT person or military anything.
Well, okay but selling a single family home these days goes for over a million commonly in the cities, even if it’s your only family home and for example you are moving into smaller home or selling for money for health care or to move into retirement home etc
A home you could have bought between 30-50 k 30 or 40 years ago could easily be worth over 1 million now
But doesn’t that have a lot to do with the fact that millionaires and billionaires are buying property and jacking up prices? If the cap is 1 million and someone sells their house for 1 million, if they make any more money that year, it goes to taxes. That would give incentive to people to actually live life instead of being completely focused on the rat race. I don’t think 1 million is a good cap, certainly not with the value of the dollar being what it is. However, I do think setting a cap and having it automatically lower a little bit every few years is a good idea. That would need to also be accompanied with a limit on liquid assets to be gradually taken down as well, if anyone is hoarding money, they would be forced to either give it away or donate to charity if they didn’t want all of it going into public programs. There shouldn’t be limit on what someone can buy/own.
A million a year barely lifts you beyond the middle class these days. You would still need a mortgage ( at least for a couple of years ) where I live.
I think maybe $10 million would be better. But I prefer a progressive system over a cap. Earning more money should always make you more money. People respond to incentives. We just need to increase the tax rate as high as 90% by the time you are making $10 million or more.
If a few billionaires had $100 million, it would not wreck society.
I mean, I like to shit on Billionaires as much as anyone, but they don’t really own a Billion dollars like sitting around in their bank accounts. They own it in assets like stocks of companies, real estate, etc. The money they spend are usually loans against these assets which they then pay back by selling some because their values usually increases more than the interest rates.
So I don’t understand how you are envisioning this asset cap and going to social services. Imagine you have stock In a company that’s growing more than a million dollars. Would they be forced to sell the stock to ‘social services’? Who controls these assets then? Or are they forced to sell them? Then the assets just get passed around.
I don’t think a solution is that simple. Maybe it would be better if we regulate the companies more. But for that we need to agree on rules on an international level because otherwise, as it is now already happening, they just switch their HQ to less regulated countries. The EU approaches this with regulations you need to follow if you want to operate in the EU at all. Which makes the corps found subcorps to operate in EU. They evade all regulations as long as we can’t agree on an international standard.
Long story short. It’s not the billionaires money that’s the problem, it’s the power they hold in their assets in multinational corporations that enables them to operate above any laws of one nation.
