• Buffalox@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Sundray@lemmus.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        '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.” ’

      • positiveWHAT@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.

        • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Musk would definitely be the guy operating a digital hell for everyone who buys his neural backup products and doesn’t pay a monthly fee to opt out.

        • Sundray@lemmus.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.)

          • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net
            1·
            1 year ago

            Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

            His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

    • stinerman@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      People fail to realize that we’re in the mirror universe and the universe Star Trek exists in is the unattainable utopia.

      • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.