RAMBLE CITY WARS: EPISODE V: CAPITALISM STRIKES BACK

[Weltall]

I know exactly how the Federation works: It operates on the assumption that nobody cares anything for personal or material gain. You do whatever it is you do for the challenge and thrill of it. Which is wonderful until you realize that there are a lot of people in Star Trek who have shitty jobs to do, which they do usually without complaint. Note also how civilians dress in Star Trek: plain, dull clothing. Can't tell anyone apart. No one wants to be an individual. Nobody reads anything but what we today, 400 years in the past, consider dusty old classics. Riker listens to jazz, which makes him something of a rebel because how often does anyone else listen to anything but classical music? Nobody is creative. There is never any depiction of modernity whatsoever in Star Trek except for technology. It's as if humanity ceased creative development in the mid-1960s.

Even the technological gap seems less and less amazing. When you take away the stuff that is based clearly on nonsense or wild theory, we really haven't advanced very much in 400 years, and almost everything that is plausible is already on the drawing board somewhere in the world. 400 years from now, we should be millennia ahead, technologically, from what we see in Star Trek's 24th century.

For all these reasons, I've come to strongly dislike Star Trek. It's been perpetuated, for decades, by people with awfully stunted visions of the future. The real future is going to be vastly more compelling.