© 2009 G.N. Jacobs
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Is Greed Good? Dunno! Enjoy Part 1!
A world without greed or money sounds tempting to those of us that play Bill Roulette every month waiting for the check or PayPal transfer to clear. When Gene Roddenberry dreamed up the Federation in 1964 for the upcoming pilot of Star Trek, he made a statement about his belief in the improvability of humanity. Greed, war, disease, racism, hatred and ignorance had largely been made into lessons from history books, until, of course, the intrepid crew discovers these concepts lurking among the stars.
Considering the times in which Roddenberry wrote; such optimism represents a plea for the sanity to make it through the next 40 years. That the world still more or less looks like the one that existed in 1964 is a tragedy best discussed in another rant, but we did, at least, avoid giving ourselves a Darwin Award during that time. But, for those of us that pay attention to the thought carried underneath the phasers, ship battles, green-skinned Orion slave girls and William Shatner’s over-emphatic delivery of his speeches, we have always asked how did the Federation become such a paradise?
We didn’t get much of an answer until Star Trek: The Next Generation. Roddenberry and the army of writers tasked with making the vision work on screen gave us two key pieces of technology that if made manifest really would change our understanding of economies. Behold an improved transporter and, wait for it, a matter replicator. For the three of us that have never whispered “Beam me up, Scotty” into our cell phones in hopes of dodging Johnson from Accounting, the transporter is a magic poof you are there device and the replicator is a magic I want stuff and it appears box in every cabin on the ship.
So how did these magic boxes change a capitalist society into the assumed perfection of a quasi-socialist society fueled not by money and gain, but personal growth? Well, both devices as a matter of physics represent near total control of the building blocks of the Universe, matter and energy. Such control eliminates the artificial scarcities that drive most economies. The transporter really screws the Teamsters out of jobs, because why put foodstuffs, computer parts or even yourself on a vehicle that may crash if you can just beam it there? The replicator replaces every factory that ever existed and with widespread distribution throughout the Federation completes the death of the transportation industry started by the transporter.
For dramatic reasons the writers limited the transporter to distances of only a planetary scale, as it is much more interesting to see battles between ships mixed with raygun fights between people then to have only one type of fight. For instance, Stargate SG-1 started out as a show with a long-range transporter metaphor with the star gate system, but still added starships by the fourth season. But, concessions to drama aside, planetary scale transporters still represents a sea change in how people get the food and stuff they need to live, eliminating the need for a gain based economy.
BREAK FOR PART 2 (Got nothing here!)
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