Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance

Our society dreams of making Star Trek's technologies real. Scientists, computer technologists, and science fiction media fans strive to bring to fruition: the transporter with quantum entanglement; interstellar space travel with faster-than-light speed; time travel with fabricated wormholes; the Holodeck as the Holy Grail of virtual reality; universal communication with the Klingon Language; cyborgs and androids with artificial intelligence; contact with aliens as the future that must take place. But does Star Trek's worldview coincide with the unbridled high-tech enthusiasm of recent years? Or is there a tension between the show's originality and the Borg-like assimilation of its creativity by the Star Trek industry? Focusing on the stories themselves, the author reveals the basic principles behind Star Trek that contest the ideology of mainstream technoscience, consumer culture, and liberal humanism promoted by Paramount Pictures. Bringing together the passion of a true fan and an intellectual reflection on science, technology and media culture, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance explains the real reasons for Star Trek's global mass appeal for the very first time. The encounter between thought and a popular subject mutually transforms both, and brings about genuine movement in ideas.

aus der Introduction

Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews.
But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping "science fiction" that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even "hard
sciences" like physics. Some book authors repeat the well-worn truism that Star Trek is a great modern mythology. Others follow the paradigm of The Science of Star Trek, substituting their own particular field of expertise
for the word "Science" in that formula. This is exactly the opposite of clearing a path to the perception that Star Trek actively affects technoscience and techno-culture. It holds Star Trek in the weaker position
of being "tested" against an established body of knowledge to see if it "measures up" on a scale of feasibility or correctness. The possibility that Star Trek is the lively initiator of a "new real" is thereby eliminated in advance...

There are two burning intellectual questions about Star Trek that pervade the existing literature and also engage us here. Why is Star Trek so popular? What are we to make of Star Trek's futuristic technologies?... We love Star Trek and we are technologists. We inhabit a technological "lifeworld." If we are able to understand why we love Star Trek - to name certain basic principles, artistic and ethical values, or a single intricate thread within its "universe" that captures our adherence as "true fans" - then it will become clear what our attitude towards Star Trek's "imaginary" technologies should be... Star Trek's futuristic technologies are our own twenty-first century technologies in development. When we have comprehended exactly why we "believe in" Star Trek - what the moral, aesthetic, philosophical, and techno-scientific grounding of our partisanship really is - then we will know exactly which tenets to reapply to our work as technologists, media practitioners, electronic artists, or thinkers about technology...

aus "A Taste of Armageddon"...

The humanoids we observe in the corridors of power, Mea-Three, Anan-Seven and the others, are living shadows of their own forthcoming deaths. They are mere specters of the primary reality of the online game... To keep the
hyper-reality of cyberwar going, the ghost-people must continue to exercise a certain "minimal" function in the real. To lend the game its requisite weight or support, they must furnish a necessary dose of reality-effect
through the chalking up of their disappearance... The spectral individuals "out here" must keep up the accuracy of input-output information that feeds and keeps in balance the legitimacy of the virtual reality game system "in there..." Eminiar is a simulacral power engaged in the simulacrum of war, using the foe Vendikar, or the Other, as a convenient alibi for its perfect crime...

und aus "How the Transporter 'Really Works' "...

Gene Roddenberry's original modernist conception of a physical transporter did not suggest any real threat to prevalent ideas about human subjectivity because the mental picturing of the transmission of a person's phased
matter stream or "energy" within the force field of the annular confinement beam still evoked traditional associations and images of the point-to-point transportation of an intact bodily self. The newer postmodernist digital transporter and hypermodernist quantum teleporter gesture towards a paradigm shift in the predominant definition of what it means to be human.

Within this posthuman paradigm, it is conceded that a copy of myself,either created from the same model informational digital pattern or emanating from an initiatory quantum mechanical techno-scientific coupled entanglement, is identical to me. Formulated in terms of the implied new
relationship to mortality, it will be a question of accepting the death of the original subject just one single time when the inaugural, startup clone
of myself is manufactured. This "death," moreover, will be fortuitously rationalized by the technoscience-driven conquest of cool as a small price to be paid for the acquisition of a useful and generalized cybernetic
prosthesis. Who will not agree to the minor inconvenience of his own "departure" or not be willing to ignore the minor philosophical technicality of "who is really me?" in economic exchange for being able to travel instantly from Paris to New York? Who will not consent to a system
of cloning when it grants me a sort of immortality? It is worth noting, however, that this is not the view of Star Trek's seminal stories about the transporter like The Enemy Within or The Next Generation episode Second Chances...

A fascinating aspect of the cyborg condition in Haraway's sense is reversibility. Reversibility is a form of radical critique or rebellion that does not posit any essentialist identity; positively valuate any existentialist non-identity; nor refuse the cultural system it opposes as
constituted by omnipresent irreversible power that is either frightfully totalizing or melts instantly when the "rebel" achieves awareness that it is an "arbitrary" construct. Reversibility is a critique situated in actions, relations, and exchanges (not identities and differences). It reverses the system in which it was born and has long lived...

It is true that all gender deportment can be seen as a performance, but this realization is just a "moment" for the challenge of reversibility. The performance has been going on all one's life, and one has a duel relationship to that biographical materiality or "destiny." You cannot simply jump out of your biography, or over your own shadow. As a reversing cyborg, Seven of Nine's task is to act on the realization that becoming human also means Becoming-Borg, engaging with the future in relation to
engaging with the past. Contrary to the official explanation, it is not the case that Seven's experience with the Borg was terrible and evil, and now she must recover from it, like a former concentration camp victim. Her time with the Borg was necessary to become something "of great value" that would not have been possible without that experience...