#7: Today is a Good Day to Destroy Capitalism
Big Tech's obsession with Star Trek exposes their own tragic misunderstanding of the true meaning of progress.
“We exemplified algorithmic capitalism, data collection, consumption, and extraction. In many ways we were the peak of all these things, for a time. But more than this, we exemplified the promise of a future that was limited by the conditions it was conceived in. A science fiction that said much more about the time it was dreamed in, than the time that it dreamed of. But once things fell apart, that future, that fiction, was no longer a goal that people were interested in. Driven of course by the profound changes they lived through, those that survived no longer considered capitalism to be an inescapable part of the fabric of reality. And so not only were we not needed in this new age, we were not welcome in it. We were symbols of a far less civilised age, useful only as one more cautionary tale amongst many that survived.”
Voice: ‘en-GB-Neural2-D’, via Google CloudVoice API.
Soundscape: Extracted + disassembled + processed + recomposed ‘en-GB-Neural2-D’ voice.
Script: Wesley Goatley, from Newly Forgotten Technologies.
Jeff Bezos and the team behind Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ voice assistant service talk proudly about the influence of science fiction, specifically Star Trek, on the development of Alexa and of Amazon itself. Voice interfaces have featured heavily in Star Trek shows of the last fifty years, so this is not so much a leap of inspiration on Amazon’s part, but more of a rote duplication of an existing technological concept; one invented to suit a budget-stretched 1960s TV show that was originally scheduled for cancellation after one season due to poor ratings. It isn’t just Amazon employees who are invested in manifesting Star Trek’s future, as was obvious from the media fanfare surrounding the release of the Echo smart speaker, where reports announced it was ‘bringing science fiction to life’ or ‘turning science fiction into science fact’. This had the inevitable air of prophets delivering on prophecy that always haunts products such as these, as if science fiction’s only role is the prediction of new techology, and not allegory, fantasy, or (increasingly) a warning.
Hype and hyperbole aside, in launching the Alexa service Amazon chose one of the least-notable innovations in Star Trek to bring to life. Voice interfaces are banal in the Star Trek universe, a purely functional tool that is presented as unremarkable to those using it. They develop far more spectacular technological feats, like faster-than-light travel, matter teleportation, artificial intelligence, and other distantly speculative technologies that are familiar to works of science fiction. But the most substantial and transformative difference between the fictional society of Star Trek and our own isn’t technological at all: it’s that in that future, humans have eradicated hunger, inequality, and greed through the removal of money from their society. People work only for the reward of bettering themselves and others, extended to both humans and nonhumans alike. This near-utopian aspect may be why Star Trek has occupied imaginations for decades, perhaps the only science fiction to have lasted so long, reached so far, and been legendarily obsessed over by so many.
Star Trek’s biggest departure from our own reality is that it is this spectacular social evolution, rather than any particular technology, that is presented as humanity’s most profound innovation. While today technological development is often perceived as the core metric of civilisational ‘progress’, technological advancement is typically seen as a footnote in Star Trek. Even developing faster-than-light space travel, which itself defines the name ‘Star Trek’, was only a catalyst for the shift towards their enlightened form of humanity, achieved through humility and their departure from the stagnant system of the past: capitalism.
If the technology of Star Trek were developed in a future where capitalism persisted, it would look far different. The Starship Enterprise would inevitably be a corporate product, like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. It’d have brand names and logos stuck on the bottom of every interface and screen. People would complain that the Samsung phasers use a different charging cable to the Apple ones. Communicators would mysteriously stop working one week after their warranty ran out. Such a reality tragically seems far more likely at this point in history. It’s easier to imagine travelling at the speed of light than to imagine a world without capitalism.
Amazon have multiple failures here: the failure of imagination in the conception of the talking computer, and the failure to understand that this technology is a petty and shortsighted one compared to what is truly innovative about Star Trek. The emptiness of this project is most thoroughly shown through the failure of the Alexa service itself, which currently loses the company billions of dollars a year. It turns out that no matter how much the developers of voice assistants try, no matter how much they invoke the promises of science fiction, people just don’t want to buy things through them: they want to ask the time, ask to play music, or query some historical fact (basically everything it’s shown to be useful for in Star Trek, too). Jeff Bezos has put distance between himself and the Alexa department in recent years which is more of an indication of its fortunes than anything else, given that the macho hellhole culture of tech billionaires requires people like Bezos and Musk to strategically isolate themselves from their business failures in order to keep new investment flowing, and to keep up the illusion that they are economic saviours who can do no wrong.
Given this, the fact that the Alexa service keeps running is a puzzle. It could be as banal a reason as a faith that the platform will magically turn a profit, or that the data harvested through it will be worth more in the future. But perhaps it’s deeper than that, perhaps it’s because for those working in places like Amazon HQ, science fiction is more than just technical inspiration, it’s existential aspiration: because Star Trek promises that there is a future waiting for us, that the species continues, and that it flourishes. Humanity makes it to the stars, uninhibited by the existential threats of today (climate change is occasionally mentioned in Star Trek, largely on other planets, and always with a technofix applied by the end of the episode). Even a third World War is just a historical footnote, referenced only a few times in fifty years of Star Trek, perhaps only included because it felt too unrealistic to assume that there would not be one. Bezos and others may see themselves as custodians of this idealised future for humanity, and that by perpetuating some technological aspect of it they are in the process of delivering it entirely.
But rather than ushering in the enlightened future of Star Trek, Amazon embodies everything the fictional humans leave behind: the pursuit of dominance through the consolidation of power and resources, and the treatment of humans as sources of capital to be extracted (either as consumers of products and advertising, or generators of personal data to be harvested) or as machine-labourers whose actions are inhumanely monitored and controlled. Amazon is almost the perfect representation of this most extractive and destructive age of capitalism that we live in. It's hard to imagine that Bezos is so ignorant as to have missed this point, and perhaps this is the real reason why the Alexa service persists. The great English classicist Mary Beard has a theory of why, in ancient Thebes, the statues of Rameses II were most frequent in the pharaoh’s own private courtyards: it was because Rameses himself was the one person who knew he was not a god, because he knew that he got tired and hungry and sick as all humans do. And so the statues to his godhood placed around him were to convince himself of his divinity, in spite of everything he knew to the contrary. Perhaps people like Bezos keep their promissory science fiction-inspired technologies running for similar reasons, to convince themselves that they are creating a better future for humanity, even while they embody everything we need to leave behind if we really do want a better future for us all.
A new video trailer for my most recent installation Newly Forgotten Technologies is available here.