Utopian science fiction as a gateway to hell

Is Star Trek just harmless fun?

We are all sinners, my sin is LLM image generation while being a luddite. :-)

First a note, this is not an attack on science fiction as a genre as a whole. Some of my favorite authors are science fiction writers like Philp K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. Science fiction can serve as a warning about potential dystopias that is useful and important. 1984 and Brave New World are science fiction novels that we use as landmarks to this day in navigating the pitfall of an increasingly technology driven society. This is not even an attack on all utopian science fiction, Ursula K. LeGuinn had some interesting visions of what a reasonable post industrial future might look like in novels like “The Word for World is Forest,” and “Always Coming Home.” Rather I am going to make a critique here of how certain utopian science fiction best exemplified by Star Trek is used by our tech bros, and globalist management WEF type elite and their useful idiot followers to create propaganda for technocracy. I do not know BTW this was necessarily Gene Roddenberry’s intention in creating Star Trek, but like all fiction how it is used once released to the world is not really under the author’s control.

Let’s look at an example of Star Trek technology which if we tried to actually make it happen would not work as it’s portrayed in Star Trek as an entry into how Star Trek’s tech utopianism can lead to a distorted view of reality. In all the Star Trek series the transporter is portrayed as an essentially magical device that turns a person into pure energy and reassembles them at the beam down point. But lets think about how this device would actually work. It would first scan a person to the atomic and perhaps even subatomic level and store that information in a computer. Then it would use a high energy beam to completely destroy the person standing on the transporter platform, then it would send the information scanned in an energy beam like a radio wave, and then finally somehow that radio transmitter would have the ability to reconstitute the energy back into the matter the person is made of. The important thing to note here is the transporter murders the original person, and then replaces them at the transporter destination with essentially a clone of the original based on information in the original scan before they were killed. Would you agree to be murdered and replaced with a clone for instant travel? Of course no sane person would agree to that. Yet on the show it’s so seamless and slick, and that makes Star Trek’s portrayal of tech alluring and seductive.

Now some people will object, no one is trying to make a transporter, what are you talking about? But that actually isn’t the point, the point is Star Trek portrays what seems to be a scarcity free high tech utopia on it’s shinny surface, just don’t ask about the nuts and bolts of how it works. It’s a future where there is extensive trade between planets, a military style hierarchy, no money, and everyone has a place serving “the Federation.” Is this not the WEF vision of the future only on many planets as opposed to one? Do you think anyone on the Enterprise owns anything besides their personal possessions besides maybe the elite like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock? You will own nothing and be happy, you will talk to your computer as an AI assistant, you will have no personal money to buy food and other things, you will be employed by a supranational governmental organization to serve the common good. Where do you think people first saw such things? Isn’t it in fact highly likely the WEF crowd and Elon Musk tech bros who are mostly in their 40s through their 70s grew up on Star Trek? Musk himself sells his tech through presentations and videos that are like mini Sci Fi. TV episodes. You want an electric truck that looks like a lunar rover, and a personal robot, and a neural implant like 7 of 9 don’t you? But just like Star Trek’s transporter don’t look under the hood to see how or even if it works, or what sacrifices of personal autonomy will be necessary to bring this whiz bang highly produced spectacle of the future into being. Just watch the dazzling images and dream big. Occupy Mars! “The first step to being an interplanetary race.” Gee it’s just like the beginning of Enterprise, an admittedly IMO somewhat underrated part of the Star Trek Franchise.

But it is actually worth stepping back and asking if it’s even possible or desirable at all outside the dog and pony show.

I am actually pretty pessimistic any of this is possible at all. Even at our current level of technological development our grid is under stress already. According to the Brave Browser LLM “AI”

“Texas has a history of power outages and grid stress, notably during the 2021 winter storm crisis and the summer of 2022, when extreme heat led to record high power demand. In February 2021, the state experienced its worst energy infrastructure failure, which led to shortages of water, food, and heat, leaving over 4.5 million homes and businesses without power for several days. The crisis highlighted the state’s lack of preparedness for such storms and the failure to implement winterization recommendations made by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation in 2011.”

Is it really realistic to assume as tech optimists do that a grid that is already near collapse in one of the largest states in the country can really stand up to adding things like more electric cars that draw as much current as several houses to charge, massive data centers for AI, and the sort of massive technical infrastructure necessary to make spaceships for interplanetary travel? In Star Trek of course it’s all just presented slickly as fait accompli. But what would this look like on the ground? Are we going to sacrifice more forests and farmland for power plants and robot factories? What are these power plants going to be fueled with? We have decades at best of fossil fuels even at current rates of consumption, and even supposedly “sustainable” solutions like solar and wind require massive amounts of land to operate, and there is already NIMBY outcry all over the country about wind farms and solar plant sites. Literally hundreds of counties have outright banned the construction of windfarms based on citizen demand.

“In the past decade, about 180 counties got their first commercial wind-power projects. But in the same period, more than twice as many blocked wind development. And while solar power has found more broad acceptance, 2023 was the first year to see almost as many individual counties block new solar projects as the ones adding their first projects.

The result: Some of the areas with the nation’s best sources of wind and solar power have now been boxed out.”

Ok what about nuclear? Rather than recapitulate a long argument on why nuclear energy is a bad idea I’ll refer you to this note I wrote today.

I would also add that even if it is possible, is this really how we want to live, and will we be given a choice in the matter? Star Trek is fun and all but it’s my strong opinion we need to put away the entertainment for grown children, and do some hard sober thinking about what exactly is being sold to us using sci fi imagery?

I hope I have shown that regardless of the intention of creators like Gene Roddenberry that utopian science fiction has the potential to unmoore people from reality when it comes to thinking about whether we want to live in a technocracy especially among the global leadership class who has the most power and wealth to enact it. I suspect this essay will be controversial with some people, so feel free to leave a comment below, this is a subject I am very interested in, so I am sure we can all have a good discussion about it. I would also add there are people in our little circle who IMO have been indoctrinated into supporting a technocatic dystopia every bit as much the WEF boys and Musk, I won’t be rude and name names, but I am pretty sure most reading this know who I am talking about. I will also add I am not a saint and am using the tech toys myself, but that I also have no faith they will be here by the end of my life, and I am almost at retirement age.

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