Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema

Prior to seeing Star Trek, I watched Oblivion, which seemed to me full of futurism -- it had a ship that had a novel (to modern cinema) ship design, 'drone' design, antagonist design. I think we live in a world that is quickly gaining the capability of creating our ideas, so those things that were fantastical in the 70s but trope today are not as easy to devine today.

I was just thinking the other day that I sincerely enjoy how Scifi is quickly becoming a mainstay of modern film, because it means more scifi films to invent some novel idea of the future. You really should not be basing your assumptions of modern cinema off of a remake.

It's an action-oriented big-budget Star Trek blockbuster - you go to see spaceships crashing into each other. Intelligent sci-fi rarely sells enough tickets to justify a budget in the hundreds of millions.

I don't really like the reboot either (wrong tone entirely if you ask me) but you can't say you could expect much after the first, right?

- advanced handheld medical scanners and treatments

- a genetically engineered human with super strength, health, and intelligence

- suspended animation that keeps humans alive for centuries

- artificial gravity

- faster than light communication and travel

- materials strong enough to maintain structural integrity after falling from space and plowing through a city

- matter transference across light years

I think the issue here is that author only paid attention to the elements that seem familiar, and dismissed the rest as fantasy. Of course handheld communicators and tablet computers were once fantasy too.

America post-WWII worked and studied its ass off. Then it defeated the Soviets. You ask people today though, what they think of the future, and I think that the picture is bleak not merely because of the economic malaise, but because people don't know what to strive for.

In a competitive sense, who are we fighting? Our ostensible enemies are (1) the lunatic fringe of Islam and maybe also Christianity, and (2) China/India, depending on who looks more fearful in any given year, except the West also trades and intermarries with those cultures. I think the kicker is that Westerners don't even fetish after Chinese and Indians the way they used to.

Now in a purely constructive sense, what does the future hold? Well we've already seen that the tech industry simply isn't providing jobs for most people the way that manufacturing did. And why should it? Lets face it, our culture is not one that really values math or science or engineering. Most of you weren't popular when you were kids, am I right? It's not nice to hoard all of the pie, but it's not easy to share it on these terms either. The best programmers are supposedly 10x-100x better than the average ones, so even if more people did get into tech, they'd probably be discouraged and see it to be insurmountably difficult, and they might be right.

Tech has increased the productivity of workers in the West, but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person, and that's what cinema was originally made for. It is a mass media. It caters to the common man, and the common man probably thinks better of the past than the future. I think it isn't surprising then that the latest Star Trek actually feels strangely like a retro-future, or that the tech in it is just shiny polished toys. I think that's the real danger here, that in tech, we will simply just relegate ourselves to making shiny toys for people, and all they do is consume. That's probably not the path to a healthy future for our society.

It may be instructive to look at a series like Firefly, or even BSG. When people are feeling down, they want to be empathized, and Firefly assuages that in a way. In the future, even if things all go to hell, some people will still make it out, by the ties they share and their ingenuity.