@zcaudate: If.. I can just get through today.. can think about & discuss these fun ideas... 🙂

getting through today... it's monday - the struggle is real over here

Yeah, had to work through the entire weekend, due to mis-planning.

But fortunately everything's turning out reasonably well, I think.

@zcaudate: I think optimistic futurism's nice, because it sucks when pessimistic future visions resonate better. 🙂 Like: - cyberpunk (punk has a core of "no future". Cyberpunk tech is the opposite of liberatory & imaginative: violence & control.) - frankenstein (our creations lead to apocalypse, like in Battlestar Galactica and climate change)

Is Star Trek about human races united to effectively fight a bigger racial conflict? Resonates in the US, where modern racism was invented, because race is fundamentally about "unifying" cultures by messily lumping them together into abstract competing races. Though real-world racial partitions shift with politics, Star Trek and Tolkien's novels can actually portray the racial ideal of distinct humanoid species, with different attitudes because of genetics, not environment. (And of course, we see common racial stereotypes, like how the Ferengi are basically goblins, regardless how they're used as satire about US cultural obsessions with acquiring wealth...)

I think Star Trek's useful in discussing political economies of the future: > "should we be moving toward what Novara, the media initiative that emerged from the 2010 student movement, began cheerfully referring to as FALC—or Fully Automated Luxury Communism—encouraging technologies like 3-D printing to aim for a world of Star Trek–style replicators where everything is free?" http://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber Also, this weekend I re-read a detailed, creative re-imagining of the Federation as a Participatory Economy.

Though I personally think this is the closest to the actual Star Trek, when you look at it: "an Americanized version of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, and above all, one which actually worked..." https://books.google.com/books?id=HFtABAAAQBAJ&pg=PT120&dq=graeber+star+trek+kinder+gentler+soviet+union

I hope that maybe answered your question? 🙂 What are your thoughts on Star Trek? (Everyone else is of course welcome to share their thoughts!)