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Dear Lemmy, why Star Trek??
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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Star Trek is post scarcity. It is more evolved than your politics.
Our world is already post scarcity too for basic needs like food and housing. We're just terrible at actually getting them to people since most countries are still capitalist, so they prioritize capital/profit over human lives and rely on what's basically slave labour from less developed nations to make the ruling class richer.
Under capitalism, food isn't produced to eat but to make profits. When it's not profitable to sell, they would rather dump foods, starving the people than to plainly donate.
We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates.
Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
Read an article in the economist ten years ago or so that said that with the automation potential back then, we could have 70% unemployment and still produce western middle-class living standards for absolutely everyone. Probably not cars (go public transport, instead) but definitely roof and four walls, healthy food, education and entertainment, healthcare, and a washing machine. Reason it's not happening is that while investing in that kind of thing has a giant ROI, it's also long-term, for quarterly or even ten-year profits it's more advantageous to hire humans.
Honestly, actually that's good news: It's going to happen one way or the other anyway, and we don't want that kind of control over automated means of productions in the hands of people too greedy to invest in it.
Just gonna point out that by definition, a world that is post-scarcity is post-scarcity for all of its inhabitants. Your assertion that there are "less developed" nations that "don't get basic resources" means we are not post-scarcity.
That's just one definition, no? You could interpret this part of the wiki like I did for example
and conclude that we're already in that world, like Star Trek is.
It can mean that if you cherry-pick your clauses, but if you actually take the entire text into account, you are absolutely wrong. Tell me what "basic needs" are met cheaply or freely to the general population of the planet? And I mean all of us. From the children in Beverly Hills to the grandparents in Mozambique. Food, shelter, water. At a bare minimum, those three are available cheaply to everyone on the planet on a post-scarcity planet. We absolutely do not live on one of those at this point.
They could have easily have those ends met, but at the moment, they can't easily go get those basic needs fulfilled.
Like I said, just different ways of interpreting the definitions.
The wiki definition "people can easily have their basic survival needs met" is passive, which could mean either
The latter is how I interpreted it. And that's our world, just hindered by our current political/economic system of capitalism.
Aside from the arguments posited by this comment’s siblings, I’ll add: artificial scarcity is scarcity nonetheless.
We’re very far from post-scarcity despite the fact that there’s seemingly no material conditions stopping us from achieving it.
And yet the political commentary displayed in the series is blatantly leftist in nature, and was written in the context of modern Capitalism.
Just like showing a dystopian hyper-Capitalist cyberpunk future is a commentary on the dangers of modern day Capitalism, showing a more "enlightened" post-scarcity Communist society as a hopeful future is also commentary on modern day society.
Sci-fi is pretty much just political, as it's all speculative fiction based on different possibilities of modern society abstracted to a future setting.