A big part of the original concept of Trek was to be a very avant-garde thought experiment about how our institutions and culture really could look quite different in the future in ways that are hard to picture now. Roddenberry himself was kinda nuts and I don’t think had a coherent picture of what that could look like, but he did at least sort of try to keep the thread of this through Trek. But with TNG and later stuff, the writers just did not seem that interested in exploring how the basic institutions of society itself could change and turned it into a fun geopolitics in space with an optimistic/hopeful spin show. Love the espionage episodes, very fun, but even by middle of TNG it’s hard to recognize the show in terms of its attitudes towards political economy. You can see this shift in the attitude towards money. Money references become more and more common the closer to the present you get, because the social milieu changed and it became harder to talk about a society without money. So they stopped. Now they’re just vague about it.
Anyways, I think that anodyne posi-posi utopia idea kind of worked in context with Roddenberry’s original thought experiment, although it was never realistic (“we all became socialist because the Vulcans showed up and logic’ed us out of capitalist imperialism” it would be nice if it worked like that, huh?) but as later writers decided they wanted to do something different, that energy stopped mattering so much. Now it’s just limiting.
A big part of the original concept of Trek was to be a very avant-garde thought experiment about how our institutions and culture really could look quite different in the future in ways that are hard to picture now. Roddenberry himself was kinda nuts and I don’t think had a coherent picture of what that could look like, but he did at least sort of try to keep the thread of this through Trek. But with TNG and later stuff, the writers just did not seem that interested in exploring how the basic institutions of society itself could change and turned it into a fun geopolitics in space with an optimistic/hopeful spin show. Love the espionage episodes, very fun, but even by middle of TNG it’s hard to recognize the show in terms of its attitudes towards political economy. You can see this shift in the attitude towards money. Money references become more and more common the closer to the present you get, because the social milieu changed and it became harder to talk about a society without money. So they stopped. Now they’re just vague about it.
Anyways, I think that anodyne posi-posi utopia idea kind of worked in context with Roddenberry’s original thought experiment, although it was never realistic (“we all became socialist because the Vulcans showed up and logic’ed us out of capitalist imperialism” it would be nice if it worked like that, huh?) but as later writers decided they wanted to do something different, that energy stopped mattering so much. Now it’s just limiting.