youcouldwinahabit replied to your post: What is it with people in the future o…
i find this kind of thing deeply fascinating. it’s actually because writers in the 80s literally could not conceive of modern data storage and sharing methods. nobody expects the spanish cloud storage.
I was watching a B5 episode and the guy had stolen a data crystal that the government really wanted back, but…shouldn’t they worry that he’s had plenty of time to copy it and pass on the information? They had floppy disks in the 90s; it’s not that hard to copy them.
And there was another episode where they caught some criminal who was later taken away along with his records, but isn’t that the sort of thing it’s just sensible to keep a backup copy of? I don’t understand. Data doesn’t vanish if you copy it. Make a copy! Make ten copies! It’s the future! And even twenty years ago, if wasn’t that alien a concept to keep backups, surely? (With much earlier shows I get it, the technology just wasn’t there. But even more recent ones seem to fall into a “there can only be one copy of this data” sort of mindset.)
I started writing and then I veered a little, but maybe you will find this interesting anyway.
I find myself thinking, sometimes, that the people who write the future do so with extreme nostalgia for the past. They think, “Well, the future is going to be better. What do I think of when I think of ‘better’? When I was younger.” I don’t think this is actually a conscious decision, but I think it sort of explains why we don’t see people with their own fucking personal communication other than the crews of these places. The people writing these shows did not grow up with cellphone technology, so it’s not natural for them to think of it as enduring. There may also be a kind of bias involved. The things happening now are just fads, they won’t last. But what you have had for 30 years? That’s Enduring. That’s Classic. That will make it to the future.
Star Trek often feels like the white picket fence world of the future to me, because we never hear about people watching TV or playing video games. They all read, play instruments, drink tea, play a sport. Characters who are famous actors do their acting on stage, rarely film or tv. Older things are seen as more legitimate in a lot of media, I think. It’s why we still have fucking songs talking about people having records. CDs and mp3s players aren’t romantic and timeless enough to the people writing the stories/songs.
So I think this is all part of it, somehow. In the memories of the people writing these shows, data could not be doubled or replicated quickly, and even if they’re perfectly capable of seeing that it is possible NOW (and they may have in fact done so with the very writing they’re making), there’s some kind of idyllic thing in the backs of their minds that keeps them from ever considering it. They may even be responding to wanting to write things like what they fell in love with growing up. A bit like the reverse of all those posts you see on Tumblr of people saying, “I can’t watch this old movie because I just can’t stop being frustrated that they’d solve the entire plot if someone just had a cellphone.”
We see bits of things breaking free of this here and there - Vir playing a video game, Quark and his family singing an advertising jingle in DS9, Garibaldi watching TV and following a sports team (90s ones, though, I hasten to add), Julian Bashir playing in the holosuites like it’s World of Warcraft - but I don’t feel like ‘the future’ has been shown to us in a way that accurately pictures it any longer because of a combination of idyllic nostalgia and the audience’s weak suspension of disbelief. Sci-fi lately seems to suffer from a fear of being too ridiculous, I think. When Star Trek was made, things were so bright and starry regarding the future that they just made up any old fantastic thing and it was all equally (im)plausible. Now we’ve made (and bettered) so much of the technology from the original show that most of it looks laughable. Writers may be aiming to not look trendy OR ridiculous while deciding that audiences want less wonder, more realism. So now all our sci-fi and fantasy is post-apocalyptic bombed out wastelands.
And no one has a goddamn cellphone.