Though I never thought about it too hard, I always assumed replicator and transporter technology was behind the radical transformation on Earth. Though the show never adequately connects the dots (because taking that tech to its logical conclusion would kill all possibility of drama), being able to break down matter at the atomic level and restructure it into other forms of matter would result in a literal post-scarcity world almost over night. IRL I think that would result in unbelievable social ill and decay (a la The Last Night's premise) instead of utopia, but I'll give them a pass for not outright claiming communism worked to get us to the aspirational premise. (A premise which is truly beautiful, if delusional.)
It's funny how it takes technology as advanced as a replicator to make the Earth a utopia.
I don't know about you but a replicator sounds like a pretty far fetched idea I wouldn't count on as being actually possible and if that's what it takes us to stop us from killing each other then we're probably in some trouble.
What's funny is how cynical the idea actually is when you really think about it, the only way to stop mankind form killing each other in endless wars is endless gibs, but that's probably how it really is.
I'd put Halo 3 over Code of Honor any day. Code of Honor isn't bad for un-woke, Code of Honor is bad for being a crappy episode. It was also the scriptwriter's fetish, the guy who wrote Code of Honor also went on to write an identical episode for Stargate SG-1, this time with Amanda Tapping. The episode is crap.
I'm not defending Code of Honor, I haven't even seen the full episode, I was just saying that Rich was more on point than he even realizes when he said that a lot of the writers on season 1 would have grown up in the 1930s.
People who grew up in the 1930s wouldn't have been too old in the 1980s and thus their influence would have been significantly felt and that influence would have continued on into even the 2000s.
Because I'm not even talking about people who were literally alive in the 1930s, I'm just talking about 1930s culture being a point of interest and influence on even 2000s culture, I'll cite the movie O, Brother, Where Art Thou? for one example.
When I replayed Halo 3 it just stuck out at me how radically different than games today in tone and overall style it is, Halo 3 was drawing from a long history of science fiction media dating all the way back to the 1930s and Star Trek itself is part of that history, but I feel like the last ten years have been a bigger paradigm shift for American culture than anything between the 1930s and the 2000s or at the very least the 1960s and 2000s for sure.
Just compare Star Trek Discovery and TOS and TNG for a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
My overall point is that culture evolves slower than we realize since we live in an unusual time where technology evolves very fast, but culture evolves slower, that is why I say Halo 3 is closer to Flash Gordan from the 1930s than anything being made today, not because of the technology, but because of the overall "spirit" and tone of things.
You really can't understate how radical the changes in attitude have been over the last ten years though, to cite O, Brother, Where Art Thou? as an example again, while the movie had no problem acknowledging the past's flaws as any movie made about old time America around the 1990s and 2000s did, it still saw the past as something interesting, something worth remembering and something worthy of respect, that's completely different than today, the Woke despise the past, the past is their enemy, they have a desire to wipe clean the entire slate of human history and culture and start fresh where only their version of history and their culture will be remembered by future generations.
On a side note, what I will defend is the sequences of Riker hitting on the woman in the bar, Patrick Stewart's rant about stereotypical female characters comes off as way more creepy to me than laid back scenes of Riker hitting on some VR chick, this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about is why we, putting aside the context of it being VR and not real anyway, do we look at a situation like that and only accuse the guy of wrongdoing? Why do we not seem to realize that in that type of situation the woman would be just as thirsty, just as hoping to get laid and just as "objectifying" the man as the man may be doing towards the woman? Why do so many people get uncomfortable now at the very thought of a man and a woman hooking up?
