Yeah. Luckily the parts of Star Trek that inspired people were the gadgets. It's common to hear Valley startup founders talk about seeing something in Star Trek and then thirty years later it's their product launch. The social side was much less impactful, you never hear people talk about how to create the Federation, probably because the writers never explored it (as they couldn't).

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hollerith 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>The social side was much less impactful

I'm not so sure.

I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.

Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:

Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105

Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . . Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988

If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.

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mike_hearn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm. Interesting perspective. I must admit I've never had someone try to convince me of the merits of socialism using any kind of argument, let alone by way of comparison to Star Trek.

But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".

People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.

I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.

	▲	hollerith 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone". But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.