vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


twitter (inactive)
twitter.com/vogon
bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

vogon
@vogon

the revelation at the end of the star trek: voyager episode "author, author" that the federation operates a dilithium mine with a facility-wide holomatrix capable of projecting hundreds of clones of an obsolete medical hologram to serve as servant laborers breaking rocks, who nevertheless get a quota of leisure time in the holodeck to play through clandestinely-distributed holonovels that reveal to them the fact that they're an oppressed class, is truly one of the most baffling attempts at ending a television show with an uplifting social message that I've ever seen


vogon
@vogon

also having the whole stirring "measure of a man" arc where it looks like the show is winding up to establish once and for all that yes, holograms are people, only for the verdict to be "well uhhhhhhhh we're not gonna decide whether holograms are people today, but also they can hold copyright in creative works so we're ceasing all future distribution of The Doctor's holonovel, except there's thousands of copies of it out in the wild anyway and also we need to hint at it starting a peasant revolt in the outro so [shrug] you figure it out man", is hilariously deflating


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @vogon's post:

It doesn't make sense as a good ending to the story, and it also doesn't make sense in universe either. It's a computer that projects force fields that they are using to mine, so they have it pretend to be pickaxes? That's just silly.

in reply to @vogon's post:

It kinda does and doesn't in Picard. Spoilers aside, the backmatter implies that holo-workers basically fell out of favor, then a general backslide in progress against artificial beings happened for Reasons, though it is reversed by the end of the season with a full press for synthetic-rights happening in the background of season 2 (though the thread is pretty much dropped because of everything else that happens, and it remains to be seen if it'll be picked up again in S3).

In star trek online, which bills itself as taking place in the prime timeline, photonic rights are conditional on passing a "sentience test" based on the Doctor, otherwise they're still considered property.

I recently wrote about this broad issue in a blog post about Elementary, Dear Data. In a lot of ways, that episode planted seeds that managed to break almost everything produced since, in some way. "Yeah, our computers create conscious beings. And instead of grappling with the ethical issues of using them for entertainment, we're going to just pretend that this is normal, and use them as a slave race." And then they launched Picard by telling us that the Federation ethnically-cleansed all the "synthetics," and...then we never talked about it again. Hooray?