I just don’t get it. What is the freaking problem of those directors, trying to rewrite federation into some kind of dystopian tech fascism?

I was annoyed by the first Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, with those police cops. I was alienated by those anti-android resentments in Picard. I stopped watching Discovery after the first episode, because the main protagonist was sent to some kind of labor prison for disobedience, where prisoners regularly die. I didn’t think it could get any worse but just watching the first 10 minutes of Starfleet Academy makes me want to bury the whole franchise [edit: and stopped watching]. Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner. How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

Star Trek is supposed to be the ONE fiction with a positive, utopian view on mankind and the future. I totally get the attraction of dystopian settings but for that I can read some Warhammer 40k novels. This really makes me furious.

Fortunately there is still Strange New Worlds.

Please spoiler me, when this bullshit in Starfleet Academy gets turned around in some twist, because otherwise I will just ignore the show.

  • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Food too. A lot of problems with malnutrition and food deserts would be solved very quickly if you had a machine that could churn out perfectly nutritionally balanced meals.

    Not worrying about potentially starving to death would free up a lot for people to go and do what they want to do, and to decline bad work environments.

    If you didn’t have to worry about food, or bills, why would you stick to your rubbish job, instead of doing something you actually wanted to do?

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      16 hours ago

      And significantly, if you needed someone to actually do a job that wasn’t made obsolete by the removal of material scarcity you’d need to find a way to make it meaningfully enticing to them. Material scarcity is the driver for so much suckage that it’s almost mind boggling how much would change if we even made a significant dent on it.