Star Trek as an Addictive Drug

Why Some Cyberpunks Love Star Trek Even Though It Sucks, When Cyberpuks Always Diss What is Lame and Useless The secret is that Star Trek, in all its generations and spinoffs, was designed to be habit-forming. Star Trek is the first virtual designer drug. Like the cousins of opium, a Star Trek episode induces a pleasurable buzz for a programmed length of time. Like the opiates, it does so by raising your gullibility levels and jamming your critical factulties, thus lowering your pleasure thr...

 Anecdote of Shamans Responding to Star Trek

DI for documenting his journey to shamanism in the 1994 book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of African Shaman. He writes about the proverbial dive into the rabbit hole as he was studying with the elders of his community and balancing his newfound wisdom with his Western education. Some paints a picture of a different path to knowledge that contradicts the norms of Western conventions. According to him. the Dagara have no word for the supernatural. "For us, ...

 Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a Meditation on Cybernetics

Consider for a moment just how many times Star Trek: The Motion Picture lingers upon the important act of a man entering -- or connecting to -- a machine. We watch Kirk's shuttle pod "dock" with Enterprise after a long, lingering examination of the ship. We see Spock, in a thruster suit, "penetrate" -- in his words, "the orifice" leading to the next interior "chamber" of V'Ger. This terminology sounds very biological, doesn't it? Consider that Spock next mentally-joins with V'Ger, utilizing a...

 Mainstream News is Irrelevant

Generally I don't watch the nightly network news. Experimentally I've tuned in. It lives in a parallel universe, very weakly connected to reality. One has to invest many hours in its fictional narrative to make any sense of it, much like you don't tune into episode 50 of a pop culture TV show and understand any of it. You're no better educated given one episode of the nightly news than you are when given one episode of "breaking bad". In that way one isolated pop culture clickbait artifact f...