So I thought I would write a post that was less on the serious, abstract side of things and do something that was more casual, fun, and a bit more playful. After all, as Mencius had said, “great is the man who has not lost his childlike heart.”
For those who have not watched Star Trek before, or more specifically, an episode or movie with The Borg in it, I strongly recommend this. Much like Skynet in the Terminator movie series, The Borg are an eerily threatening symbol of future possibilities.
Actually, before I start talking about the Borg, why don't I talk a little about the Terminator series, because it's had more mainstream exposure than Star Trek, and the concept of how Skynet works as a socio-political warning of extreme modern thinking is more obvious.
To summarize the role of Skynet in both James Cameron's Terminator films, Skynet is a computer program designed to not only manage our nuclear strike abilities, but to actually make decisions regarding when and how to attack other countries using nuclear via its algorhythms. In addition, it coordinates all automated military units (we actually have these kinds of things, Obama's been using military drones to bomb certain targets in Pakistan for sometime). However, shortly after going online, gaining sentience, and given control of America's nuclear weaponry and automated machinery, it immediately declares de-facto war upon humankind and proceeds to exterminates us all.
The Terminator has a strong libertarian undertone to it. Skynet is symbolically and literally a government program given far too much power and way too easily trusted. Of course, as the plot follows its libertarian undertones, the government program is not only incompetent, it actively and constructively damages the people it was supposed to help.
The other element in the Terminator films is a critique of our false assumption that technology will help us progress. More specifically, we're called to re-think how often we immediately and uncritically assume that the newest piece of technology will always embetter us or our situation. The government's willingness to implement the Skynet program exemplifies this dangerous mentality toward technology. Of course, for those of us who are naturally more skeptical or have been paying closer attention, we know that technology keeps getting us into more and more trouble. Anyone who has heard of Monsanto and their genetic engineering of seeds knows this. In fact, we've actually come close to the brink. Some years ago, there was an experiment in Oregon where researchers developed a genetically-modified bacterium designed to break down waste vegetation into ethanol outcompeted soil fungi, essential to plant life, and rendered the soil completely infertile. The researchers concluded had the bacteria spread to the rest of the world, all plant life on earth could have theoretically ended (The Constant Economy, by Zac Goldsmith).
The reality is that none of the technological developments past a certain point in history are essential for humanity, few are substantially more beneficial than harmful, and most are simply long-term harmful. But this is a topic to be explored another time...
Skynet also symbolizes the inhumaness of government beaucracy. A computer program is a set of algorhythms that always produces the same output with the same input. A system of beaurcracy, built solely upon a system of laws and policies, works exactly the same way. In fact, a computer program is the natural extension of the government beaucracy. The problem with having a set of algorhythms that determines everything is that either it goes haywire when presented with a extreme or usual case (due to inherent inflexibility), and/or it makes heartless/ruthless decisions.
Either cause accounts for Skynet's decision to exterminate humanity. Skynet may have produced a "haywire result" when faced with the extreme situation of the possibility of nuclear annhiliation, or decided via algorhytms that humanity is too much of a threat to be allowed to continue to exist. It wouldn't surprise me, actually, that a computer program designed to minimize the number of human causalities would choose "extinction now" as the optimal way to achieve that goal. After all, as the human population grows and continues inidefinitely, more and more human beings' deaths will accumulate (even in an entirely peaceful world, not to mention a global nuclear holocaust 100 years down the road when the Earth holds perhaps 30 billion individuals instead of 6 billion). So killing 6 billion now instead of many more in the future is the "logical" decision.
On a sidenote, I want to also point out that I think it was a great directing choice in Terminator 2 to have the T-1000 takes the form of a police officer.
Directly because the T-1000 has taken the appearance of a police officer, everyone gives him their full and complete trust. As a result, he always gets honest answers from the people he asks questions to, nobody stops him from going anywhere, etc etc. He has full license to do whatever he wants, and nobody questions him! Not even John Connor's foster parents suspect a thing - after all, why would they, he's a cop? Whereas Connor's party are hunted down by the police, the T-1000 never, even once, faces any such obstacle.
I'm sure I can go into more detail about the Terminator films and their socio-political implications, and whoever reads this blog surely can, but I'll leave that for the comments section.
So let's go back to the "original" subject of this post, The Borg
"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
The Borg are a 'species' of cyborgs, part human and part machine, that work together as a singular hive-mind. Their purpose is to find other species or cultures, assimilate them into their collective, and bring themselves and the assimilated closer to perfection.
Can we see how much interpretive fun we can have with these guys? The Borg has been explained as a symbol for any technological, monopolizing multinational corporation such as Microsoft or Google, to any culturally-homogenizing force such as globalization or the American melting pot, or sociopolitical coercion that echoes the sentiments of the "white man's burden" in which the harm is done in the name of helping the coerced, including colonialism and neocolonialism, Communism, or specific liberal government programs such as universal healthcare or public schooling. The Borg can also be likened to certain religious activity, including but not limited to cults (like Scientology) or evangelical Christians.
In a society that continues to become more and more homogenized, technologized, nationalized and globalized, the threat that the Borg represents looms closer and taller. For the threat that the Borg symbolizes is not a foreign threat, it's the potential of what we could become.
When forces from television to public schooling both homogenizes and dulls our minds, we become closer to sharing a hive mind devoid of true individuality. We become closer to the Borg.
When the rapid change in technology continues to disrupt social dynamics, such as facebook and online chat replacing the richness of person to person communication (with its dimensions of facial expression, tone of voice, and immediate real-time response) with a method of communication that is purely textual and devoid of any other dimensions, we become closer to becoming more and more dependent on technology for our social needs. We become closer to the Borg.
When politicians, both Republican and Democrat, neoconservative and liberal, continue to shift power toward the federal government and away from local communities, every individual loses their agency. Because the ordinary citizen can always go to city council meetings, but never actually meet the president of the United States, a more federalized nation necessarily means a depowered citizen. And when we keep losing power as individuals in an increasingly larger and larger community, we become more like the Borg.
When people talk about globalization of cultures as a progessively good thing, when certain people talk about a new emerging "global spiritual consciousness," when people conceptualize the world as a melting pot, we become more and more homogenized. We abandon the unique customs and expressions of our localities, and and we merge into this mass of undifferentiated humanity shared with 6 billion other unknown individuals. In this way, we become more like the Borg.
But resistance is not futile. We can return to the local world. We can reserve our power by simply saying no to politicians who extend the national (or even international) government's power, no matter how appealing the idea is, by saying "we can do it locally!" We can use technology critically, keeping it strictly for uses that are harmless, beneficial, and can be done in no better way. We can avoid forces that homogenize and dull our minds by watching television critically and discriminately, or by reforming public schools that only instruct knowledge memorization intead of developing thinking.
"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!"
The quote above is said by the captain of the Enterprise, in response to the Borg's invasion of his ship and Earth. Even though it's from a science-fiction movie, it really captures what our mentality should be in stopping this trend of becoming "more like the Borg."
This far, no further!
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