#@biblioflyer

[procrastinatorproject]

I hadn't even considered the holo-angle! (Which is a bit of a shock, I have to admit)

And most holograms are patched into larger systems (a ship or station where they work), the Doctor being an exception because he can load himself into the mobile emitter. What might it do to the rest of the system if a hologram were to experience the admonition?

(Also: the admonition was created for synthetic minds, which means on some level, it's code. Which begs the question: if the code gets extracted/copied from afflicted people through an in-depth scan, or if some scientists go to check out the Admonition and study the technology -- will that affect their computer systems? Does it only become dangerous when a system (like the Borg hive mind) tries to decode it and interpret it as a message, but the data itself is fairly safe to have sitting around?)

SO MANY INTERESTING THREADS!

Hmm according to Fandom Alpha, he mentioned that The Admonition:

“—was designed for synthetic minds, any organics attempting to access it could be driven to madness, self-harm, and suicide.”

So I wonder what would have happened if the Admonition was passed on to the Borg.

BTW, I still can’t believe that Ramdha’a supposed grief and despair was the reason for the submatrix collapse of the Artifact Cube.

Because the Borg have assimilated so many worlds, a billion minds filled with grief and despair as their lives were taken from them and their loved ones. It doesn’t make sense, it has to be something else.

I believe that Narissa believed it was because of Ramdha. But I personally don’t.

(The whole AI synthetic thing was too close to BSG and the one other game— I’m not on board with that part of the plot.)

But also, Romulans love their secrets too much that 80% of the time the cause of their own downfall.

[biblioflyer]

Did Star Trek Picard turn the Federation into a Dystopia? (A series) Introduction

Introduction & Summary

Video version

This question contains within it a central gripe about Star Trek: Picard (from here on out abbreviated as PIC in order to avoid confusing the show with the character.) The aggrieved commenter usually gestures towards one of a few different datapoints that I’ll unpack.

First I’ll offer a TL/DR: my position is “no.”

Let me offer a quick abstract on that for just a bit more depth without going all in on the meat and potatoes. Unlike a clickbait site I don’t want to make you slog through this to get to the point. Also, there will be spoilers for PIC Seasons 1 and 2.

Related essays:

Analysis of Picard's Media Interview

Picard Rewatch: Introduction and Index

What to do with elderly characters whose arcs got forgotten decades ago?

What is Gene's vision? Values and assumptions of Star Trek.

Jiuratis and Raffis: a Star Trek fandom personality test.

What does it mean to "be Star Trek?" Is Picard "Star Trek?" (Yes, but..)

What is lost and what is gained by leaning into "realism"

The salient points:

First off I don’t consider the Federation as it is depicted in PIC a dystopia. I would characterize it more as a tarnished utopia. A setting where good things happen and a great number of modern social problems appear to be virtually nonexistent, however it still has cracks and blindspots that need to be addressed. 

I understand that this is irksome to those who use phrases like “Gene Roddenberry’s vision” and “Star Trek is supposed to be a history of the future” and I’m not unsympathetic! Far from it! Yet from an artistic point of view, I believe that for responsible, moral storytelling it is important for Star Trek to complicate its setting rather than only tell “Enlightened Us vs Ignorant Them” stories. This also does not mean embracing the “everything just gets worse” bleakness of the Galactica reboot or The Expanse. I love those shows too. I love a good cautionary tale. Not everything needs to take this to the nth degree.

Additionally the more I reflect on the Federation of TNG/DS9, the less I consider it to be a capital U Utopia and instead view it as a more enlightened society but not one that has achieved the pinnacle of moral development. This doesn’t make it a hellscape full of misery and torment that should be burned to the ground. The best Star Trek stories are about rejecting false binaries.

Again, this is irksome to those who want Star Trek to be a history of the future and also perhaps who liked the triumphalist attitude of “classic” Star Trek where the lectures were generally directed to stand-ins who were coded as “foreign.”

That one stings doesn’t it?

Stay with me though! I’m not going to tell you that you’re a bad person for enjoying those stories or that Star Trek is Bad, Actually.

Finally I’ll discuss some of the moral quandaries surfaced by PIC (Synth labor, mental health, astropolitics, humanitarian duties) and examine whether I think we should be strident in our condemnation of the Federation for its failings or if we should be a bit more holistic and humane in how we judge these things. Spoiler: a lot of this wasn’t ideal, but I think the show did better in some ways of selling the ethical complexity of these themes than is commonly thought while phoning it in in other ways.

[biblioflyer]

Picard's media interview: a holistic assessment (Did Star Trek Picard make the Federation into a Dystopia series?)

Datapoint 1: Picard’s media interview: a holistic assessment.

This is part of an ongoing series of essays reassessing Star Trek Picard and the arguments surrounding that series. See here for the Introduction. Other essays can generally be read in any order.

Listen to me jabber about this instead:

If you are reading along, Part two picks up at "Is Star Trek Trying to be More Adult?"

In this scene Picard is challenged by an interviewer on his resignation from Starfleet, opposition to the Synth ban, and his effort to focus the Federation on Romulan relief efforts. It is explicitly stated that this interview was only granted under the condition that it would focus on his humanitarian efforts rather than his opposition to what we are led to believe was the security consensus after Mars was attacked.

The scene in question:

I’m not going to lie, this was a challenging scene to watch the first time I saw it. From a Doylist perspective, the interviewer seems to be rather clearly intended to be an avatar of the Federation. The interviewer’s narrative function was to provide exposition for why and how Picard is embittered and alienated. She serves this up in rather blunt fashion. The Federation turned its back on the ideals that Picard believes in and that he believed the Federation stood for: mercy, justice, an extraverted and peaceable foreign policy etc. 

Wait, weren’t the Romulans the bad guys?

The irony here is that in some of the darker discussions that I have taken part in around this topic, there are many fans who side against the Romulans on this matter.

To play devil’s advocate, if anything the interviewer undersells the case for leaving the Romulans to their fate: they did, after all, clone Picard and that clone led a successful coup with the apparent near universal support of the military and intelligence establishment and would have wiped out all life on Earth if not for the last minute defection of a couple of Romulan commanders. The case for letting the Romulans twist in the wind is far stronger than it ever was for the Klingons when the Khitomer Accords were being negotiated.

It should be noted that while the Romulan Star Empire, or at least elements within it, are serial attempted genociders, this blog takes the controversial position that commiting genocide through inaction is not cool. 

For those who would pedantically say that letting Romulus fry is not technically genocide because there are plenty more Romulans offworld and they were an interstellar warp capable civilization who still managed to evacuate significant numbers of people offworld anyway:

You are technically correct but it doesn’t make you a nice person. Whether it's allowing just a few hundred million or 99.9% of an entire species to die, it's just not cool, man. Not cool at all.

Be the Captain They Remember

Picard’s reaction to the interviewer not really appreciating his Dunkirk analogy is coded as more evidence of the Federation living in a sort of permanent present with no historical perspective. I accept that that is probably what the show runners had in mind but it reads as more like the sort of smug social media dunk that would get lots of likes from the speaker’s posse but largely fails as both an attempt at sincere engagement. In my experience its just a bad way to make the point in general if you start thinking about it for more than a minute or two.

Its also rather boorish and snobby to pluck one event that neatly parallels the Romulan evacuation from the preceding 400 years of Earth history out of 7 continents, three world wars, innumerable smaller scale conflicts, and expect the reporter to be familiar with it just by virtue of Picard name dropping it.

As a Franco-Brit, it’s also aggressively ethnocentric of Picard. It is not uncharacteristic of Picard to be ethnocentric but Picard’s ethnocentrism generally honors and tries to preserve the distinct history of France in particular and Europe more generally rather than wield it as a club to score points. (Belligerence is notably where I personally would draw the line between healthy love of country and pride of heritage and where it starts heading down an unpleasant path.)

Of course, another reading of this is that Picard reaching for his specialist expertise as a weapon to swipe back at the interviewer when he loses his temper is very intentional. His reversion to elitism in a society that theoretically has no classes shows us how far he’s slipped from the Captain Picard who used the literary canon and history as teaching tools rather than a rhetorical phaser.

Debating Mars, 9/11, Cultural Trauma, Prudence and Hysteria

The interviewer goes on to invoke the specter of the Synth attack and the virtual destruction of Mars and all living on it. Nearly a hundred thousand lives in total. This appears intended as a sort of “gotcha.” Picard’s sympathy for the Romulans and opposition to the Synth ban is cast as disrespect for the dead and a myopic failure to appreciate the seriousness of the threats against the Federation.

This feels very reminiscent of Post 9/11 discourse around the Global War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act and other dialogues wherein the “doveish” side is demolished by painting them as naive and disloyal. I’m very aware that Patrick Stewart’s own anger over what he felt were false narratives being spun up to justify Brexit is in the show’s DNA although I am not personally fluent enough in the gritty details to draw direct comparisons.

This is another argument that, if it was intended to portray the Federation in a negative light, it may have backfired. If one sets aside for the moment that Picard is our point of view character and therefore is presumably the North Star that we should be setting our moral compasses by and using as our guide for what’s fact or crap; a strong case was made here about how terrified the Federation was and how much ambiguity there was about what happened. In that context, it’s not exactly xenophobic to be reticent about making widespread use of Synths and especially putting them around all manner of Treknobabble that is notoriously easy to repurpose into a WMD.

Picard seemed in a minority in the belief that the Federation was not facing a new national security crisis from a foe that was perfectly willing to annihilate entire planetary populations. This is not out of character for Picard. He has generally been the character who takes a stand against fear mongering and frequently argues that a presumption of goodwill carries with it calculated risks that must be taken in order to preserve peace. Picard’s position throughout TNG seemed to be able to be boiled down to: if you always assume the worst and react from that assumption reflexively, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

We will also later learn that Picard is not wholly objective here, if he was going to get another relief effort underway in time with the bandwidth to make a meaningful contribution, Picard was going to need Synth labor. This isn’t a slight against Picard’s moral fiber, being guilty of motivated reasoning doesn’t make someone a bad person. More often than not it seems people talk themselves out of following their conscience, not into. Which is a point in Picard’s favor as a moral actor.

Once more following a trend of ST:PIC stepping all over its own messaging, it will later be revealed that in all likelihood, had Picard succeeded in getting the Federation to use Synth labor to finish the evacuation of Romulus, Commodore Oh probably would have taken the opportunity to find a way to screw with that too, proving that the isolationists were right to be terrified that someone was out to use Federation automation to kill as many people as possible.

So this all brings us to an uncomfortable question: is Jean luc Picard a reliable narrator in the show that bears his name? Something, anything ought to have been done to save more Romulans. Abdicating that responsibility is awful! Yet, given all of the evidence gathered so far about what is happening in the setting, while there is perhaps a tone of schadenfreude in the reporter’s voice when she brings up Romulan misdeeds and then proceeds to leave Picard sputtering and furious; the setting kind of backs up her points in a way that is extremely uncomfortable. 

Is Star Trek trying to be “more adult” by portraying a lack of moral clarity?

I want to make it clear: I’m writing about my hero here. Picard as a character is an inspiration to me and is a major pillar of my own evolution as a person. Yet, I think Picard the character would want me to admit he may be imperfect and he may be shortchanging his society. 

Which lends me to wonder if what is being modeled is perhaps a different sort of character’s journey that mirrors my own. The journey from wide eyed, uncritical idealism to cynical despair and anger and then ultimately to a murkier sort of place where good and bad exist alongside one another and where it is the heights of achievement that make the failings hurt so badly. “We can put a Man on the Moon but we can’t fix homelessness.” “We can mutate Tom Parris into a lizard but we can’t find it in our hearts to not blame all Romulans for the actions of my embittered clone.”

As a Star Trek fan and as a recovering member of the “Star Trek is a history of the future” club, I am unhappy that at least where the Synth subplot is concerned, PIC stepped all over itself and the way the conspiracy unraveled strongly implies that some degree of caution was warranted with regards to making a mass deployment of Starfleet assets outside of Federation space for an extended period of time and using Synth labor. 

Yet, it would have had profoundly bad implications for the state of the Federation had Picard been wholly vindicated and all of the fears that led to the Federation abdicating responsibility for the Romulans turned out to be wholly irrational.

Good modern sci-fi storytelling is frequently less about “us vs them” and more “us vs ourselves” wherein the subject has to contend with some sort of internalized problem or break cycles of distrust and violence. The Expanse is a magnificent example of this. 

PIC is about this as well with the first season culminating in reaching out to and creating common cause with synthetic life. One moral that was setup at the start that was fulfilled was that it was wrong to distrust all Synths (except that Oh really did reprogram them to kill all humans and there is apparently an AI supremacist civilization out there that shoots first and asks questions second when summoned.) 

Meanwhile the Romulan arc is left with a jagged edge wherein we were made to feel sympathetic for them while also left with yet another classic arc about Romulan treachery. It's as if STPIC took one step away from Cowboys and Indians IN SPACE but then was afraid to let go entirely. Maybe there was an attempt at a more complex message about how failed states are bad, people will do what they have to in order to survive, and if you think it's gross and evil that they’re carving up liberated Borg for parts, then help them and in the future quit making failed states, but honestly that part feels like I’m trying to spin straw into gold.

Consequently, it is hard to argue that the Federation is wholly utopian. Aspects of the arguments that the interviewer and later Admiral Yancy use to justify leaving the Romulans to their fate are deeply unsettling. It definitely veers into a tendency to blame an entire people for the behavior of specific factions or elites. It’s reminiscent of blaming civilians for not overthrowing a brutal dictator and thereby rationalizing making their lives shorter and more miserable to punish them or goad them to revolt. (To be more specific, I am thinking more about the Iraq sanctions of the 90s after Iraq’s capacity to hurt its neighbors had mostly been pulverized, any analogies to current events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine deserve far more space to unpack and are more likely to age poorly.)

Yet I don’t think that caring about protecting one’s people under conditions where 100,000 people were just burned up by rogue androids is mustache twirling villainy. Picard himself will later acknowledge that it would take strip mining Starfleet’s reserves and Synth labor (the very same labor that just caused an apocalypse) to save the remaining Romulans. So if this is supposed to make the Federation a dystopia, the showrunners failed by virtue of including a Romulan deep cover agent who was personally responsible for Mars and could and probably would do it again.

[ofsmokenandgold]

I'm always going to be that person who is put off by the "lack of severe criticism for Western values and institutions." My entire shtick is that NONE of Star Trek (with the possible exception of Picard S2) is truly progressive because of its uncritical acceptance of western universalism and its relationship to liberal imperialism.

Different Treks, Different Ethos? 

Is there authentic and valid disagreement between fans adjacent to the dumpster fires?

This is part of a series analyzing the finale of Discovery and the conflict between different aspects of the Star Trek fandom. This is in part inspired by and a reaction to a conversation between Andrew Heaton and Tim Shandefur on the Political Orphanage podcast. For more like this, use the Star Trek ethics tag.

I recently listened to a discussion between Andrew Heaton and Tim Sandefur on the Political Orphanage about the Politics of Star Trek, a couple of people I don’t particularly have a lot in common with except for a love of Star Trek. That being the case, it was an interesting exercise in seeing the franchise through someone else’s eyes. It was disorienting but interesting. 

Heaton displayed an impressive degree of understanding of views he may or may not share, but treats them with seriousness. I came away feeling like Sandefur in particular was caricaturing convictions he didn’t share and generally being deeply unfair, but it’s a viewpoint worth unpacking because I see variations on his arguments all over the place.

Essentially Sandefur draws a line between the Cold War liberalism of The Original Series and Star Trek The Next Generation, which he characterizes as “New Left”, maybe even “Post Modernist.” I’m fuzzy on whether he used the second term but I suspect he probably wouldn’t disagree given what I came to believe his definition of Post Modernist would be.

I know you may be already cringing because I brought up one of the biggest snarl worlds and thought terminating cliches in social discourse. I want to frontload this by saying that I think this is interesting, and even that it is probably reflective of a very real division in Trek fandom, not that I think Sandefur’s interpretation is fair minded or even accurate. He does get caught misremembering (a cynic might say butchering) Trek canon to make a point, but then who doesn’t have a tendency to emphasize the parts of the setting that affirm our convictions?

Kirkism

In Sandefur’s telling, the Cold War Liberalism of Kirk emphasizes equity, justice, intellectualism, is fundamentally optimistic about technology, is broadly positive about Western coded institutions and values, is prideful of its achievements, disdainful of ignorance (as defined by being scientifically backward or culturally illiberal), and perhaps most controversially: the Kirkian tradition is interventionist.

Kirk does not stop to ponder what the collateral damage will be from liberating the locals from an AI god before destroying said god. 

Kirk is mournful but resolute when it comes to arming a preindustrial people he is sympathetic to in order to ensure they are more evenly matched with a tribe the Klingons are arming. At no point does Kirk stop to interrogate what the gender, sexual, racial, religious, or political norms of said tribe are: it is enough that the tribe he is friendly with will at least be subjugated if not annihilated wholesale if Starfleet doesn’t arm them.

Kirk would not, and quite literally has not, hesitated to punch Nazis up to and including possibly causing an interstellar incident. Incidentally, in a sign the metapolitics of Star Trek may be swinging back to the Kirkian, Strange New Worlds even affirms that Kirk’s aggressiveness during the events of “The Balance of Terror” is the correct posture. Aggressively confronting an aggressor is depicted as essential for preventing a devastating interstellar war with the Romulans. 

I’m less persuaded about Burnham having been in the right with regards to “The Vulcan Hello” and the need to respond aggressively to the Klingons. There are a lot of variables between Shenzou opening hailing frequencies and T’kuvma becoming a martyr so I accept there is a strong argument for Burnham (and by extension, the “Kirkian tradition”) having been correct here.

So far, so interesting right? I would wager that your average social justice minded Trekkie is not actually finding fault with all of this if they weren’t immediately put off by the lack of severe criticism for Western values and institutions.

Kirk’s astropolitics meanwhile are complex. I would imagine a lot of us are uncomfortable with the idea of giving advanced weaponry to a preindustrial society no questions asked, but at the same time we don’t necessarily like the idea of them simply being wiped out. Do note that while the episode to my recollection presents this as a binary: arming or extinction, it is implicitly a trinary choice, it's just that the third option is really, really bad. That third option being directly interdicting weapon supplies from the Klingons and risking an interstellar war.

As far as the Discovery finale is concerned, the big thing is the techno optimism of TOS. Scientific progress is not unquestioned but it is generally portrayed as a positive.

There are certain verboten technologies in the TOS morality. Genetic engineering of humans to explicitly improve their physical and mental prowess is viewed as inevitably flinging the door wide open to fascism due to the way it creates “superior beings with superior ambition.” Likewise, the setting seems vaguely hostile to artificial intelligence. The common theme seems to be that these are crypto-illiberal technologies that seem highly likely to result in the subjugation of humans to amoral actors.

Yet when it comes to most other things, there’s rarely much in the way of introspection about whether sentient beings (I’m probably going to end up saying humanity a lot just for simplicity, which I know Azetbur would take me to task for due to its xenocentrism) have a right to “play God” or to use this or that technology responsibly. McCoy is often curmudgeonly but a lot of the time it seems like he’s written to be a silly luddite for Spock and Kirk to dunk on. Likewise McCoy is often skewered for his excitability by Spock, whom he regards as cold and amoral.

Next: Picardism and why what you would do to protect your favorite bar may not well advised for when nuclear weapons are involved.

[procrastinatorproject]

Oh, I like your thinking!

I absolutely agree that because Agnes saw the Admonition filtered through Oh's eyes, her perception of it was deeply coloured by Oh's interpretation. (Someone else also touched on that in one of my all-time favourite Agnes fics, actually!) And Oh's perception was always going to be extremely prejudiced, because the whole Zhat Vash training prepares you for a horrible, terrible, world-destroying secret -- and then you receive the Admonition. How could you interpret it as anything but hostile?

And if you want, you can even read hints of this interpretation in the show itself. The visuals we get for the Admonition show drawings by Da Vinci, Earth-based plants and animals, a human fetus, images of a Soong-type android, synths with Starfleet insignia, the Attack on Mars... When the Admonition was created several hundred millenia ago, none of these things existed!

And sure, the Doylist explanation is that these are the visuals that work because they give us, the 21st century audience, the right associations and vibes. But I think it makes sense in-universe, too. Because the Admonition isn't a video message or anything nearly as coherent. It draws on the memories, experiences, and thoughts of the person who receives it and creates visuals out of those.

And I think the version of the Admonition that we see is what Agnes sees. That's why it has animals and plants from Earth and a human embryo. Because if it was Oh's vision, "life begins" wouldn't necessarily conjure humans, even if they currently post the biggest threat where the development of artificial life is concerned. And then when Sutra melds with Agnes, it's her voice that reads out the message, which again makes it feel like the Admonition adapts to its recipient.

I it's entirely possible that the message Sutra took from the Admonition was deeply coloured by both Oh's interpretation and Agnes's devastation, but also by her own character. Sutra is shown to be manipulative and willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone for what she perceives as "saving her people". She even sacrifices Saga to make her fellow synths believe that the threat gainst their lives is so great it justifies any action they might take. (Which makes some sense, as her characterization, when you remember that her sister was killed by Starfleet and she was creted and taught by Soong and Maddox, neither of whom could be discribed as having great judgement, honestly...)

So, maybe, if, say, Data had accessed the Admonition directly, the message might have been less "You will have our protection. Your evolution will be their extinction. [Implied: We will make sure of it because it's the only possibility to protect you from the organics] and more "You will have our protection. Your evolution could be their extinction [so we will ensure that you can leave their plane of existence and join us/ make sure you and all of your offspring will be protected and be given a place in their society, if you wish.]"

It's definitely something to ponder!

Though I think I personally prefer the headcanon that the Admonition was created as a passive message, not as a thing with agency 🤔 Your interpretation is really cool and there is a lot of potential for stories and meta in there!

I just like the Lovecraftian implications. That seeing the Admonition could never be a truly positive experience for a non-synth, because they cannot understand what it's trying to tell them and get hurt in the process.

Even if it doesn't give you visions of Death, Destruction, and Apocalyptic undoing (because those might have been a Zhat Vash interpretation issue), it'll still be too vast and too much information to be processed by an organic (or semi-organic) brain. You'd be left knowing you have gotten a glimpse of something vast and fundamental, and so, so far beyond you. And you'd know you'll never be able to understand it or make real sense of any of it. That would probably drive anyone some flavour of mad, even if the unearthly glimpses they got weren't in and of themselves devastating. To say nothing of the damage this sort of overload would probably cause an organic brain...

Hmm according to Fandom Alpha, he mentioned that The Admonition:

“—was designed for synthetic minds, any organics attempting to access it could be driven to madness, self-harm, and suicide.”

So I wonder what would have happened if the Admonition was passed on to the Borg.

BTW, I still can’t believe that Ramdha’a supposed grief and despair was the reason for the submatrix collapse of the Artifact Cube.

Because the Borg have assimilated so many worlds, a billion minds filled with grief and despair as their lives were taken from them and their loved ones. It doesn’t make sense, it has to be something else.

I believe that Narissa believed it was because of Ramdha. But I personally don’t.

(The whole AI synthetic thing was too close to BSG and the one other game— I’m not on board with that part of the plot.)

But also, Romulans love their secrets too much that 80% of the time the cause of their own downfall.