The Borg
It is interesting to note the perspective of the narrater, who is totally "assimilated" into the Star Trek multiverse. He sees the Borg threat as a symbolic treatment relationship between humanity and technology.
According to the narrator, the Borg represent the perfect foil for the values represented by the "good guys" in the Star Trek Franchise: freedom, diversity, individuality. In fact, these values can be recognized as uniquely American. The premise of this blog is that the threat to these values does indeed come from technology, but there is no need for technology to be particularly advanced. The first time that assimilation appeared in history on a frightening scale, it was enabled by the expert bowman riding on horseback.
Conquerors soon learned to to enslave their victims instead of killing them. Fredrick W. Taylor, the first management consultant and inventor of the assembly line put this explicitly. His contempt for "freedom, diversity and individuality" was visceral:
'I can say, without the slightest hesitation,' Taylor told a congressional committee, 'that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is ... physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.
Treating human beings as agricultural machinery (slaves) was hardly new to America. But Taylor generalized and crystallized the concept for the industrial age. The importance of human beings was to be interchangeable cogs in an industrial machine, whose purpose was to create things efficiently at the lowest possible cost.
In the alarmingly shallow world of Star Trek, the future of the human race is depicted as exploring the "final frontier" in a flying first class hotel. Manufacture of anything has mysteriously disappeared, but our heroes are still armed with devastating personal weaponry and post-nuclear destructive "photon torpedoes". Their peaceful exploration "where no man has gone before" includes a weapons officer on deck at all times.
The crew survives to fight another battle each week by means of clever battle strategy, often laughably connected to some last-minute flourish of "out of the box" thinking. The enemy is never presented as having "freedom, diversity or individuality". They are exterminated like rats. The original series aired during the Viet Nam war, where the average American assumed that victory in war validated the goodness of the victor. They were in for a shock.
Star Trek is about expanding American "freedom, diversity and individuality" throughout the galaxy at the point of a gun. Back home in the real world, the real Borg (corporations and armed forces) are granted legal personhood and assimilation proceeds unchecked.
In the alarmingly shallow world of Star Trek, the future of the human race is depicted as exploring the "final frontier" in a flying first class hotel. Manufacture of anything has mysteriously disappeared, but our heroes are still armed with devastating personal weaponry and post-nuclear destructive "photon torpedoes". Their peaceful exploration "where no man has gone before" includes a weapons officer on deck at all times.
The crew survives to fight another battle each week by means of clever battle strategy, often laughably connected to some last-minute flourish of "out of the box" thinking. The enemy is never presented as having "freedom, diversity or individuality". They are exterminated like rats. The original series aired during the Viet Nam war, where the average American assumed that victory in war validated the goodness of the victor. They were in for a shock.
Star Trek is about expanding American "freedom, diversity and individuality" throughout the galaxy at the point of a gun. Back home in the real world, the real Borg (corporations and armed forces) are granted legal personhood and assimilation proceeds unchecked.
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