Why Do Tech Billionaires Love Star Trek? SCRIPT (Patreon)

Hey all, here's a script for a new video! I'm gonna be filming it in the coming days. It covers SOME of the same ground as the recent Ferengi video, especially in terms of establishing neoliberalism within Star Trek - but goes in a wildly different direction. It's sort of a sister video to the Ferengi one - a bit more dystopic, but I'm going to be releasing it BEFORE the Ferengi one so as to have that be the more uplifting follow-up. Excited to hear what y'all think. Also, credit to Aranock for script editing on this one. 

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Why do Silicon Valley billionaires love Star Trek so damn much?

Sure, they’ve got other sci-fi side flings. Mark Zuckerberg swiped “metaverse” from Snow Crash—a book where the metaverse is literally the villain, which is kind of like naming your new daycare Jurassic Park.  And, as the San Francisco Standard recently revealed, a bunch of top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—including ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman—are obsessed with the Bobiverse books by Dennis E. Taylor. You know, that heartwarming series about a sentient, immortal AI based on the uploaded brain of a giant Trekkie engineering nerd. Yeah… no clue why they like that one…

But Star Trek just hits different, ya know? The richest of the rich adore it—like it’s a luxury brand for billionaires, the Rolex you can only wear if you’ve launched at least one phallic-shaped rocket. And they don’t just like it—they name-drop it constantly, evangelize it, and treat it like a brand extension of themselves. Bill Gates once dressed as Spock to launch a version of Windows. Jeff Bezos almost named Amazon MakeItSo.com (yes, really) and keeps a model of the USS Enterprise in a Blue Origin lobby like a holy relic. And both Bezos and Elon Musk claim Star Trek inspired them to get into tech—as if ‘seek out new life and new civilizations’ really meant ‘seek out new markets and destabilize them.’ Musk even wore a Starfleet Academy patch during the 2024 US election - you know the one he openly admitted to illegally interfering with. 

 [clip - https://x.com/america/status/1850340249362125038 - Elon Musk - “I was wearing this jacket that was given to me by the Space Force. You know, its got Star Trek Enterprise on it. It’s like Starfleet Academy. We want to make Starfleet Academy real.”]

Then he hopped on his 'white genocide is real' app to reiterate:

“Let’s make Starfleet Academy real.”

And on the surface, they seem to love Star Trek for the same reason a lot of people do, including me: that its one of the few pop-culture depictions of the future that’s optimistic—not another fascism-in-space apocalypse, but a vision where humanity gets its act together, beyond war, beyond poverty, and went to the stars. 

[https://youtu.be/oH8BchSp0H8?si=80HI7NrXgGAKE0lT - @ 0:34 - ELON MUSK: “I like Star Trek because it shows more of a utopian future. It's not like things are horrible in the future. There are so many bloody post-apocalyptic futures today, can we have one that’s nice?”]

And we do, rightly, like to laugh at them for it. I mean, don’t they know Star Trek hates billionaires! Didn’t they hear Picard say they don’t use money anymore? Star Trek’s IS woke! It’s fully automated luxury gay space communism, babyyyyyyyy. 

[clip latest Game Changer season finale episode - Brennen Lee Muligan - “We’re going full Star Trek Luxury Gay Space Communism”]  

Hell, when Musk tweeted “let’s make Starfleet Academy real,” star of Star Trek Prodigy, Voyager, and the upcoming Starfleet Academy, Robert Picardo clapped back:

 “Step one: support a leader who embodies Starfleet values like diversity, inclusion, and ethical behavior.” 

And tons of people cheered at the god ol’ Doctor owning Musk like he was Janeway and Musk was a Tuvix. 

That one’s for you Trekkies.

Except… Picardo said that on Musk’s own platform—the one filled with Nazis, boosting white nationalism, and whose so-called AI is explicitly programmed to deny the genocide in Gaza. So sure, it was a fun dunk—but it was a dunk performed inside the billionaire’s sandbox, boosting his engagement. No matter how much we like to make fun of them not getting STAR TREK’s future, we’re currently living in theirs. Cue the Disco Elysium quote:

“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”

And Star Trek itself hasn’t exactly shunned these guys. Bill Gates visited the Star Trek: Enterprise set back in the early 2000s. Musk himself got mentioned in Star Trek Discovery twice, as a great man of history, and even literally got a school named after him. At least they mention it's an awful school. 

[clip of Star Trek Discovery S2E2 “NEW EDEN” @ 34:23 - COMPUTER: “Musk Junior High School, class of 2247… May: Stilly, what the heck? Youre moving again? Its only been six months. Youre the nicest person Ive ever met at this awful school.”] 

Bezos was literally in Star Trek Beyond, buried under unrecognizable latex prosthetics—finally giving him the chance to see what it’s like to work 12 hours in uncomfortable conditions for no credit. It’s a shame because it means one of my favorite Trek movies has a jump scare. On that note, though, since 2009, Star Trek films have been produced by David Ellison, CEO of Skydance and son of Oracle co-founder—and second-richest man alive—Larry Ellison. The same Larry Ellison who helped Musk buy Twitter “because it sounded fun,” sat on Tesla’s board for four years, is close friends with Donald Trump, and whose company stands to directly benefit from Trump’s AI and tech policies—including being the frontrunner to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations so the app can legally keep running here. These are the men who’ve bought the platforms where we meet and imagine the future—from social media to the internet to outer space—privatizing our collective dreams before we can make them real.

Now, Skydance just bought Paramount, which owns Star Trek, with funding from Larry Ellison himself. Skydance itself, in appeasement of the Trump administration’s fascist policies, appointed a new ‘ombudsman’ to keep the news from criticizing the administration and promised to kill the company’s already narrow diversity programs—the very thing Star Trek supposedly stands for. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. The thing I believe in so much it’s tattooed on my arms. And David Ellison himself is a huge Trek fan and has stated he wants to make Star Trek a priority for Skydance going forward. 

So if Star Trek was always intended not only to imagine something better, but to challenge the status quo and power of today, to be an anti-capitalist, inclusive socialist future—why are these guys obsessed with it? Do they not understand Star Trek? Or—when we smugly say they don’t get it—are we the ones missing something? What do they see in Star Trek? What does Star Trek see in them? And what does it tell us about what it means when our future - and our dreams for it - get bought?

===========[INTRO SEQUENCE]============

Star Trek is often directly cited as “anti-capitalist,” most especially early Next Generation under Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s direct influence. The first season finale, The Neutral Zone, which aired in May 1988, makes it quite blunt - a 20th-century capitalist wakes from cryogenic sleep convinced wealth equals power—only for Picard to tell him money and competition are relics of a less enlightened past. 

[clip - Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1 episode 26 The Neutral Zone @ 24:57 - Picard: A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, and the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy. RALPH: You've got it all wrong. It's never been about possessions. It's about power. PICARD: Power to do what? RALPH: To control your life, your destiny. PICARD: That kind of control is an illusion.]

Roddenberry himself overtly argued The Next Generation was a future where humanity had shed “a staggering burden of soon-to-be-outmoded values and political ideas, capitalistic and other economic assumptions, religious habits, Western industrial world prejudices, and so on.” Even the Ferengi, who were initially positioned as Trek’s new Big Bad as a replacement for the Klingons, were a caricature of ruthless, misogynistic profiteers—complete with literal phallic space whips. 

[clip - Star Trek The Next Generation season 1 episode The Last Outpost @ 37:50 FERENGI: “We Ferengi now challenge this human madness.” RIKER: I admit we withheld modern technology from some worlds. KAYRON: You see? They are demented. Their values are insane. You cannot believe the business opportunities they have destroyed.] 

However, the problem is that Star Trek has always remained vague about what materially replaced capitalism—no specifics on resource management, how needs are met, or what system replaced capitalism’s core split between private and public property. We get hints: Picard’s family vineyard or Joseph Sisko’s Creole restaurant suggest, as YouTuber Roman J. Coleman argues in his excellent How Star Trek’s Future Works series, some distinction between personal and public property, though the show never says it outright. As one biographer of Gene Roddenberry, Joel Engel, argued

 “...in his rush to perfect posterity, Roddenberry failed to delineate just what replaced these obsolete institutions.” The Federation promised a paradise free of poverty and prejudice, but the economic and political machinery stayed a black box, and its cultural center of gravity remained Western liberal humanism.”

After Roddenberry’s death, studio executive Rick Berman—whom Roddenberry had chosen to work with because they got along better than he did with most other Paramount executives—took over running the franchise. Unlike Roddenberry, who was a creative producer, Berman’s focus was on keeping Star Trek marketable. And functionally, that meant smoothing away anything too political or too challenging to modern-day audiences. The canonically gay characters Roddenberry long-promised never arrived, women were costumed and shot for “sex appeal,” and the Federation stayed squeaky-clean in ways that made brand managers happy. It was brand logic: protect the four-quadrant appeal. Not the cool “four galactic quadrants” kind—no, the boring marketing ones, where instead of boldly going where no one’s gone before, you boldly went wherever the cultural zeitgeist told you. And by the early ’90s in the US, that meant aligning with the era’s reigning ideology: neoliberalism.

Yeah, I know - I said one of the words on the leftist video essay bingo sheet. I hope you already covered the “late-stage capitalism mention” free space. But stick with me, I promise, we’ll get to sentient AI gods soon enough. But before then, we gotta deal with old-man Reagan. 

For the layman, neoliberalism was the late–20th–century makeover of democracy, recasting it around market logic. Competition, privatization, and deregulation weren’t just policies; they were treated like the natural order of the universe. It was sold as “common sense,” not as an ideology. Reagan pushed it in the U.S., Thatcher in the U.K., and then it spread worldwide—sometimes gently, sometimes at gunpoint. Media was one of its favorite tools, shaping which futures felt believable, or even worth dreaming about. And pretty soon, even the Democrats—supposedly Reagan’s opposition in the United States—were selling the same ideas.

[https://youtu.be/8EXNrdzwB4M?si=dH7hsNjfI6FfdQRB Bill Clinton @11:55 “To improve the state of our Union, we must ask more of ourselves, we must expect more of each other, and we must face our challenges together. Here, in this place, our responsibility begins with balancing the budget in a way that is fair to all Americans. There is now broad bipartisan agreement that permanent deficit spending must come to an end.”]

Neoliberalism became the overriding ideology of American culture, framing itself as antithetical to a collectivist socialist approach to a future. The same future Star Trek was supposedly about.. 

[Ronald Reagan - https://youtu.be/A8cF2S4QO_w?si=qC9ejWk8-ARQOMIy @ 18:44 “Our aim is to increase our national wealth so all will have more, not just redistribute what we already have which is just a sharing of scarcity. We can begin to reward hard work and risk-taking, by forcing this Government to live within its means.”]

For many Silicon Valley tycoons today, the same ideology at the heart of neoliberalism fuels their worldview. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen—co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful VC firms in the world—has poured more money into AI start-ups than almost anyone. In 2023, he published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a 5,000-word credo that reads like the Prime Directive rewritten by Gordon Gekko—if Gordon Gekko also wanted to make sweet, decon chamber-style love to a warp core. We’ll talk more about the manifesto later on - but at its core, it frames much of the same assumptions of neoliberalism. 

“Societies, like sharks, grow or die… we believe growth is progress… everything good is downstream of growth… Without growth comes stagnation… degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.”

Andreessen frames the free market as the ultimate expression of society that drives the utopian future neoliberalism promises, wrapped in American nationalism:

“We believe markets lift people out of poverty – in fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty, and always have been. Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat… leads to rapidly rising incomes… Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich everyone can get…. We believe America and her allies should be strong… national strength… flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power).”

He even echoes the logic that makes neoliberalism dovetail neatly with Star Trek’s collectivist sheen:

“We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes.”

Andreessen casts Silicon Valley’s billionaires as heroic captains—

“We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.”

They see themselves as the great men, the Luke Skywalkers, who enter the cave and return to change society for us - see my and Aranock’s video on Star Wars for more on that. It’s a creed, a demand for forward motion, an unshakable faith in their hand on the helm.

And despite its initial collectivist ideals under Roddenberry, Star Trek: The Next Generation gradually absorbed that neoliberal logic—shifting from celebrating science and collective problem-solving to centering risk-taking and individual success. Embraced great men on hero’s journeys. The episode Tapestry is a perfect example. It’s basically It’s a Wonderful Life if Clarence were your immortal, omnipotent, flirty gay boyfriend who likes to wear robes. Q gives Picard the chance to relive the day he was stabbed in a youthful bar brawl, avoiding the injury that changed his life. In the altered timeline, Picard is a perfectly respectable science officer—safe, cautious, and destined to stay middle management. To him, it’s a fate worse than death. 

[Star Trek The Next Generation Tapestry - PICARD: I can't live out my days as that person. That man is bereft of passion and imagination. That is not who I am.]

The moral is that greatness comes from bold, risky, even reckless, moves—the kind that might get you stabbed by a nine-foot–tall space biker who looks like they lost a bet with a dental surgeon but could also land you in the captain’s chair. It reframes Picard’s decisiveness, moral clarity, and willingness to stand for his principles —not as the result of belief in a collective, of learning from others and existing in community, but as rewards for being the “right” kind of man. 

[clip Star Trek The Next Generation Tapestry - Q: That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realised how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted for much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves…. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.]

It’s pure Reagan-era bootstraps logic, one that subtly casts every science officer as just a failed captain and equates success with prestige and authority. Even characters who once seemed content outside the chain of command, like Counselor Deanna Troi, were given arcs about earning promotions—where “growth” meant climbing toward command and proving you could make the “hard calls.” That mindset still lingers in Trek today, with Voyager’s Seven of Nine—once far more interested in science—eventually written toward captaincy as her “true” destiny in 2023’s Star Trek: Picard. It’s the same narrative that shapes Picard himself: the captain’s chair isn’t just a job, it’s the culmination of a life defined by decisive, risky moments that supposedly foreshadowed his greatness all along. And these so-called “great men” who embody that ideal have literally walked Picard’s halls—a decade before Gates or Bezos, Ronald Reagan himself toured the Enterprise set while still president. 

This is also why so many tech bros latch onto Captain Kirk specifically as their favorite captain. In December 2023, Elon Musk tweeted at William Shatner, “You will always be my Captain” after Shatner joked he should be the face of Twitter—while Bezos, after shooting Shatner up into orbit on his gleaming, overcompensating penis rocket, waited until the poor guy was trying to have a genuine, heartfelt moment, then whipped out a champagne bottle in his face and sprayed the 90-year-old down like he’d just conquered a woman in their frat-house.

[5 seconds of this clip- https://youtu.be/9GQoHIBDogU?si=xUqMe0J0nwmD0_5z ] 

They just wanna fuck Shatner, don’t they? 

[clip - STAR TREK GENERATIONS https://youtu.be/y8_oqgPwHfI?si=thLhV_QwLxgTa4lK Kirk “Oh my.”]

It’s okay, there were girls there. That makes it fine. Can’t risk even a flicker of “silly girl feelings” like genuine connection or shared joy with another man.

[CLIP Star Trek: The Original Series “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” ANDREA: No. Not programmed for you.]

Jokes aside, though—this moment really does read as homoerotic, because Bezos is treating Shatner the way these guys treat women, and really anyone they see as beneath them: as something to exploit, to perform dominance over, not as a human being to share a moment with. They can’t handle intimacy with another man unless it’s reframed around conquest, ego, or control. Tenderness isn’t allowed—it has to be victory.

But they idolize the character of Kirk because to them he's the ideoloized American man - the swaggering, gut-instinct cowboy—John Wayne in space. 

[CLIP https://youtu.be/gIU3HrCCT2k?si=yc6Cv57-eWo0UKYs Kirk - “RISK… RISK IS OUR BUSINESS.”] 

These qualities are especially emphasized in modern versions of Kirk, such as Chris Pine’s portrayal of the character in the Skydance films, which at least justifies this by depicting him as an alternate Kirk with a rougher childhood and an inexplicable love for the Beastie Boys. Picard’s the intellectual, Sisko’s the war prophet, Burnham’s the overachiever, Janeway’s the caffeine-fueled scientist, and Archer… Archer’s just happy to be here. But tech bros want the poker-playing, risk-drunk Kirk—someone who takes action for action’s sake. The guy they imagine themselves to be when Musk says

[Elon Musk @ 0:00 https://youtu.be/XfW5KNhyupE?si=vM37SzOASPhzuEpi “You have two choices - you can either be a spectator or a participant”] 

But in truth, the original Shatner Kirk often played chess and read books. 

[clip Star Trek The Original Series “Where No Man Has Gone Before” S1E3 @ 14:28 - Mitchell: “Hey man, I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs.”] 

He listened to intellectuals like Spock and thought before punching. The Kirk in tech-bro fantasies is a nostalgic monument to a man who never existed—a relic of the “real men take risks” era they’re convinced would be “canceled by the woke” today. Hell, Very Short Treks has already made that Boomer fanfic for them. 

[clip @ 1:27 -https://youtu.be/2xD7QCSjkBc?si=8Gb_slxwDNXl2mR6 - FAKE KIRK: “All right, everyone, I’m sorry, okay? It’s important that the Federation make all feel welcome, and I apologize. I’m a dumbass. I screwed up. ASSMAN: What? Asses are dumb to you? SCRWEMAN: Screws are synonymous with making mistakes? ]

This is the “great men of history” model in action—ambitious risk-takers drive society forward, and the rest of us get whatever trickles down from their greatness…. I probably could’ve phrased that better.

[Ronald Reagan - https://youtu.be/A8cF2S4QO_w?si=qC9ejWk8-ARQOMIy @ around 18:10  - “I urge those great institutions in America, business and labor, to be guided by the national interest, and I'm confident they will. The only special interest that we will serve is the interest of all the people. We can create the incentives which take advantage of the genius of our economic system—a system, as Walter Lippmann observed more than 40 years ago, which for the first time in history gave men "a way of producing wealth in which the good fortune of others multiplied their own.”]

In this way, Reagan echoed Thatcher’s insistence that neoliberalism was the natural order of Western civilization—but he wrapped it in distinctly American nationalism and exceptionalism. The message was that the United States wasn’t just good at capitalism, it was destined for it, and the marketplace was where we proved our strength to the world.

In Silicon Valley, that same narrative of natural evolutionary journey towards destiny is rooted entirely in one thing - technology. 

Tech billionaires see technology as the engine of civilization—past, present, and future. Take Elon Musk, who loves to muse about the cosmos in front of SpaceX rockets:

[Clip – https://youtu.be/7DPR9rzVCzk?si=jyHgjpND9NE7tISO @ 1:50] “I’m aware of no evidence of aliens whatsoever. Which means that we’re probably alone... When you think about how old civilization is, I think the right measuring point for civilization would be the advent of writing... So that’s only been around 5,000 years out of 4.5 billion years Earth has been around... All of human civilization is basically the blink of an eye... And I think that means consciousness is probably incredibly rare.”

Musk here is indirectly invoking the Fermi Paradox—the question of why, given the size and age of the universe, we haven’t found alien life. He concludes we’re probably alone because, by his definition, “civilization” starts with writing. Except that humans existed long before writing: Homo sapiens for 300,000 years, human ancestors for millions more, with rich oral traditions, environmental engineering, and complex societies. Western science dismissed all that as “prehistory,” a colonial framing that Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “the production of silence”:

“Western narratives often denied agency to non-Western peoples by casting them as people without history or as steps behind a Western model of progress.”

In the 19th century, anthropology formalized this as unilinear cultural evolution—civilization as a single track ending in white, Western modernity. Star Trek often mirrors this, treating history as a conveyor belt toward the same utopia and even framing biological evolution as preordained. Think Voyager’s “Threshold,” where Paris “evolves” into a salamander after hitting Warp 10, or TNG’s “Genesis,” where a virus makes the crew “devolve.” Both treat evolution as destiny rather than adaptation over generations.

This thinking hardened into the “civilizing mission”—Kipling’s “white man’s burden”—justifying conquest, land theft, enslavement, and the violent erasure of cultures deemed “not yet ready” until they resembled their colonizers.  It’s the same logic echoed in bigotry used to justify settler colonial projects even now, like Israel’s justification of its genocide of Palestinians through the lie that they are a primitive, inferior culture who are, in their logic, less human. 

[clip- https://youtube.com/shorts/1bJsSFeDN1M?si=NNEOaYaQT_qovUUX Asmondgold:  “They are not the same as us. They come from an inferior culture that is horrible, it kills people for their identity and is directly antithetical to everything Western values stand for, and it is an inferior culture in all ways. It is that simple. No, I don’t feel bad for them, I don’t feel sorry for them. I don’t care.]

While the term prehistory, with our increasing awareness that it reinforces colonial hierarchies, hasn’t been entirely discarded, today most archaeologists define history not by the presence of writing but by evidence—material, cultural, and environmental. Despite this, the mindset still shapes how we think about progress today.  It’s the same moral sleight of hand that would later be used to justify capitalism: the “CEO burden to uplift the American working man by exploiting them” is just the repackaged “white man’s burden” for the modern racist. Capitalism is the inheritor of colonialism’s logic of time and progress as justification for exploitation and conflict. Violent conflict is also in part why Star Trek can appeal to both progressives and conservatives- as TikToker Seth Dunkin explains perfectly.

[Clip @ 0:58 - https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6yVJ16n/  “So war is hell. I don’t think anyone would consider that statement to be controversial. But American conservatives tend to see the world in a very dog-eat-dog kind of way. They tend to consider it an axiom that all life forms are doomed to compete with each other for access to hopelessly limited natural resources or to advance their bespoke ideologies… and because they consider violence inevitable, they take pride in preparing themselves for it… Most of the conservatives that I’ve ever met think that that’s the way it should be, for as long as possible, and at any cost… Put Starfleet in a tactical situation, and you’ll have most American conservatives eating out of Gene Roddenberry’s hand.]

Star Trek may not be a war story, but war is always looming in the background, be it from the Klingons, the Borg, the Dominion, the Borg again, the Breen, the Borg again or the totally not a poorly handled metaphor for Al Qaeda [broll of the Xindi from Enterprise].  Despite Starfleet’s pacifist claims, it’s still the Federation’s military—and it’s damn good at violence when it needs to be. They don’t want war, but if it comes, you’ve got the biggest ship and the moral high ground. That’s a very American worldview: like the Federation, America should prove its strength, take the lead, and set the terms for everyone else.  Speak softly, carry a photon torpedo. This fits in neatly with political capitalists' ideas that endless competition is necessary for and inherent to societal progress. Competition, they assert, forces innovation, evolution, and growth. It's an overlap of colonial and capitalistic mindsets - one building out of the other. 

So while money supposedly doesn’t exist in the Federation, the cracks show whenever the story brushes against material life. The Federation bids for wormholes [broll from the TNG episode TNG - The Price], negotiates trade agreements that benefit itself, licenses Quark’s bar, 

 [clip from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 4 episode 16 Bar Association @ 25:00 - “SISKO: Maybe I don't know much about Ferengi culture but I do know who holds the lease on your bar. QUARK: The Federation. And I couldn't ask for better landlords. ]

and exerts soft power that steers other planets’ economies into alignment with its own standards. Take how Chief O’Brien—the most important man in Starfleet, who is upgrading a space station once engineered by the Cardassians for another non-Federation government, the Bajorans—has no idea what a “self-sealing stem bolt” is used for, despite it being a common item outside Starfleet. 

[clip from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 1 episode 15 Progress @ 19:30 NOG: Why does anybody use self-sealing stem bolts? O'BRIEN: I wouldn't know. I've never used them, Ive never even seen one.] 

O’Brien’s ignorance shows how the Federation operates. As Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at Harvey Mudd College David K. Seitz notes, the Federation’s hands stay clean from local exchange, while it sets the economic baseline for those it influences. Bajor can keep its culture and quirks, provided they align with and depend on a Federation-shaped economy, thereby cutting out other competing civilizations, such as the Romulans or Cardassians.

That posture mirrors how the United States operated in the 1980s under Reagan. The U.S. didn’t need formal colonies—it used economic leverage, covert operations, and “development aid” to secure resources and markets. For example, the United States used Saudi Arabian oil production money to fund anti-communist rebellions around the world. Colonialism outsourced through capitalism—still exploitative, just branded as a partnership. Propagandized as a moral good - just as the Federation helps other “less prosperous” planets like Bajor, America, and Western neoliberal democracies state that they are uplifting these countries and bringing them into a better, more just society to justify interference in other cultures. These justifications go back to the beginning of the Cold War and continued well past its end. 

[Margaret Thatcher - https://youtu.be/XdylCoiCd4A?si=fRrVz2wEJpEf3PTc @ 17:40 - It is among the unfree and unfed that subversion takes root. As Ethiopia demonstrated, those people get very little help from the Soviet Union and its allies. The weapons which they pour in offer no help nor hope to the hungry. It is the West which heard their cries. It is the West which responded massively to the heartrending starvation in Africa. It is the West which has made a unique contribution to the uplifting of hundreds of millions of people from poverty literacy and disease.”]

The United States carried this logic forward into the War on Terror, justifying the invasion of Afghanistan not only as a mission to stop terrorism, but as a moral duty to “liberate” women and girls from a supposedly backwards society and the misogynistic Taliban. Figures like Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, along with countless politicians and political pundits, framed the war as an act of feminist uplift—arguing that American intervention was necessary to “save” Middle Eastern women through Western values. 

[https://youtu.be/gr6liwDJMoU?si=nqLkGuoxj9lPOxjN @ 0:00 - LAURA BUSH “Good morning, I’m Laura Bush and I’m delivering this week's radio address to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the Brutality against  women and children by the Al Qaeda terrorist network]

The Federation’s “post-scarcity” utopia, despite its supposed evolution, runs on the same logic as the late Cold War U.S.—sell the dream of a better tomorrow while low-key deciding who gets to build it and who gets to own it. Likewise, modern billionaires continue elements of this exploitation and justification; Musk’s Tesla batteries rely on cobalt from abusive mines in the Congo. Here in the United States, Bezos’ Amazon squeezes warehouse workers while exploiting low-wage labor abroad. So-called AI is powered by mass consumption of water, pollution of communities' air, and massive energy costs. In particular, the human cost is not only ignored, it is treated as the necessary fuel to bring about humanity's destiny, which, for tech bros is either to upload our consciousness to a server or go to the stars.  As Associate Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo John C. Mohawk argued in his work on how Western civilization’s history of conquest often hides behind utopian ideals: 

“if a group expects that their utopian story will culminate in the production of a perfect world, everything they do to create or react to the conditions that will bring this about acquires enhanced importance. 

Basically, if you think you can make utopia, or at least are arguing that you are, then you have the right to do anything to anyone to make it happen.

Star Trek, in a way, justifies that same idea—that there is a “natural destiny path” we’re meant to follow. In the Enterprise episode “Dear Doctor,” Captain Archer refuses to give a cure to a species dying from a planet-wide disease, deciding it’s part of their “natural development” to die off, letting the oppressed species on the planet rise to the top. Instead of, you know, not treating oppressor-versus-oppressed dynamics as a zero-sum game where one has to die for the other to live, the episode leans into a competitive-minded misunderstanding of evolution as “survival of the fittest.” In reality, evolution isn’t about the strongest crushing the weakest—it’s about the traits that best fit an environment, and cooperation is often as important to survival as competition. But colonialism and capitalism both thrive on this distorted “fittest means strongest” framing. And the episode itself uses it to lay the groundwork for the Prime Directive—an ideology of non-interference we know the Federation will later adopt—framing it as nothing more than protecting the “natural” course of evolution. In other words, the show justifies the creation of its in-universe ideology by presenting it as the inevitable outcome of humanity's learning to be benevolent keepers of the cosmos. 

And of course, Star Trek: The Original Series makes this a universal scientific law with its “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development,” the in-universe excuse for why so many alien worlds look like 20th-century Earth (or, more accurately, like whatever could be shot on a cheap Western backlot). But embedded in that budget-saving handwave is the same worldview: all civilizations evolve in the same direction—Americas. Some are just late to the party.

Which brings us back to Musk’s aliens. Because even beyond the idea that humans have been around long before writing, long before that, there were other forms of life. Life has existed on Earth for over 3.8 billion years. And in fact, opposed to what Musk said, it emerged relatively quickly - at least on a galactic standard. 

[Clip – TV SERIES - The Inexplicable Universe, S1E3 @ 11:33 “All data that we’ve ever collected on the fossil history of life on Earth tells us that life began almost as soon as earthly conditions would allow it… After the period of heavy bombardment, it took no more than 200 million years… That sounds like a lot, but it’s not—it’s just .2 billion years of Earth’s history.”]

So life out there may not be rare at all. There are plenty of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox that don’t assume we’re alone, many of which are explored in science fiction. Maybe they don’t value communication. Maybe they never invented radio. Maybe they aren’t expansionist. Maybe they have nothing to say to us. Maybe neither of us understands the other’s communication methods.

But none of that fits Musk’s worldview, where life doesn’t exist UNLESS it mirrors what he sees as civilization. Like how western colonists justified seeing their colonized subjects as not full people by arguing they were “primitive”, Musk doesn’t see alien life as possible because to him, he doesn’t respect or see them as “worthwhile living beings” until they hit a certain bar of technology, and this also connects with Star Trek. 

Star Trek is a future defined by technology. Transporters, tricorders, starships, replicators—Star Trek is a universe built on techno-optimism, where many human problems can and, in many cases, have been solved by the right machine. In Star Trek lore, it’s a faster-than-light warp drive that is seen as not just the most significant innovation, but a civilizational milestone. Humanity’s greatest leap came with Zefram Cochrane’s first warp flight, which led directly to first contact with the Vulcans and set us on the path to the Federation. From then on, warp became codified as the benchmark for “maturity.” The moment a society discovers it, they’re considered ready to join the interstellar community. Until then, they’re a “pre-warp civilization,” to be left alone under the Prime Directive, so as not to “contaminate” their natural development. It’s a kind of benevolent imperialism—Star Trek’s attempt to avoid the mistakes of Earth’s colonial past, where European powers arrived with superior weapons and technology to dominate other cultures. But the word pre-warp mirrors the concept of “prehistory” - it carries an assumption of inevitability, as if every civilization follows the same fixed path toward progress, measured only by technological advancement. It leaves no room for the possibility that a society might be ready to meet alien life before developing warp—or might choose never to develop it at all, focusing instead on other pursuits beyond the technological. But for tech billionaires, that is, in the words of one Ferengi actor - 

[CLIP https://youtu.be/qhXjcZdk5QQ?si=GmDkEZnVwtQVdh6z WALLACE SHAWN: “Inconcievable”] 

As Marc Andreesen argues in his Techno Optimistic Manifesto, technology is the thing that will take us to our manifest destiny, not into the frontier of the American west, but now into the final frontier of the stars.  

“the only perpetual source of growth is technology. In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible. We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less…. We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us…. We believe the natural human drive to make things, to gain territory, to explore the unknown can be channeled productively into building technology….   We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars.”

Andreessen’s essay argues that most of humanity’s big problems have already been solved through technology—especially technology without guardrails—and that we should do everything possible to accelerate its development. It functions as a manifesto for effective accelerationism, a philosophical movement that takes an explicitly pro-technology stance, believing that unrestricted technological progress is the solution to everything from war and climate change to poverty.

Like many utopian visions, it assumes that anything is justified in the pursuit of its creation. If technology can ensure human survival and let us spread our consciousness across the stars, then no limit is too great to break. Supporters often lean on physics-based arguments, like those from physicist and former research scientist at George Tech Jeremy England, who offers a kind of Darwinism for the tech-bro mindset. England argues that life emerges as a way to increase entropy—the one universal constant that always rises—and that life is therefore “destined” to expand across the cosmos to fulfill that purpose. In this worldview, and as we’ve seen with Musk, many tech leaders assume humanity is the only civilization capable of carrying out this mission. It becomes, in their eyes, our “manifest destiny” to colonize the stars—because if we don’t, no one else will fulfill the universe’s destiny. To them, the two biggest drivers for fulfilling this so-called destiny are technology—specifically, maximizing both AI and our energy potential—which they believe will launch humanity to the “next level” of civilization and out into the stars. Not every Silicon Valley CEO treats this as literal holy scripture, but most still preach the same gospel. Take ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman: the guy is literally building AI while also calling for a massive increase in global energy production.

[https://youtu.be/d6lDZpvHAoo?si=Q5gtLu7av8IgW1Ya @ 8:00 - Sam Altman: “Energy is an area I’ve been particularly interested in. I’m much less interested in things that compete with subsidies as cheap as oil or natural gas but if we can figure out a way to make energy for a penny a kilowatt, that would be transformational.] 

Meanwhile, ChatGPT uses ten times as much energy as Google—and more than some entire countries. One report found that by 2030, data centers will consume 20% of Europe’s newly generated renewable energy. They’re burning through fossil fuels and siphoning off renewables, all justified by the promise of a future AI utopia. The logic goes: it’s fine to exploit and ravage resources now because one day this technology will save and uplift us all. 

This is still colonial logic, just with better graphics. It's by no means a coincidence that Jeremy England, an open and proud Zionist, himself has openly advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and in 2024 justified the ongoing genocide in Gaza by saying Zionists had the right to control the land because it was “Jews’ destiny.” When you connect that mindset to the techno-utopian belief that humanity has the same “destiny” to dominate space, the parallel is clear: the same logic that justifies seizing land and controlling people on Earth is being projected into our visions of the future, with technology as the vehicle.

And if you want to see what that “vehicle” actually looks like, you don’t even need to leave Earth. Star Trek isn’t tech bros only pull for a technological aesthetic—just look at Tesla’s Cybertruck, a stainless steel wedge that seems ripped straight from a cyberpunk dystopia like Minority Report or Blade Runner. In fact, Tesla was even accused in a lawsuit of feeding stills from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to help promote it. In a perfect bit of self-parody, actual police departments have started using them. Nothing says “futuristic law enforcement” like a $100k behemoth that can’t fit down an alley and shatters its own “bulletproof” windows onstage. It’s the same manifest destiny fantasy, just repainted in stainless steel and sold as a lifestyle accessory. Musk calls it “making the future look like the future”—a line his biographer Walter Isaacson traces back to a question his son Saxon once asked: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?”

But it's also this aesthetic element that explains WHY Star Trek gets so much of their focus - because to their mind, TREK looks most like the future. They are so specifically focused on Star Trek when it comes to technology because it has actually already shaped tech and space culture. Star Trek-inspired flip phones, tablets, and voice assistants. Martin Cooper, inventor of the handheld cellphone, credits the communicator. PADDs are iPads without Bluetooth. 

The reason for this, however, is that Star Trek gave generations of engineers and scientists an aspirational dream. The same engineers and scientists whose work these billionaires profit off by slapping their name on and saying they helped make. After Leonard Nimoy was invited to the 1967 National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner—an event attended by the people shaping the future of spaceflight- he wrote to Gene Roddenberry 

“I do not overstate the fact when I tell you that the interest in the show is so intense, that it would almost seem they feel we are a dramatization of the future of their space program.” 

That belief has only deepened over time.

Yet, Star Trek has always reflected this seeming inevitability of a human utopia. Star Trek has always preached that the Federation has moved beyond structural racism and homophobia. Citizens are shown with full political freedom, total economic security, and—per Thatcher’s neoliberal dream—free to “develop his or her talents” without material worry. We see it in moments like Captain Sisko’s father, who can run his Creole kitchen without fretting about rent or payroll—just perfecting his gumbo. But under the surface, this liberation is framed as the natural endpoint of capitalism’s arc, not a rejection of it. The assumption is: just wait your turn, trust the system—it’ll work eventually. But change doesn’t happen because people wait. It happens because they fight. Star Trek, though, presents a future where all that struggle within human society is already behind us - in large part because of technology. So neoliberals can look back at the social advancements reflected in Star Trek’s past—its interracial cast, its women in command—and see how they mirrored contemporary social justice movements and political trends and treat them as proof of an inevitable “long arc” of justice, erasing the actual labour that went into making change. Likewise, figures like Musk and Bezos read the technological innovations inspired by Star Trek in the same way. To them, these developments aren’t the result of people imagining a better future and working to make it real—they’re signposts along a natural, preordained road of technological progress. Take Sam Altman, who’s openly said he’s trying to build the world he saw in Star Trek—because, to him, it was “obviously” where we are headed.

[https://youtu.be/1vbdEZcQ7Yk?si=e2P6blyjyNy62ONL  - Sam Altman: “I was a very nerdy kid. I grew up reading scifi or watching Star Trek or whatever. There was already a time where all contemporary scifi was pretty dystopic. But the older stuff, the older Star Trek episodes, those were still like kinda optimistic and cool and you sort of saw how AI was gonna be great and how that was obviously the future.”]

In that telling, Star Trek stops being the aspirational fiction that inspired people to create the future and instead becomes prophecy—a text that didn’t inspire the future so much as predict it. And if it is the inevitable future, then, in their eyes, they should be the ones to slap their name on that future. 

That’s why they’re so comfortable with Star Trek’s own narrative shortcut around capitalism. Because Trek does sidestep the messy politics of ending capitalism - like you know, a workers revolution - by hand-waving at a vaguely undefined World War III—a catastrophe so great humanity “had to” rebuild. The result is a Federation that emerges fully formed as a Western neoliberal democracy in space, carrying all the same DNA. Quite literally, Star Trek pulled a Mark Fisher before Mark Fisher—it imagined the end of the world before the end of capitalism.

So do today’s billionaires—only they’re preparing for it. New Zealand has quietly become the “apocalypse escape destination” for America’s elite. Peter Thiel secured a passport there in case he needs to bail. Others are buying remote farmland or commissioning luxury bunkers that make Bond villain lairs look modest—indoor pools, hydroponic farms, artificial sunlight so they never have to see the real sky again. In December 2023, Wired reported that Mark Zuckerberg was building a $270 million Hawaiian compound on Kauai, complete with two mansions linked by a tunnel to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter. The bunker will have its own energy and food supply, a concrete-filled blast door, and an escape hatch—basically, Fallout DLC for the ultra-rich. These aren’t the preparations of people trying to avert disaster. They’re accelerationists in their own way, assuming collapse is inevitable and positioning themselves to inherit the ruins and cause the destruction. The goal isn’t to preserve the world—it’s to survive the end of it and emerge as the technocratic “visionaries” who rebuild it in their image.. As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff puts it:

 “The billionaires understand that they’re playing a dangerous game… They are running out of room to externalize the damage of the way that their companies operate… The most powerful people in the world see themselves as utterly incapable of actually creating a future in which everything’s gonna be OK.” 

They can imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism because capitalism is a death drive, consuming everything and everyone. They see it as an inevitability. I mean, Sam Altman - the guy who is literally building CHATGPT - “sarcastically” said he believes his product will end the world, but you know, in the meantime, companies are gonna do great work *whisper whisper profit off of you so they can build their nest eggs and apocalypse bunkers.

[ https://youtu.be/d6lDZpvHAoo?si=LbmZX07H_JbCfZy3 @ 8:50 - Sam Altman - “I think AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created with machine learning…”]

Their real fantasy is that they’ll just pop out afterward—our Zephram Cochrane figures—ready to lead a new society that is humanity’s destiny, one built in their image, and that they will help lift us out of to the future - while in reality using the bodies of the working class and women and their children to build that future - like Musk telling the mother of one of his children that he needs to have as many babies as possible with women surrogates in order to make a future of mostly white people.  

“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates” - Elon Musk

For example, writer Nic Carter recently posted a tweet saying, “everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop – basically marx’ worst nightmare/fantasy. This is the permanent underclass thing. And everyone I know subscribes to it.” He’s pointing out the current tech trend toward a completely disenfranchised workforce—people pushed out of jobs by things like so-called “AI.” Marc Andreessen responded by saying, “this necessarily would mean productivity growth to the moon, prices of goods nad services collapse, consumer utopia for pennies every day,” essentially arguing we shouldn’t worry because the future will be so cheap for billionaires that they’ll “support” everyone else—handing out freebies like gods in a post-scarcity Trek utopia.

That’s the real reason tech billionaires love Star Trek: they see themselves as its Zephram Cochrane. He’s the brilliant scientist who, in the ashes of WWIII, builds the first warp ship, accidentally kickstarting humanity’s utopian future and cementing himself as one of history’s GREAT MEN. Then, in the 1960s TOS, we learn he cheated death thanks to an immortal space girlfriend who kept him “young and vigorous” for… let’s just say the warp core wasn’t the only thing she was keeping warmed up. That’s the fantasy for these CEOs—you give the world its shiny new future, and then you get to spend the rest of your time hanging out in your private utopia with your hot space partner. The visionary genius at the center of history, eternally rewarded, untouched by the mess that everyone else still has to live in. Captain Kirks in charge of Starship Humanity’s destiny. 

But Kirk and Cochrane are not the only so-called “visionary risk takers” Star Trek has; in fact, they weren't even the first.  The first - the man who tried to write himself into the future—says a lot about how better futures are actually built, and how even the creator of Star Trek could misunderstand the very future he was selling. 

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations—IDIC—is one of Star Trek’s most beautiful ideas: the Vulcan belief that the greatest beauty comes from the meeting of the most unexpected differences, that every lifeform, culture, and perspective has something to contribute to the whole. It’s a statement against bigotry, a celebration of difference. 

It was also created to sell merchandise.

IDIC first appeared in the third-season 1969 (nice) Original Series episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? By this point in the series, Gene Roddenberry had largely walked away from Star Trek after NBC buried the show in a Friday night “death slot,” leaving producer Fred Freiberger—nicknamed “the show killer”—in charge. Spock actor Leonard Nimoy, always protective of his character’s integrity, disliked one “long and frankly dull conversation” between Spock and another character about their philosophies. He asked Freiberger to fix it and was ignored, so he called Roddenberry directly, who agreed the scene was weak and promised a rewrite. Nimoy felt the new pages greatly improved the scene but the scene now highlighted Spock wearing an ornate medallion that Roddenberry planned to sell replicas of through his mail-order company, Lincoln Enterprises. 

“Certainly, I was all in favor of the philosophy behind the IDIC - but not the fact that Gene wanted me to wear the medallion because he wanted to sell them… Where the scene had been problematic creatively for me, it now was problematic ethically.” - Leonard Nimoy

From the start, Star Trek has been both art and commodity—an idealistic vision and a business. After The Original series was cancelled, Roddenberry saw how powerful the fandom was becoming—conventions, fanzines, a growing mythology. On speaking tours, he doubled down on the legend of himself as the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” - the man who had created Star Trek’s ideas of a better future quietly erasing collaborators like producer Herb Solow, story editor Dorothy Fontana, and producer Gene L. Coon. Even ideas from others were rebranded as his own. I did a whole video on this if you want receipts, but long and short, he tried to sell himself as a visionary. 

 [clip of Gene Roddenberry sounding particularly visionary from this clip - https://youtu.be/_q4hXZwYrlU?si=a5pSp71KmaQxX8Ox]

When The Next Generation launched, Roddenberry didn’t see it as just another Trek show—it was his utopia made real. Humanity was free from interpersonal conflict, didn’t grieve death, and had already reached near-perfection. The Federation wasn’t striving for improvement; it was the end state. Even Picard was, to Roddenberry, supposed to be that John Wayne type figure perfectly, the American hero with no flaws, ignoring all the flaws and racism of John Wayne’s characters, as well as the real person. 

 [Ira Steven Behr @ 50:00 - https://youtu.be/JuJpt3txrbY?si=5uVuHHTrNXhAEotr “I sat across from Gene and Gene looked me in the eye and said “Jean-Luc Picard is John Wayne.” And I said well hold it hold it hold it, do you mean the public image of John Wayne - because I know John Wayne films - he’s played characters who’ve had doubts, in the Searchers he was a racist - so what John Wayne are you talking about? And he said, “he’s John Wayne, he never doubts himself. He has no fear.”]

Gene ideologized John Wayne’s characters to create a sterilized, nostalgic hegemonically masculine image of the past that he wanted to see himself within.

That made it a nightmare for writers, who struggled to tell stories without conflict, but for Roddenberry, the show was less about drama and more about broadcasting his post-capitalist ideal. Behind the scenes, he fought constantly to keep his name on everything, pushing out veterans like D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold to ensure it stayed his future. The writing suffered, but that didn’t matter—what mattered was the vision, and Roddenberry’s belief that he was a visionary out of time, already living in the world he imagined.

As Yvonne Fern, wife of studio executive Herb Solow, who herself interviewed Roddenberry extensively, said: “Gene Roddenberry did not believe in time. He never spoke of the future in the future tense… The future is, not will be. It was present, within him.” He saw himself not just as a writer, but as someone already living in that perfect future. All he had to do was make us believe his future was true. And once we believed, the future would stop being fiction and start being real. That’s what all these men who have utopian visions ultimately want: to make their perfect, ordered utopias that they get to wrestle people into. 

What's interesting, though, is how Roddenberry related to this idea of a visionary. Because Roddenberry, strangely enough, had a morbid fascination with fascism. Not admiration for its horrors, but an enduring fascination with how it worked. Susan Sackett, his longtime assistant, remembered that “Gene was fascinated by World War II and anything related to Hitler... We spent long hours discussing his fascination. Whenever I mentioned how evil I thought Hitler was, Gene would disagree…. “Gene’s reply: “But it is our interpretation of these actions that labels them evil. Certainly, Hitler didn’t think he was doing evil. HE thought what he did was for the good of his country.” Yvonne Fern recalled similar conversations in his final years. Yet according to Yvonne Fern, “What he admires is determination and industry and certain efficiencies that were introduced into Germany during the Third Reich. He admires the fierceness and focus with which an almost impossible task of recreating something devastated, almost dead, is successfully executed in the creation of something strong. One of the hallmarks of his thinking is to separate—to see something good embedded in an evil he once said he was happy to fight. He separates the motivations from the result and ends up musing about a system that if it were not designed to obliterate freedom, would facilitate it beyond imagining.”

Roddenberry didn’t think Hitler was a misunderstood genius, nor am I calling him a fascist—he despised much of what the Nazis did—but he also was seduced by the architecture of their vision: one unified dream, imposed through power and absolute conviction, reshaping the world around it. Everyone marching in lockstep toward a single future. This, ironically, is antithetical to his own ideals of celebrating difference - the very tension that defines Roddenberry and makes him such an interesting, contradictory figure. But Roddenberry began to see Star Trek less as an aspiration and more like a fixed endpoint utopia that he needed to bring into being. His dreams weren’t built with tanks, but it did begin to center him as the man who could pull humanity toward his vision, who could bend the future to his will simply by making us believe in it - and Star Trek in a way was his propaganda. His insistence that one could somehow extract the efficiency of the Nazi state from its genocidal core betrays a failure to understand how fascism functions in 2 ways. Firstly, that efficiency existed purely in Nazi propaganda, and secondly, that a fascist state requires enemies to define itself. It requires heroes and men to grind themselves up for the state, just as colonialism grinds up slaves and capitalism grinds up the worker, telling them they are heroes who should believe in greater ideals of the nation, the country, or the company. 

Roddenberry didn’t want fascism’s horrors, but he was intrigued by the propaganda of one unified dream, imposed with conviction by a singular visionary, reshaping reality, who could pull humanity toward it. He believed it in an almost religious sense - awnting to birth an inevitable future utopia.  And that’s what tech billionaires want too. Not to be in Star Trek, not even to create Star Trek—but to be Gene Roddenberry: the man who is the future, the man whose name defines it. It’s why Elon Musk can give a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and, seconds later, talk about Mars as if he’s offering us a hopeful future. The gesture and the dream are part of the same story: a future where they get to decide who lives in it, and what it looks like. 

[clip - https://youtu.be/hvR2OMljMHE?si=HqKAnZ9nISjz-hlr MUSK: [gives a goddamn Nazi salute]. “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. We’re goingg ot have safe cities, finally. Safe borders. Sensible spending. Basic Stuff. And we’re going to take DOGE to Mars. Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? How inspiring would that be? There needs to be things that make you look forward to the future. ] 

It’s also why, ironically, Musk’s first mention in Star Trek: Discovery is perfect. The character who name-drops him turns out to be a fascist from the Mirror Universe who is trying to become Emperor—of cours,e he’d remember Elon Musk as a heroic visionary. He invokes Musk’s name to insult Paul Stamets, a gay scientist who defends the ethical use of science, painting Stamets as selfish. That’s exactly how fascists see the world: anyone who challenges “progress” as they define it—whether by rejecting a heteronormative, patriarchal order or by refusing technology for technology’s sake—is a selfish obstacle stopping their destiny and must be mocked or eliminated.

[Star Trek Discovery “The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry @ 23:35 - CAPTAIN LORCA - “How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Bros, Elon Musk, and Zephram Cochrane, or as a failed fungus expert? A selfish little man who put the survival of his own ego before the lives of others.] 

There’s a perfect Star Trek parable for this type of thinking in Deep Space Nine that I think is brilliant in how it understands how capitalist “visionaries” see time and the future. In the pilot episode, Sisko meets the Prophets—aliens who exist outside time. They can’t grasp why linear beings like us value the idea of the future, so Sisko explains it with baseball: you don’t know what the next pitch will be, and that’s the point.

 [Star Trek Deep Space Nine “Emissary” S1E1 @ 01:12:14 SISKO: “In fact, the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen. JAKE: You value your ignorance of what is to come? SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you either with weapons or with ideas, but to co-exist and learn.”]

The joy of being human is in uncertainty, becoming, and change. It’s a beautiful encapsulation of Star Trek’s ethos—our future isn’t defined by already knowing the ending. It’s defined by the process of becoming, by the growth we achieve in the act of trying.

And yet… capitalism hates that. Uncertainty is bad for quarterly reports. If you can’t predict the future, you can’t invest in it, leverage it, or sell it back to people at a markup.  Which brings us to one of my favorite DS9 episodes, “Profit Motive.” In it, Grand Nagus Zek—the leader of the capitalistic society of the Ferengi —decides to visit the Prophets himself so he can ask them about the future so he can profit from it. If he can know tomorrow’s market before anyone else gets there, he wins - he can beat every other capitalist. 

[clip Star Trek Deep Space Nine S3E16 “Profit Motive” - PROPHET: The Zek wanted to understand events outside the restrictions of linear time. QUARK: He wanted to see the future so he could gain by it.]

He doesn’t really believe in competition; he believes in being the winner.  Indeed, while many capitalists talk up the virtues of the “free market,” what they really picture is domination—monopoly as destiny. Peter Thiel doesn’t even hide it, calling competition bad and openly pushing for monopolies. 

[https://youtu.be/Z3D8Vo9hRyw?si=fobOIQKb3XcJndNK Peter Thiel @ 0:14 - “We think of capitalism and competition as synonyms, and I believe they are antonyms. I believe a capitalist is someone who is in the business of accumulating capital. A world with competition is the world where all the profits are competed away… What I believe every founder or entrepreneur should aim to do is build a monopoly.]

They just want it to be like Blade Runner or the recent Alien: Earth - where the nation states of the future are just mega-corporations - and run just as “efficently”. Jeff Bezos makes the same case, though he wraps it in Star Trek explorer cosplay.

 [https://youtu.be/43ebT9qP0Ws?si=xTOLQnxhc96TObn7 @ 3:58 - “We at Amazon don’t wake up every morning with a sort of competitive zeal to kill somebody else. We’re more of explorers and we kind of invent new ways and we do wild things - a lot of them don’t work. There’s a lot of risk-taking, a lot of invention. I think one of the best things about taking a customer-centric approach instead of a competitor-centric approach is that if you get ahead in a particular arena, then it keeps you motivated then if you’re number 1 in a particular arena.” ]

Bezos doesn’t reject competition because he’s above it—he rejects it because he already sees himself as number one, with everyone else as a customer inside his ecosystem. Elon Musk calls for “free markets” while using DOGE to undermine regulators of his companies—gutting the CFPB, kneecapping USAID, purging the FAA. While also gutting American public systems that people rely on, like Medicare, forcing people into privatized health care. Zuckerberg envisions Meta as the default platform for all human activity. Musk bought X to do the same, with backing from Larry Ellison. Ellison’s own company, Oracle - alongside SoftBank and Sam Altman’s OpenAI —is now helping Trump build Project Stargate. And yes, it’s named after the 1994 film Stargate—not even good Stargate like Atlantis—a sloppy algorithm network wrongly called ai integrated into the Pentagon, stocked with government data, and anchored by ten new data centers in Texas with the goal to ultimately let these CEOs control the computational space of the future, all through their crappy, half-baked barely functional algorithms.

Musk, Bezos, Apple, Microsoft, Zuckerberg—they all package their utopias inside corporate ecosystems. Want to use the internet of the future? You’ll do it through Meta. Want social media? It’ll be filtered through Google, Musk, or soon Larry Ellison. Even the final frontier is getting carved up. The International Space Station will deorbit in 2031, and its replacement won’t be “international” at all. Under the Trump administration, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy signed a directive pushing full privatization of space stations, pitting companies against each other for Space Act Agreements. Instead of a unified Star Trek–style future, we’re splintering into a patchwork of national and corporate fiefdoms in orbit—low Earth orbit as a chain of Ferengi-run strip malls with worse food. Want to dock with a future station? You’d better have the right proprietary airlock connector. They want to be the ones who control and define everything.

In “Profit Motive” the Prophets, of course, find this ideology incomprehensible. To them, Zek’s obsession with squeezing profit out of the future is the exact opposite of Sisko’s joy in the unknown. And that’s the tension right there: Star Trek’s vision of time as open-ended growth versus the capitalist vision of time as a resource to be extracted and monetized. Quark later gives the Wormhole Aliens a speech about what he sees as humanity’s (and Ferenginar’s) true nature. He insists—over a soft swell of the Star Trek theme, as he tries to mirror a Star Trek captain’s idealistic speech—that the drive for private accumulation, for profit and greed, is what pushes all beings to better themselves.

[clip Star Trek Deep Space Nine S3E16 “Profit Motive” - Quark: I don't know how you people live, but all of us corporeal, linear whatevers have certain things in common, and one of those things is the need to improve ourselves. Our ambition to improve ourselves motivates everything we do. Without ambition, without, dare I say it, greed, people would lie around all day doing nothing. They wouldn't work, they wouldn't bathe, they wouldn't even eat. They'd starve to death. Is that what you want? Are you so isolated and detached that you would sit back and allow the extinction of every corporeal being in the galaxy?]

It’s the purest neoliberal argument that those who misunderstand Star Trek think it stands for: individual primacy and hierarchical exploitation as the only real path to progress, which he thinks is not the means to the future, but the ends in and of itself.

The Prophets reject him outright. They point out that greed isn’t “natural” —it’s a self-destructive trap.

[clip Star Trek Deep Space Nine S3E16 “Profit Motive” - Sisko: Your argument is specious.Changing you will not result in the termination of all corporeal existence.]

 Their “experiment” proves it: they turned Grand Nagus Zek in the episode into a kind, generous man not by “fixing him”, but simply returning him to who he would have been had he not been born under Ferenginar’s capitalist system.

Quark is a parody of past capitalists who are just as applicable to today’s tech billionaires—Musk, Bezos, Andreessen—men who think they “get” Star Trek but mistake capitalism for immutable human nature. That’s how tech billionaires see Star Trek—not as a hopeful what-if, but as a blueprint that they can capitalize on. Control the story of time, and you control who gets to shape it. They’re obsessed with the idea that the future is inevitable, that they’ve glimpsed the blueprint, and that it’s their personal calling to make it real. Take Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment from a forum created by LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the most influential figures in AI modern techno-futurism, who is funded by the likes of Peter Thiel. The Basilisk imagines a future superintelligent AI that’s so powerful it can simulate the past perfectly. Once it exists, it decides to punish anyone who knew about it but didn’t help bring it into existence, on the logic that the threat will motivate more people to help build it now. The moment you hear about the Basilisk, you’re trapped in its game. If it might exist, you’d better help create it, or risk eternal punishment in the simulations it runs later. It’s a warped, sci-fi version of Pascal’s Wager—better to believe in God just in case, except here God is an all-knowing robot with a grudge. And while it sounds absurd, many in tech circles take the underlying premise seriously—knowing about the future makes you responsible for ensuring it happens. A tech bro reinvention of rapture ideology, that one must believe and make the rapture - I mean singularity - occur so as to not to be punished by Jesus, I mean the AI, when it does.

In Marc Andreseen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, he writes - “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” In Andreessen’s worldview, refusing to build the AI future is not just shortsighted—it’s an act of violence towards non-existent future humans, the idea of Effective Altruism and longtermism that Philosophy Tube did this excellent breakdown of. 

The future is a fixed point, a straight line, and their role—the role of any visionary CEO—is to drag the rest of us toward that Torment Nexus, I mean utopia, even if it’s kill us. Better a dead future they control than an unpredictable one they don’t. Take ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman - who when directly confronted with a question about people losing their jobs to his so called AI by 2035 gets nervous trying to imagine that apocalyptic future, dodges the question and instead gives unspecific aphorisms about humanity going to the stars and looking down on us poor humans today because we didn’t have the technology to do so.

[https://youtu.be/hmtuvNfytjM?si=xTm-NrcWhoGEwJR- @21:25 Cleo Abram: “There are some leaders in the AI space that have said that in 5 years, half of the entry level white collar workforce will be replaced by AI. So we’re college graduates in 5 years. What do you hope the world looks like for us?…”  Sam Altman: 2035, I mean that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some kind of completely new exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job and feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this kind of really boring old kind of work and everything is just better. 10 years feels very hard to imagine at this point because its too far. It’s too far. If you compound the current rate of change for 10 more years, it’s probably something we can’t even time travel.”]

He has no actual vision, no actual desire to help people - just instead makes vague utopian promises while he barrels ahead with his Roko’s Basilisk religious mission to cause the rapture, I mean singularity - sorry my tongue getting twisited- through creating a superintelligent ChatGPT with no thought to the human, environmental, or cultural cost or if its even remotely possible to do. Cause you know, its not. Let me be clear - don’t buy into the propaganda; we aren’t going to create a superintelligent AI based on how MLMs like ChatGPT operate. What ChatGPT is instead about is creating dependency, trapping people in a decaying cycle they can’t escape. It’s a slow-motion hollowing out of capitalist society in service of a fantasy future—some warped, corporatized facsimile of Star Trek’s utopia. Jeff Bezos does much the same, but is much more overt. 

[https://youtu.be/43ebT9qP0Ws?si=2Spw7lIMX2eh6kHX @ 5:36 JEFF BEZOS QUOTE - “It’s really hard to know what Amazon will look like in 20 years… Things change so quickly. But the one thing you can count on is your customers and their needs. Even 20 years from now they’ll still want low prices, fast delivery, and vast selection… You can build a set of activities around those things because you know they’ll still be true.”. ]

To Bezos, the future should be predictable—because predictability is stability, stability is control, and control means he gets to be the Cochrane, the Roddenberry, the one who “saw it all coming” and made it happen. He wants to still see the future as full of “customers” rather than thinking about how to help people, because he fundamentally sees the future as something to exploit. And the more he can predict a future that he can exploit, the better. It’s no wonder he’s spent decades funding the 10,000-year clock, a massive clock designed by former VP of Research at Disney Imagineering Daniel Hills that is meant to “symbolize long-term thinking.”

[https://youtu.be/43ebT9qP0Ws?si=5SP5bppe4gI_OwQK - 12:21 - JEFF BEZOS QUOTE - “I’m building a clock, a big clock - its a symbol for long-term thinking… You can accomplish so much if you think long-term. If I say to you “I want you to solve world hunger in 5 years, you would right turn down that mission, its impossible, why would you even bother trying? But if I said solve world hunger in 100 years - now thats actually much more tractible. Ok, now you say how do we create the preconditions to solve world hunger. And so I think long-term thinking is a huge lever. And it gets harder to do as the speed of invention and civilization changes in part because it doesn’t make sense to think long term because everything is changing so quickly. And it goes back ot the customer needs I was talking about before. You need to find those things that as a society that we’ll want even 100 years from now and make sure we go about working on those things.”]

Bezos ignores the fact that he has the resources to END world hunger today. In 2022, UN World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley stated that it would take only an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030 - less than 20% of what Bezos is personally worth. He could commit a fraction of his fortune, partner with governments and NGOs, and see real change in his own lifetime. But his philosophy of time pushes those solutions into some vague, centuries-away horizon—because the point isn’t actually solving hunger, it’s securing the future as a space he owns.

In physics, time isn’t fixed. It’s relative—shaped by your position in space, your speed, and the gravity around you. The more massive an object, the more it bends spacetime, slowing time itself nearby. Tech oligarchs want to be that massive object—a black hole of capital and influence—warping time so we all live inside their event horizon, trapped in their version of the future. Bezos’ 10,000-year clock looms as a monument to controlling not just the passage of time, but its meaning.

Underneath all the sleek, utopian branding of techno-fascist futurism is raw fear. Their rush to colonize space or trap us in the metaverse isn’t about “saving humanity”—it’s about saving themselves from death. They’re terrified of their own death. Take Elon Musk’s obsession with having as many children as possible - it’s textbook reproductive futurism: the belief that your legacy only survives if the future is populated with people who look, think, and act like you. It’s the same anxiety that fuels his “white genocide” tweets, reframed in sci-fi packaging—turning demographic panic into a Mars recruitment poster. When Mark Cuban asked how many kids he planned on having, Musk replied, “Mars needs people”. It's like Musk saw the kids movie MARS NEEDS MOMS and never got over it. 

They dream of various immortality—a future where history remembers them as the visionaries who “saved” humanity, or their names carved into monuments, or their consciousness uploaded to the cloud, or their bodies kept from decay. Hell, the goal of LessWrong’s Eliezer Yudkowsky is to, as tech writer David Gerard points out, is quite literally to “live forever as a human mind running as a process on the future superintelligent AI god computer.” Literally, their argument is that we must cause the creation of the singularity so that we can all live forever because the future AI God will revive every living person eternally. By the way, if you want to see a great exploration of this mindset, please watch the show Pantheon - it’s literally about this. 

But whether it’s Musks need to have as many babies as possible to popular the stars, Yudkowsky’s AI immortality or shit like tech CEO Bryan Johnson infamously transfusing his teenage son’s blood into himself to try to keep himself young - it’s all the same impulse: control the future so completely that they can live eternally and avoid death.  

But a human fear of death is really a fear of change - of time itself. We can imagine the future, which means we can imagine our ending—and that knowledge drives some to hoard, to freeze the present, to shut out anything that might change it. But time isn’t a straight line to be locked down; it’s a shifting web of possibilities. Immortality doesn’t come from clinging to the self. It comes from change, from living on through a community, from caring for what comes next. In both physics and Star Trek, time isn’t a perfect circle that returns to itself. Time only exists because things change—if nothing changed, there would be no time at all. It isn’t a river endlessly flowing forward; it’s a measure of transformation. Memory exists because we carry the traces of what has changed before. Our human sense of time as a “progressive” flow comes from our ability to imagine the future using the past, as Sisko once explained. And we shouldn’t fear that change—because change is time. It’s the only thing that keeps the universe alive.

Despite correctly reading its reflection of Western colonial impulse, tech oligarchs still fundamentally misunderstand Star Trek. To them, Star Trek is their utopia: ordered, perfect, familiar. It’s not about surpassing the present—it’s about preserving it, or rather the nostalgic past they grew up idolizing, just with better gadgets. For neoliberals, it’s “America as it was” in the ’60s or ’80s. For tech billionaires, it’s the sleek, corporate-polished world they already dominate, pressed into the far future like an insect in amber. Fascism thrives on that logic: the future as a recreation of the past, imposed on the present. Star Trek, to them, isn’t a challenge—it’s a return. And they see themselves as the chosen ones who will bring it back.

They are the spawn of every system that feeds on the next—colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, nation-state nationalism—stacked like rotting bricks in the same collapsing tower. Each props up the others, recycling the same lies until they mistake themselves for prophets instead of parasites. They sell a flawless “future” that can never exist, because it’s nothing more than a fetishized, airbrushed version of a past that never was. Chasing that mirage, they’ll sanction any atrocity, excuse any cruelty, so long as their name is etched on the blueprint. It’s not vision—it’s the hunger for immortality, the belief that if they brand the future as theirs, they’ll never truly die. 

They don’t just want to own the future—they want to own the spaces where the future happens. And the future doesn’t begin on our social media platforms or the internet or outer space - it starts first in how we dream of the future. That’s why Larry Ellison has pushed to have 27.5% voting rights in Paramount’s board post-merger, why Jeff Bezos paid to send Shatner into space, and why modern Trek film sets look like an Apple Store - because they want to push to make our dreams of the future look like theirs. They covet Star Trek’s look, not its soul—turning its promise of exploration into a showroom for their ideology. If they control the aesthetic, they control the blueprint, so every vision of tomorrow is built inside the borders of their worldview. This is a very real danger right now. Franchises like Star Trek are being hollowed out as just vehicles for nostalgia - look, Captain Kirk is back, look it's the Enterprise again… and again… and again - don’t you just love living in the Star Trek utopia? Ignore that Star Trek used to have actual commentary baked into it from the beginning - no, just enjoy the fun little space zoom zoom pew pews. Because in clinging to the mythologized past, they miss the truth entirely. 

Star Trek’s future was never a fixed point—it’s a reach. Flawed, contradictory, and shaped by the baggage of capitalism, colonialism, and preordained Western timelines, yes—but still a reach for something new. At its best, it imagines a world that grows because we choose to understand, not control, one another. A future that evolves through change, through learning, through the messy, imperfect work of connection.

In Star Trek, the future doesn’t arrive because of technology. The Federation didn’t exist because Zefram Cochrane built a warp drive—it happened because that flight happened to lead to first contact with the Vulcans. And Cochrane wasn’t a “great man” who did it alone—he worked alongside Lily Sloane, a Black woman erased from the history books. Star Trek at its best was never about saying the future was a perfect, static technological utopia - it was flawed and full of mistakes. The Original Series constantly questioned the Federation’s colonial impulses, drawing direct comparisons with America’s modern-day colonialism. 

[CLIP - STAR TREK THE ORIGINAL SERIES “A Private Little War” - KIRK: Bones, do you remember the twentieth century brush wars on the Asian continent? Two giant powers involved, much like the Klingons and ourselves. Neither side felt could pull out MCCOY: Yes, I remember. It went on bloody year after bloody year.]

America's complicity Star Trek’s future is built by collectives, by people who inspire each other to reach further than they could alone. Uhura’s Nichelle Nichols helped recruit more women—especially Black women—for NASA; Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, credits Nichols for inspiring her. ISS commander Samantha Cristoforetti has said Nana Visitor’s Kira Nerys shaped her career. My friend Dr. Erin Macdonald credits Captain Janeway for helping her finish her PhD in astrophysics, just as countless other women credit Star Trek with inspiring them to join STEM. Philosophers, artists, politicians, and creators of every kind have drawn from it to do better. I know a trans woman who works as a YouTuber and is now pursuing a career as a film director, who credits Star Trek for both ambitions: for sparking her desire to tell stories on screen, and for giving her the language to understand herself - myself. In Jadzia Dax, I saw a future where I could exist fully, a reflection of myself woven into Star Trek’s vision of what humanity could become. Star Trek isn’t a sacred text we’re fated to make real—it’s an aspiration we reach for, and in reaching, make better. We saw ourselves in the alien, and realized we weren’t so different from each other. At its core, Star Trek isn’t about outer space, technology, or even “the future”—it’s about exploring what it means to be us, both the self within and the connections that bind us to one another.

[Star Trek Enterprise “Terra Prime” S4E21 Archer: “We are all explorers, driven to know what's over the horizon, what's beyond our own shores. And yet, the more I've experienced, the more I've learned that no matter how far we travel, or how fast we get there, the most profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They're within us, woven into the threads that bind us, all of us, to each other.”]

And it's because Gene Roddenberry, for all his flaws, and all those who have worked on Star Trek, had something today’s CEOs lack: curiosity, empathy and the capacity - no, the desire - to be changed by others. To the tech CEO's mind, that’s too terrifying.

In Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, grok means to understand something so completely you merge with it. After Star Trek’s original run was cancelled, fans wore “I GROK SPOCK” shirts because Spock—the ultimate Other—embodied IDIC: difference not as alien, but as us. Kirk is better because of Spock; Spock is better because of Kirk. Each changes the other. Tech billionaires flatten that into techno-fascism. Now “grok” is the name of a “white genocide is real” algorithm, twisting a word about deep understanding into a tool for control. Because that’s how they see us—not as people to understand, but as resources to be owned, managed, and used up for their power. Musk’s own daughter, Vivian Wilson, came out as a trans woman and publicly cut ties with him. For Musk, that was a “red pill” moment—a shift to fighting “woke ideology”—not because of gender itself, but because she rejected the future he and our culture had scripted for her. Trans people are living proof the future isn’t inevitable or pre-written. We choose who we are. We make ourselves. And for men like Musk, that’s terrifying—because if people can choose a future beyond their control, they can choose a future without them.

That’s what is so unique about Star Trek. It is true that capitalism subsumes all critiques of itself, and Star Trek is just a projection of the future based on the biases and assumptions of the present. However, it is also true that we build our collective futures, our actual collective futures, within the oppressive and controlling present. We resist the defined, preplanned destinies imposed by the powerful by building our own within their endless looping present. Star Trek has never been about its utopia, but the people in that future still striving to grow - focused on becoming their better selves, never getting there but always trying.

[clip Star Trek: The Next Generation The Offspring S3E16 Data: “We must strive to be more then we are Lal. It does not matter if we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yeilds its own rewards.]

 You see that within the story of the Star Trek character played by the man who roasted Musk on his own platform - Robert Picardo’s The Doctor. At first, he’s just the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram—programmed to treat injuries, then shut down. He isn’t even considered a person by most of the crew. Over the seasons, he fights to name himself, to express himself, to prove he’s more than just a tool. And in the episode “Author, Author,” he writes a thinly veiled holonovel about his experiences with prejudice aboard Voyager. The Federation reviews it—and rules that as a hologram, he has no legal rights, not even to his own work. In the end, the Doctor chooses to withhold the book to protect the crew’s reputation, but it still leaks to other holograms, who are themselves being used as forced labor in dilithium mines. They share it in secret. It becomes a spark of solidarity, a story that says: you are people, not property. Star Trek already wrote the parable Musk doesn’t understand: AI in Star Trek isn’t about shiny new tools for billionaires to become gods. It’s a metaphor for marginalized people demanding recognition, dignity, and freedom from exploitation. Star Trek is always a collective story. They try to make it theirs alone, a story of inevitable progress that will march on without us. But it’s not inevitable. It’s ours—or it’s nobody’s.

CUT TO BLACK.

CUT BACK.

And in case you didn’t get it—what I’m saying is, to make Star Trek, we need build a kind of class consciousness and solidarity because that’s the only way we get a better future. And as Star Trek once said directly to a capitalist’s face—

[Star Trek Deep Space Nine “Bar Association” S4E16 - Rom: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”]

CITATIONS

• A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine by David K. Seitz

• I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

• Gene Roddenberry The Last Conversation by Yvonne Fern

• Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek by Joel Engel 

• Silence the Past: Power and the Production fo History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

• Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western Wrold by John C Mohawk

• Inside Trek: My Secret Life with STar Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry by Susan Sacket

• The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash by Abigail Thorn - https://youtu.be/Lm0vHQYKI-Y?si=EpW3gAkmvCfbe8_X 

• The Ultimate Guide to How Star Trek’s Future Works by Rowan J Coleman - https://youtu.be/Hc1PmfzTTAA?si=8oYyQI47XggQd97d 

• https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ 

• https://sfstandard.com/2025/06/27/legion-bob-sam-altman-marc-benioff-reid-hoffman-dystopia/ 

• https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-grok-ai-chatbot-suspended-after-gaza-comments 

• https://slate.com/technology/2025/07/larry-ellison-donald-trump-paramount-skydance-merger.html 

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/technology/trump-larry-ellison-tiktok-oracle.html 

• https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/skydance-promises-fcc-eliminate-dei-paramount-cbs-news-ombudsman-1236467977/ 

• https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/david-ellison-top-gun-star-trek-1236343043/ 

• https://www.wfpusa.org/news/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/ 

• https://people.com/human-interest/elon-musk-once-said-mars-needs-people-after-mark-cuban-asked-how-many-kids-he-wants/ 

• https://qz.com/teslas-cybertruck-speaks-to-a-thoughtful-question-asked-1850840420 

• https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/ 

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/19/musk-trump-palestine-katy-perry#:~:text=%E2%80%9CTo%20reach%20legion%2Dlevel%20before,Not%20in%20this%20case

• https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/ 

• https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-grimes-and-the-philosophical-thought-experiment-that-brought-them-together-96439 

• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46985759 https://web.archive.org/web/20250726083909/https://slate.com/technology/2025/07/larry-ellison-donald-trump-paramount-skydance-merger.html 

• https://futurism.com/elon-musk-starfleet-academy 

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-is-rokos-basilisk-elon-musk-grimes/