Trek has from the very beginning had significant elements of showing societies where tech totally messed up their societies or their worlds because things went wrong.

It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.

I'll admit up front I've not read the Culture novels and am less likely to, now I read this article. But I've seen a lot of Star Trek.

It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.

In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.

I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team:

https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...

Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.

I didn't go into it much in the article but the Culture are very much not humans, although many of the species that went into them are human-ish - in the story where they encounter Earth, they mention having fewer toes and more finger joints than Earth-standard humans.

Also Banks would agree with you that the Culture does not fit with human nature - he has talked elsewhere (I think it's in the CNN interview I cite for one, but elsewhere too) about how fundamentally different they are in behavioral norms (partly due to extensive genetic engineering to change basic aspects of their cognition, which people may peg as dystopian but which Banks viewed as a positive thing).

Thanks. Yes, I guess if the book isn't about humans at all then he has the ultimate get-out clause with respect to the plausibility of utopia. It would be less interesting to me though. The interesting thing about post-scarcity utopias, to me, are questions like "would it work", "if yes how do we get there" and so on. Whether utopia would work for theoretical beings is ... well, it's sci-fi, so fine, whatever. But I guess it wouldn't have any relevance to questions of politics or ideology.

I think the question the series most addresses is "How do you manage a utopia?" and not "How do you get to a utopia for us, here, on Earth?" For instance there is a lot of thought given to how they resolve differences, how they deal with people who don't really like the utopia they live in, how do they deal with people's autonomy and freedom without harming others around them, etc. And so from that POV I think it is an interesting exploration of how and if people can live up to their ideals - how does the Culture justify taking action against neighbors in light of this radical view of freedom and autonomy? Can you ever truly live and let live, or is there a point where you NEED someone willing to get their hands dirty, etc.? I think all of those are things explored in the series.

But so much of our own politics and ideology is about the question of allocating resources - and that does not come up, because they have essentially an infinite amount. Nobody has private property, sure, but they have as much public property as they want, and so much of it that there's almost never any drive to compete for anything - attention, sure; favor, sure; but property, or money, or things, not really.

None of which is true in the real world, of course, and so yes I agree a lot of it does not really translate to "well, what do we do here and now?". It's more "What would we do if we got there?" I guess

Thanks again. I suppose in that case I'll read one of the books based on the recommendations in this thread.

I often think that in the west we're actually closer to a post-scarcity society than people tend to imagine. Yes I know, that seems radical and heartless: what about the poor? Well, there sure is still a gap between rich and poor, but when you drill in to the material gap between rich and average, it starts to look less interesting. Bill Gates wears the same clothes as the average middle class person, he uses the same technology, eats the same food, he has basically the same access to mobility (private jets and yachts being a small increase in convenience but not an increase in access to locations which is what really matters), he probably takes one or two vacations a year like an ordinary person and so on.

The big differentiators between the life of a reasonably well off middle class person and a billionaire are the size/quality of their house, possibly the education of their children (but even that's a rather nuanced question given the prevalence of scholarships and state funding), and ownership of private vehicles. Maybe a bit of jewellery or art that nobody can really tell apart from much cheaper pieces unless they're for some reason an expert. And of course how they spend their time: investing and philanthropy, but let's say that's not in and of itself a big change in quality of life.

In most other respects you wouldn't know the difference and certainly the number of ways the lives of the average person differs from those at the very top have shrunk dramatically since, say, the middle ages or the 19th century.

In this worldview current trends are a predictable consequence of post-scarcity society: the rise of things like Instagram influencers, a huge class of aimless 'elites' who invariably claim to have expansive yet vague social goals, the frequency of purity spirals and so on. When your material needs are all met, your society has failed at elevating other cultures to your levels of wealth (thinking here of "bringing freedom" to Iraq/Afghanistan etc), and your society has nowhere remaining to explore physically, what is there left to do than fight over power and attention? To the extent the Culture novels explore these themes, then I guess they would interest me indeed.

The elevator pitch for the Culture (the society the books are based around) is that it's a hyper advanced society governed/managed by Culture Minds (equally hyper advanced AIs) that are powerful enough to pay individual attention to each and every citizen. Citizens are just being sentient enough that call themselves "Culture citizens".

There's no centralized power stricture, or even a clear definition of what counts as Culture or not. If a certain society within the Culture thinks their ideals drifted too much, they can just pack up and declare "independence".

For individual citizens, they can pretty much do anything if they can convince someone (and only if they need resources). If they think it's not really a utopia, they're free to leave and join another society.

Most of the conflicts in the book happen because, in contrast to the Federation in Star Trek, the Culture actively tries to "improve" other civilizations they have a fundamental disagreement with, and how they try to not screw it up when there are equally powerful civilizations on the other side of the ideological divide.

So while you don't get the story of how the Culture came to be, you do see it contrasted with a bunch of societies they try to improve.

> It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.

For the most part Banks never writes a novel about the mainstream of Culture society because he admits in his own forewords and interviews that he can't imagine it (because humans may even be incapable of imagining true utopia) and what he can imagine wouldn't be a useful premise for the drama of a novel.

The novels are almost all entirely about exploring the flaws and the outskirts, the outsider perspectives on the Culture, the people that aren't happy inside the Culture and are looking for adventure or to leave or to fix something they found was broken about the Culture or at least a small part of it.

The difference between optimism and pessimism is that even in trying to find flaws, exploring the outskirts and the possible problems in intermediate spaces, Banks doesn't set out to tear down or destroy the Culture (though some of his unsuccessful protagonists may have that as a goal), but wonders how it enriches the Culture and how they would learn from their flaws/mistakes/imperfections, how they would use the loners and outcasts (as weapons, as players of games, as excuses and chances to grow and be better) that they don't always see eye to eye with, culturally speaking, but tolerate in their own strange ways.

A lot of the same applies to Star Trek, though often less intentionally self-aware as the Culture (but the Culture also has the benefit of learning from Trek and its flaws/mistakes). A lot of Star Trek is still a drama about how does a utopia confront its frontiers, its edges, its loners/rebels/outcasts, and most importantly its own flaws, and how does it use those conflicts to grow. (Even TNG/Voyager despite most of the problems being resolved by the end of a single episode, still have many great episodes about how the Federation isn't perfect/has room to grow.)

> It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.

I think this description is flawed both with respect to Star Trek and The Culture. Nobody is flawless in either one of them. On the contrary, the stories very often focus on the flaws of people in these societies, often exposed in the intersection of these societies and a messier outside world, but also within.

> In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human

TOS had a federation scientist introduce nazism on a planet because he thought it'd make them advance faster. DS9 showed a coup on Earth. There's been plenty of both internal strife and immoral behaviour showcased in Star Trek. A lot of the stories focus on overcoming their flaws, ranging from minor personality flaws, to outright bigotry (not just in the nazi example).

> The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.

Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason. And if it intentionally refuses to share, it will look cruel and oppressive.

The distinction between a "communist utopia" and capitalism falls apart the moment you posit near-or-full post-scarcity.

So the choice then becomes one of whether the society you show is post-scarcity or not.

> https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...

Consider that libertarianism started on the very far left: Joseph Dejacque, the founder of libertarianism, was an anarcho-communist who cheered on Proudhon's "property is theft" but denounced Proudhon for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian", because a vision of maximal freedom that is positive and founded on an idea of eventually being capable of meeting all human needs will tend towards depicting a future where those needs are met for everyone.

> Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.

The challenge is that it gets harder and harder to create a positive depiction of a future with more and more material wealth that still chooses to leave some portion of society behind in scarcity. If everyone is "rich" then the distinguishing elements of such a society between socialism and capitalism becomes fewer and fewer until they become invisible.

Star Trek TOS is pretty different, yes. Like I said, Roddenberry changed personally a lot between TOS and TNG. The show was most explicitly communist when he was in charge, so, TNG and shows very similar to it like Voyager. DS9 did develop more plausible story lines in which the Federation was presented differently and they deserve credit for that, but they had to violate some of Roddenberry's rules and vision for the show in order to do so. Their escape clause was that DS9 heavily featured non-Federation races.

TNG was definitely the peak of this. The crew of the Enterprise in that show don't turn on each other, make mistakes or do dumb stuff. This was an explicit rule by Roddenberry: in his utopia Federation officials never fought each other. The writers called it "Roddenberry's Box" because it was such a limiting rule, and the Box is why so many episodes feature mind-controlling aliens of various kinds.

Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason

I don't think this is true, see my other comments on this thread. Trek-style post scarcity where material things are non-scarce still doesn't cover anything non-replicable like people's time and attention, and by implication, service industries.

Until there is sci-fi that explains how a society eliminates scarcity of non-physical things like status, power and attention, the future will remain capitalist by default.

> I don't think this is true, see my other comments on this thread. Trek-style post scarcity where material things are non-scarce still doesn't cover anything non-replicable like people's time and attention, and by implication, service industries.

I think this stems from an idea of what socialism involves that even Marx would have dismissed as irrelevant and utopian.

In fact, Marx railed relentlessly against the notion of socialism/communism ending all inequality. One of the more famous cases of that being in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he criticises what became the SPD for even talking about "equality" without defining it precisely. This is where the (Bolshevik) distinction between socialism and communism comes from, though Marx talked about the "lower" and "higher" stages of communism, and argued that the lower would explicitly retain a lot of inequality, and that anything else would be unfair because people have different needs, and so inequality is according to Marx a pre-requisite for a fair society.

The point he made was that the goal was not to give everyone everything for free - instead he explicitly pointed to a then well established slogan: "from each according to ability, to each according to their need". The point being that his expectation - one he stated explicitly in the Critique - was that there would very much still be an exchange where peoples access to that seemingly endless material wealth is contingent on their participation in doing their bit keeping society running. He did not expect a true post-scarcity society, but one that met sufficient needs to eradicate class struggle, but which at the same time still had a need for people to work.

In that respect, the Federation strongly imply it goes further than Marx, in work being implied to be fully voluntary, and I do think we can agree there are plenty of unaddressed issues there. Though I think it's not that substantial, in that there's are many other ways of providing rewards than through material wealth, and there's nothing incompatible with socialist thinking in that.

My point, though, is that you have socialism and communism long before you get to that stage. Eradicate class struggle by eradicating the ability of anyone to monopolise production, and you have communism, irrespective of the specific details of how allocation of resources is arranged. Which is why you'll find communist ideologies that advocate for free market models and the like as the best means of making such a system work.

Will there still be exchanges of value? Sure. But those exchanges will necessarily look very different when everyone has the ability to access sufficient material wealth to be able to walk away from any transaction without fear of starvation or not having anywhere to live. That freedom is the point, not some notion of absolute equality in all things or entirely eradicating money.

And that is why I'm arguing that any sufficiently utopian/post-scarcity society will seem socialist. Not because there's no exchange of value at the margins, but because it's a small enough part of the lives of the typical person that being constrained by resources rarely comes up.

Did you watch the ending of Discovery?

What about Amazon and their business practices makes you think "positive change"?

Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?

Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.

Depends on how you look at it. It's tech that has allowed millions to work from their homes during a pandemic, something that has saved thousands of lives that would not have been saved if those people had to go out and mingle among society. It's tech that made a new vaccine possible and that's why humanity had a vaccine for a pandemic in months.

Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.

Do insects have some sort of intrinsic value that must be preserved at any cost to mankind?

Does mankind have intrinsic value? And my direct answer to your direct question yes, insects have more intrinsic "value" for the ecosystem of this planet compared to humans, one of the first proofs is the fact that they've been in here for longer than we (or even the mammals) have.

I hate arguments from nature. We’re not doing anything out of the ordinary compared to insects. If you transplant a species of insects like say the emerald ash borer they can be just as destructive to the ecosystem as humans, probably more so because they can’t reason about their behaviour and decide to change it to avoid ecological disaster. The history of the world is full of extinctions, the benefit of being human is we can choose not to act like any other invasive species or new mutation, we can choose the path that allows for human flourishing along with good stewardship of the planet. The best thing for both would probably be to accelerate our move off of this world and only come back for vacations and to prevent the odd “natural” extinction event.

Nobody is here longer than anybody, we are all part of the same unbroken genetic chain Humanity has value to humanity, value to life as a whole is determined by which species survive to carry on, if insects dont then they werent all that valuable

Mankind exists to serve itself, not the ecosystem.

> Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology.

s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint.

No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology.

Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.