Being pre-internet and shown on terrestrial TV with its plethora of (random, funny, weird) softcore porn, it was a very coming-of-age show for a lot of us now in our 30s and 40s
Reminds me of that crazy scene from Picard where they get holographic popup ads on their ship.
It might just be my crazy conspiracy theory brain, but I feel like they’re trying to normalize advertising in a supposedly idyllic and utopian future society to make us see them as more of a necessity than they actually are. Same thing with Raffi living in poverty and Picard having private ownership of the means of production (his vineyard) with employees. So much for that “money-free socialist utopia.”
I never even thought about Picard’s vineyard like that. It is odd that a society that seems largely modeled off of libertarian values would include generational estates. The concept of usufruct may have been unknown by the writers of TNG when they were fleshing our Picard’s past. Or it was just a bit of our cultural bias bleeding into this “utopian” setting.
Raffis story doesn’t get a pass though. It seems like they were going for gritty and edgy in a way that was straight up contradictory to the federations ethos when they came up with that bs. The whole first season of Picard was pretty backwards in its portrayal of the federation imo. Haven’t watched the 2nd or 3rd season yet so idk if they unfucked any of the worst stuff
I mostly agree with you except the libertarian part. Is that a misspeech or something? The Federation is pretty far from being (economically) Libertarian.
Libertarian in the OG sense, more commonly called libertarian socialism or anarchism. Didn’t realize I left the socialism bit out. I hesitate to call the federation anarchist because there’s still plenty of hierarchy but it seems to be modeled after a vaguely left-libertarian ideology of some sort
The original Liberals were actually a bunch of mill owners in 19th Century Manchester (at the time the most technologically advanced city in the world) who got together to ask challenging questions like “why should we have to pay taxes?” and “what if we basically owned our employees? And their children”.
Marx and Engels lived there for a time and witnessed the conditions the working people lived in first-hand.
Libertarianism is explicitly based on the ideas of Manchester School Liberalism. The British Liberal Party of the 19th Century was all about free market ideology, in contrast to the (theoretically) more centrist modern party. In Victorian Britain, Liberal own you.
Broader socialism has its roots in the French revolution and liberalism too. But you don’t see anyone making a case that Marxists are liberals due to their common ideological heritage. Because it’s silly. It’s almost like divergent ideologies have to originate from somewhere and within a particular historical context. It’s unproductive and pointless to say “z came from y and y from x so z is the same as x”
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