Star Trek Economics

Interesting, and part of why it always rang false for me. I buy Babylon 5's view of us as more realistic where people are still people. To achieve a working Star Trek world requires the same thing Communism would require to work: beings who may look like people but do not react like people. [Link]

The notion that eliminating material scarcity will lead people to live lives of self-improvement is psychological, not economic. Even back in the 1960s, people were familiar with Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs”: the theory that people have different “levels” of needs, and that a person must fulfil one level of needs before he or she can move on to addressing the next level.

According to the hierarchy of needs, a person must first deal with meeting physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst, and sleep. Once those are met, the next most pressing set of needs are safety needs: shelter, health, family, and property. Once those are met, a person can move on to love, self-esteem and finally “self-actualisation”: the enriching of the self.

Maslow’s hierarchy has long been a favorite of pop-psychologists and has been used and abused in both fiction and journalism since the 1940s. But it is fairly clear, even just from the language that he uses, that Roddenberry is inspired by conceptual framework of the hierarchy. If human endeavours are seen as advancing up this noble ladder of advancement, then any society where all of the basic low-level needs are bet would obviously be left to while away their time exclusively on love, self-esteem, and self-actualisation.

We can even speculate about how this might have happened. From the very beginning, the Star Trek universe had the “transporter”: a machine that could turn any physical object into energy, and transmit that energy (or at least information about the original pattern) across space so that energy could then be converted into that same physical form at the destination.

A natural extension of this technology is the “replicator”, which essentially is nothing more than the receiving end of a transporter. This object simply has patterns for different types of physical objects stored in memory, and can create, on demand, any physical object from energy based on these patterns.

If you can make anything you want out of energy, and you have all of the energy in the universe at your disposal, then presumably you can have any physical thing that you want.

There are details, of course. Manual labor hasn’t been eliminated, because presumably someone has to operate the replicators, and move their products from place to place. One can only assume that large objects would have to be created in parts, and then human labor would be needed to assemble those parts.

We can also assume that these people would not need to be paid to perform this labour, because they already are having all of their physical needs met. Why do they perform this labour, then? Clearly they are motivated to assemble the large object – whatever it is – out of their sense of duty and their desire to improve humanity.

It’s all very tidy. But is that how people really work?

Teletubbies as Wells' Eloi

Teletubbies as utopia. [Link]

It seems clear from the world of the Teletubbies that, whether alien or posthuman, they come from a technologically advanced culture. Like the Borg they have assimilated technological devices into their own bodies, but unlike the wholly technological/artificial worlds of the Borg they have chosen to inhabit an environment shaped largely by the aesthetics of the natural world. We have, then, a disparity between (on the one hand) the high degree of intelligence and technological know-how needed to build the ’tubbies home, their automated toasters and vacuum-cleaners, the periscopes, the broadcasting tower and all that; and (on the other) the evident puerility and immaturity of the Teletubbies themselves. Rather that reading this in terms of parental abandonment, I suggest a reading more in keeping with the traditions of SF.

The Teletubbies, I’d suggest, are contemporary versions of Wells’s Eloi, those indolent foppish creatures from The Time Machine. Indeed, they are a more thoroughly-worked through rendering of the Eloi mode of life. Where Wells saw his Eloi as adults, still capable despite their degeneracy of adult pastimes (so that Wells’s time traveller is for instance able to have sex with the Eloi Weena), the Teletubbies inhabit a more self-consistent vision of complete degeneracy.

Let’s put it this way: imagine a culture that develops such sophisticated technical prostheses that its inhabitants no longer need to work, to worry, to strive in any way. Imagine those inhabitants, through choice or through evolutionary pressure, losing all stress-related functions of adult consciousness: work-ethic, conscience, guilt, lust, anger, avarice. Imagine them, in other words, regressing back wholly to a toddler’s existence, finding in that simplicity a maximum fit between existence and stress-free-satisfaction, like those German 40-something businessmen who like dressing in nappies and rolling around on the carpets of speciality brothels. Or, in fact, not like those men, because (unlike the Eloi) the Teletubbies have discarded the sex impulse as well, abandoning with it the dangerously fretful anxiety-gratification ratio of adult sexual life.

The machines in Teletubbyland, in other words, are the devices necessary to free mankind from its attachment to the adult world of necessity, provision and work. And once freed from those constraints, the show suggests, evolution or choice leads life back into the calm, bright satisfactions of toddlerdom. The Teletubbies are purer Eloi than the Eloi, a more complete rendering of the old SF convention about degeneration. Wells characterised his Eloi as child-like in some respect, but adult-like in others (physical appearance, sexual appetite). Huxley’s Brave New World also posited human global happiness upon an infantilisation of the human animal, although his future humans are also adult in appearance and physical appetite.