Spoilers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[bloodtide]

Rewatched Past Tense this evening, the first time in nearly thirty years. And it’s held up very well - and it’s impressively prescient to the point of being depressing about current events. No, we don’t know how we let things get so bad, but we undoubtedly have.

The two main things the story doesn’t get right are basically the same thing - the writers were in the early years of the Internet and so couldn’t understand how universal and infiltrated into everything we do it would become. So the Internet of 2024 in Past Tense is basically a version of a teletext information service like Ceefax, with text and channels, with video phone capacity, rather than what it actually is like in our era.

This also means that if Sanctuary Districts existed now (and honestly they’re rather altruistic compared to what homeless services look like in the US and elsewhere) then we would already all know about them thanks to the Internet and social media. We would already be polarised in our opinions about them, and the Bell Riots would probably therefore not be the wake up moment they were in the Star Trek timeline.

Looking at any fictional future is always hard. It is hard to make that 'amazing' leap. In '95 the Web was a slow clunky place...really a nightmare. You could go to Kmart.com, but it was a single page that said "er...um, stuff is on sale at our store". Yahoo was only a year old...and Google did not even exist yet. And 'social media'...like say MySpace was not until 2003!

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....but the idea that like 95% of people would have a supercomputer digital camera video recorder in their pocket 24/7 was really beyond imagination.....95 is a bit more 'pager pre cell phone times'.

So yea....the story is a bit odd there. But then it's not like the 24th century had it either, other then 'cell phones'.

But the story still works. Even if lots of people were posting from the Sanctuary districts......some times people don't see it...or care (see current world events). Plenty of people might 'tune in' and watch 'Sanctuary Sally' on her live stream and she shows the horrible conditions...and just shrug and go about their lives.

 

[Ryujin]

Looking at any fictional future is always hard. It is hard to make that 'amazing' leap. In '95 the Web was a slow clunky place...really a nightmare. You could go to Kmart.com, but it was a single page that said "er...um, stuff is on sale at our store". Yahoo was only a year old...and Google did not even exist yet. And 'social media'...like say MySpace was not until 2003!

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....but the idea that like 95% of people would have a supercomputer digital camera video recorder in their pocket 24/7 was really beyond imagination.....95 is a bit more 'pager pre cell phone times'.

So yea....the story is a bit odd there. But then it's not like the 24th century had it either, other then 'cell phones'.

But the story still works. Even if lots of people were posting from the Sanctuary districts......some times people don't see it...or care (see current world events). Plenty of people might 'tune in' and watch 'Sanctuary Sally' on her live stream and she shows the horrible conditions...and just shrug and go about their lives.

And so having a world spanning network that was basically Newsgroups on steroids was completely believable.

 

[trappedslider]

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....

History of videotelephony - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Unless oyu mean wide spread usage