On the Necessity of Time Travel for Human Life

The Last Showgirl, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, Magnolia

Striving for goodness
while the cruel men win.

How do you recover an irrecoverable defeat? How do you undo the past?

In 2026, this is an increasingly urgent question, not just for individual persons, but for America and the world: as one era comes crashing down, and another, perhaps, prepares to begin. 

The most uncanny thing to me about living in 2026 is simply the way that everyone, elite and ordinary, Right and Left, talks--which is simply the way characters used to talk in Star Trek episodes about time travel.

Captain Picard takes Captain Garrett and aside and confides to her in a rushed, furtive tone, his eyes lowered: "The war is going very badly for the Federation, far worse than is generally known. Starfleet Command believes defeat is inevitable. Within six months we may have no choice but to surrender." The point of this intervention, though, is not to help prepare her or the public for inevitable defeat, or even to reverse the tide of war and give the Federation victory after all--it is to convince her to go back in time and change the past. "One more ship will make no difference in the here and now. But twenty two years ago, one ship could have stopped this war before it started."

To stop the war before it started. This is the real or concealed preoccupation, it seems to me, of almost every American today. Certainly, it is the main preoccupation of the American President, whose entire political program at present consists of making or pretending to make it so the war he started with the Islamic Republic of Iran was never started, the global energy crisis he caused was never caused, the critical munitions shortage he precipitated was never precipitated, the economic bubble he inflated was never inflated, or, in short, that pretty much everything he has done since taking office in 2024 was never done. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu works overtime to pretend that the never-ending genocidal campaign and never-ending security crisis and accelerating collapse of the Israeli state that he himself has caused is all simply a bad dream. In Iran, meanwhile, a predatory military elite works continually to unravel their entire state and economy in real time, in the desperate homicidal hope that, somewhere across the world, all the other states and economies are unraveling faster. 

This sense of desperate undoing, though, extends far beyond the halls of power: indeed, it is hardly too much to say that it has become a kind of manic leitmotif for almost all institutions everywhere. I spoke recently of a desire for death, for annihilation, as a driver behind the institutional chaos we see around us--and I still believe this is true. Before that, I talked about the remarkable dominance of nostalgia in politics and culture--and I still think that is true. Increasingly, though, I think the most immediate desire animating America is not so much death or nostalgia as time travel. Whatever was done in the last five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, must be undone: including sometimes the very existence of the institutions and movements and beliefs that ruled those times.

And really, people have a point! Since at least the financial crisis of 2008-2009, political and economic and academic elites the world over have worked very hard, and invested enormous amounts of resources, in building up a new, all-encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural infrastructure centered in tech companies and the Internet--an effort that has only very recently and belatedly been given the terribly inaccurate moniker of AI. Looking back, more or less everyone now agrees that effort was, by and large, a mistake: that it has made the world poorer, lonelier, less populated, more frightened, weaker, more divided, more fragile, and more unhappy. 

It is in fact true that unimaginable resources and time and effort and belief that might have been spent on any number of other things--including, say, the American munitions stockpile, or the American transportation infrastructure, or clean energy, or prison reform, or housing, or mental health care, or physical health care, or actually effective welfare systems, or poverty relief, or community-building, or parental support, or mass redistribution of resources, or even movies that people wanted to watch and games they wanted to play, have instead been plowed wholesale into a metastatizing Soviet-style private-public tech bureaucracy whose ultimate goal and telos and outcome all along, it turns out, was unemployed homeless people sitting on crumbling streets beneath mansions watching AI-generated pornography on individual smartphones to the deafening tones of data center cooling systems. This is a hyperbole--but one that is nevertheless truer to the actual present reality of catastrophic American economic and cultural collapse than any statistical statement.

The real trouble, though, is that this effort was never, at any time, confined to American elites--it was, at one time or another, not only supported but fervently trusted and hoped in by Americans of every class and race and party. Even those who never consciously believed in it, though, have had their lives entirely transformed by its efforts--and not just economically. We all, techno-optimist or techno-pessimist, Christian or secular, have walked around these last years with a little phone in our pockets--and so at one time or other have felt the ghostly, preternatural touch of the technical regime on our daily habits, our imaginations, our dreams, our deepest desires, our most intimate and interior selves. What is to be undone is not just political, not just economic, not even just technological, but profoundly, deeply, devastatingly personal.

Most people, of course, would not say in so many words that they actually want to undo the last twenty years of technological development; nevertheless, if you ask them what they want, what they fear, what they support, and what they oppose, it mostly centers on changing the past.

For a huge part of America today, that involves a completely explicit desire to go back in time ten years and make it so that Donald Trump was never elected President--or at the very least, make it so that absolutely no trace of any effect of his Presidency remains. Meanwhile, Trumpism 2.0 has largely consisted of various flailing efforts to undo, uncreate, and unmake--beginning with the 2020 election and Biden's Presidency, but extending rapidly to the US aid and development policy that began in the 1960s, the free trade policies crystallized since the 1990s, the immigration surge of the 2000s onward, and at times extending to more or less the entire Federal government and nearly everything that has happened since WW2. 

Culturally, things are if anything even clearer--with AI acting as both the hostile provoker and force multiplier of an unprecedented turn towards nostalgia and simulation as the prevailing notes of culture. From music to movies to television to video games to food, people love most what no longer exists.

To repeat, then: in the year 2026, every major issue, every pressing concern, every fundamental debate, and nearly every passion and hope and desire centers straightforwardly on how we can change the past.

But can we change the past? And if so, how? 

To examine this question, in best Adventures of Captain Peabody fashion, I will be writing about a historical tragedy, an indie album, a Las Vegas show, and a movie about regret. 

Against the Maxxers: Or, On the Necessarily Transcendental Nature of Ethics

We are living in the Age of the Maxxers.

That, anyway, is what Sam Kriss thinks; it's also what a surprising number of other cultural commentators, Substackers, and NPR hosts think as well. Moderation is out; normalcy is out; morality itself is out. It doesn't matter what you maxx; pick something, anything, and maxx it. 

I don't believe in this trend; I don't believe in any trend that NPR hosts and Substackers tell me about, beginning with AI but also including Traditionalism, Social Media, the Alt Right, and facts. I am, as Dr. Ian Cameron once said, an educator in daily contact with young minds.

Nevertheless, like many fake trends talked about by people on the Internet, the term "maxxing" does in fact designate something--though what it designates is not in fact a fad originated by a few teenagers, but a pervasive cultural viewpoint that has structured our social and economic lives for many decades and is now mostly exemplified by people over fifty. This is true of every one of the trends mentioned above.

This particular viewpoint is easily defined, if not necessarily easily understood: it is merely what happens when people try to do ethics and live human life without believing in transcendent ends.

Hence the modest purpose of this short essay: to point out the exceptionally simple, straightforward, and obvious fact that without a robust and practical acceptance of transcendence as a pervasive feature of human life and action, it is impossible to construct a coherent ethical system, impossible to live a human life, and utterly impossible to be happy.

A Short and Succinct Four-Point Argument For Why You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way

[I have written about and against AI before, pointing out that the underlying technology and cultural orientation are nothing new, and arguing that AI is a last desperate attempt for the tech industry to save their bloated techno-salvationist bureaucracies. However, I admit that both of those pieces are very long and hard to follow, especially in the age of AI. 

Hence, I have produced the present piece, in which I make four straightforward points about why you shouldn't use AI while also including images from "the Funnies," which I am reliably informed that everyone loves (the year is 1967), for popular appeal.

Before reading the following, however, a clarification is necessary:"AI" in contemporary usage is not a descriptive term for a new technology, but an advertising term for an essentially political program of reallocating massive economic and social resources toward developing and finding applications for and forcing large-scale use of a heterogenous range of pre-existing digital technologies, products, and services. 

Hence, the question "are you for or against AI?" is not "do you in the abstract support the further development of digital technology?" but "do you support this political program?": or more immediately "do you think that the present or future achievements of this program in fact and on the whole justify the costs?" To be unable to ask this question, as I pointed out, is to be insane.]

Point 1: AI will never be profitable enough to justify the private investments made in it.

Argument 1.1: No LLM product or data center has as yet generated a profit purely on the basis of consumer and corporate usage, as opposed to investments or circular financing. Nevertheless, AI investment is scheduled to exceed 1 trillion dollars in 2026 alone. The scale differential between zero profit and trillions in investment makes it nearly impossible for the former to ever catch up with the latter for basic mathematical reasons. 

Argument 1.2: The intrinsic nature of LLMs makes them processing-heavy and therefore expensive even in carrying out simple tasks. Increases in processing power in chips have already reached a plateau, and the chips themselves require rare materials and can only be made in a few locations. Hence, the technology will continue to be very expensive for the foreseeable future. 

Argument 1.3: LLMs are inherently limited to automating tasks that are in and of themselves either superfluous to making a profit or not all that expensive. In itself, human labor is cheap and will likely always be cheaper than LLM usage at scale and for the overwhelming majority of tasks. 

Point 2: Given its lack of profitability, the only way AI development can continue on anything approaching its current scale is on the basis of enormous government investment.

Argument 2.1: The current hyper-financialized economy is ultimately structured by profit, if not for corporations at least for investors. Sooner or later, AI investment without returns will lead to a market crash and a pullback on investment into AI. 

Argument 2.2: The only institution that regularly invests AI-scale capital without any financial return on investment at all is the government. 

Argument 2.3: The use cases for AI include present priorities of the US government in which it regularly invests large amounts of money. These include most prominently military technology and mass surveillance.

Argument 2.4: The US government has been the main driver behind the current AI boom both through favorable regulation and active investment.

Point 3: The only feasible use case for mass-scale long-term government-funded AI is surveillance and murder.

Argument 3.1: Over the past decades, the US government has built a remarkable surveillance and data gathering operation. The main obstacle to the utility of mass surveillance and big data for government purposes is the difficulty of sorting through so much information and arranging it into useful and clear and short and actionable narratives. But this is in fact the one thing that LLMs are consistently good at. 

Argument 3.2: Over the past decades, the world has entered a new era of drone warfare, exemplified by the Russia-Ukraine War and the Iran War. Large-scale drone manufacturing requires development in magnet, battery, and chip technologies. The AI boom involves in part targeted development of some of these technologies.

Argument 3.3: One of the main limiters for drone warfare has become the ability to jam remote-controlled drones or even hack into them. This has led to a significant push in the direction of so-called "autonomous" drones with the ability to choose targets and carry out attacks largely on their own, as well as swarming drones operating in sync with each other. Both require sophisticated software.

Argument 3.4: Even non-autonomous drones lead to a vast multiplication of targets; the same is true even for the current military trend towards long-range targeted air bombing with manned aircraft. Selecting targets rapidly enough to keep up with operational requests requires the processing of large amounts of information and the weighting and determining of threats ad hoc and at scale. LLMs are again a technology adept at processing large amounts of information and producing an outcome based on it.

Argument 3.5: The US military and DoD have become a leading investor in AI technology over the past year, with the head of the Department of Energy declaring it a "new Manhattan project." 

Point 4: The social, political, and creative effects of mass-scale long-term government-funded AI are and always will be overwhelmingly negative and fall most heavily on the poor and vulnerable.

Argument 4.1: Most if not all military AI uses are unethical in and of themselves, since they involve violations of privacy and the waging of war and taking of life irresponsibly and unjustly. 

Argument 4.2: AI Chatbots have already provably caused suicides and driven people mad by forming quasi-social or romantic relationships with them. 

Argument 4.3: AI tools have already deprived numerous students of education by allowing them to automate most aspects of schooling. 

Argument 4.4: AI tools have already seriously degraded the quality of American visual art, film, television, and even corporate graphic design. 

Argument 4.5: By their very nature, LLMs cannot be entirely controlled or predicted, and will always be prone to "hallucination" of various sorts. This has already caused damage in many ways, from spreading false information to hacking networks to causing suicides to committing economic fraud. Militarized AI systems would be able to cause untold destruction.

Argument 4.6: The build-out of data centers has already caused environmental damage, raised energy costs, increased inflation, created noise and other pollution, and failed to produce jobs. Current plans call for an exponential growth of data centers, which would have even more drastic effects.

 

Ergo: You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way. QED.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a Sign of the Times

Since I wrote my totally-completely-absolutely-justified-I-would-not-take-back-a-single-world denunciation of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer three years ago, a number of people have told me I was wrong and tried to argue with me about it. I, meanwhile, have been waiting for an apology.

Is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey a personal apology to me for having made Oppenheimer? Did the British-American filmmaker whose movies have made over $6 billion over the past three decades read my blog review of Oppenheimer, feel its profound truth, and attempt to personally make up for it to me by making a Classics-derived film about the importance of trust and inter-personal bonds?

I doubt it! Nonetheless, this is what I've been asking myself ironically ever since I first heard of the project however many years ago it was announced. Meanwhile, a friend paid for my ticket so I could see it in theaters and report back on my thoughts. 

Well, after seeing all three hours of Nolan's take on Homer's take on the story of a man trying to get home, though I can't praise the movie that much, I can mostly accept the apology. 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not a great adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, or a great Hollywood epic, or even a great film; it is, however, a film that captures our times, and in the process tells one very important truth.

Everlasting Life: Annihilation, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Stalin and the Bomb, The Unconsoled

"You can combine up to a certain point; you can distort up to a certain point; after that you lose the identity; and with that you lose everything. [...] A thing that has changed entirely has not changed at all. It has no bridge of crisis. It can remember no change. If you wake up tomorrow and you simply are Mrs. Dope, an old woman who lets lodgings at Broadstairs—well, I don’t doubt Mrs. Dope is a saner and happier person than you are. But in what way have you progressed? What part of you is better? Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”

“No,” said Phillip, with suppressed but sudden violence, “I deny that any limit is set upon living things.”

-G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914)

We live in a time where more and more people want to stop existing. Considered historically, this is a surprisingly common desire--and a key to understanding many things present and past otherwise incomprehensible.

Last year, numerous otherwise normal people online, and an even greater number of abnormal people online, and also many people working for the United States Federal Government, embraced a twenty-year-old meme in which Werner Herzog narrates a single pilgrim penguin inexplicably leaving its colony and heading out into the frozen tundra to die alone in the cold. While for the old-fashioned pessimistic humanist Herzog this was supposed to once again point out the inhumanity and cruelty of the natural world which humans must transcend through reason, for innumerable people in America today this nihilistic story about an individual seeking death through isolation was instead seen as inspirational, even aspirational. Numerous otherwise sane people started talking about "Being the Penguin" as though lonely death by exposure and starvation was a desirable goal--and perhaps, for them, it was. Whatever Americans are in 2026, we certainly are not normal.

Still, if Americans are abnormal, they remain human; and our passion for death can in fact be understood in the light of universal human nature, via the concept and pragmatic, ethical reality of transcendence, which understood properly is as foundational to human action as food and drink is to human bodily life.

If, as Aristotle says, the soul is in a sense all things, at least by way of relation and telos, then the soul quite naturally and necessarily wants to transcend itself. If, as Aquinas says, man is ordered towards God as to an end that transcends his reason, then man quite naturally and necessarily desires to transcend himself. 

Transcendence, though, is a confusing concept. In the most basic sense, one thing transcends another when it has something in common with it, but also goes beyond it. In the proper Thomistic-metaphysical sense, one thing transcends a group of other things when it contains all their perfections in a higher, simpler, and more eminent way. Either way, though, a puzzle emerges: for what could it possibly mean for a thing to transcend itself?

One rather simple answer to that question might be that a thing transcends itself when it ceases to be itself, and becomes something else. If today I am Nathan Israel Smolin, and tomorrow I cease to be Nathan Israel Smolin and become Captain Bob "Captain Peabody" Peabody, a blue clayman veteran of the Second World War and also a blogger, there can be no doubt that I have transcended Nathan Israel Smolin in at least some sense. As Captain Peabody I can certainly reflect with satisfaction that I have left behind all the difficulties and limitations of Nathan-Israel-Smolin-hood; as well as in the concomitant fact that as Captain Peabody I will evince perfections and have experiences that Nathan Israel Smolin could never have had. And if it is the case that Nathan Israel Smolin must and will inevitably die, a transformation into Captain Peabody could well extend my life, and an indefinite series of such transformations extend it indefinitely, and so constitute a kind of eternal life beyond the span of human years.

For all that, though, there are (at least) two reasons that such a transformation does not constitute transcendence in either its metaphysical or ethical senses. The first is the simple fact that in gaining the perfections and advantages and experiences and memories and indefinable spark of being a blue clayman with a large apparent-rocket-launcher attached to the right side of my body I will have at the same time lost the indefinable spark of being Nathan Israel Smolin. Or, put another way, I will not have transcended or moved beyond the entire category of human (and clayman) personalities in such a way as to contain all the perfections of them in a supereminent way; rather, I will simply have moved from one member of that category to another. Or, put in the most fundamental way of all, I will not have found eternal life, but died.

In the second place comes the difficulty pointed out by G.K. Chesterton (via the honorable Dorian Wimpole) above, that in ceasing to be Nathan Israel Smolin I have in the proper sense simply ceased to be. Human personality and personhood, it turns out, is not simply an accidental relation added to a kind of quasi-physical substance; as rational beings, our personhood defines and constitutes each one of us in toto, body and soul. Even if (arguendum) in the transformation from Smolin to Peabody and from flesh to clay every single atom currently present in my body were kept and none discarded, the mere fact of altering my personal and rational identity from that of a human being from Alabama to a clayman from Claymatia would involve my destruction. For a transformation to be an improvement, let alone a true form of transcendence, something of the original must be preserved and survive the transition.

As I have pointed out before in this space, America has over the past fifty years been obsessed with the concept and term of identity as no other in history--even while showing little or no understanding of what identity actually is. 

If personhood and personality and therefore identity is for rational beings (as both Aristotle and Aquinas new) fundamentally defined and even constituted by relation, we could quite easily predict that the pervasive isolation and atomization of our society would result in an obsessive fixation on identity. People always become obsessively fixated on important things they are in the process of losing. And if at times our society has seemed to show a kind of naive utopian optimism about identity as such--assuming as an article of faith that every asserted or imagined or even merely vaguely felt identity was ipso facto good and just and necessary for happiness and compatible with every other identity--we can also recognize in this identitarianist optimism the kind of avoidant magical thinking present in nearly every psychological experience of loss.

Still, if there is a primal terror that makes us cling to our identities against the world, if there is an animalistic rage that makes us use them as weapons, if there is an avoidant naiveté that makes us accept any and every identity merely as a shield against the infinite dark, there is nonetheless no denying that there is also, deeply rooted in us, a desire to transcend our identities, chosen or unchosen, shallow or deep; and that this desire can quite easily be twisted into an unslakable thirst for annihilation.

In the remaining paragraphs of this essay, then, I will be tracing this human thirst for annihilation through a number of different fictional stories and historical accounts, in all of which we will be attempting to understand the human proclivity for self-destruction not through the lenses of ethics or metaphysics, but via psychology and narrative and history. By understanding these accounts, we will, hopefully, come closer to understanding ourselves and our society--and in so doing, hopefully learn to counter the thirst for death wherever it is found in America, in others, and in ourselves.

Short Story: The Date

I was sitting in the cafe by the window, working on an academic article for the Journal of Ancient History, when I saw them.

It was a man and a woman, both young, though not too young–not college-aged, or immediately post-grad. The man could have been a few years older, or that may just have been the way he was dressed; buttoned up, as they used to say, to his chin, with a coat over it. Not a “formal” suit coat, but similar. More casual. He was not wearing a tie. She, on the other hand, was dressed in something more like what a college student might wear for a first date. Tight pants, a low-cut blouse with straps, both in bright colors. Nice shoes, but not high-heeled. 

They came in together, but slightly awkwardly, as if they had only just met outside the restaurant. He did not hold the door, but he looked for a moment as if he might. After a brief hesitation, he led the way to a table by the window. It was a good table–the best in the house for a view of the park outside, as I knew well, but not one I ever took. The glare from the sun as you get towards the late afternoon makes it too hard for me to see the screen of my laptop.

Despite leading the way to the table, the man waited for the woman to sit down first. She had already pulled out her phone and was scanning the QR code on the table for the menu. After a moment, he did the same. The next few minutes were spent in silence, and I returned to a difficult passage about Late Imperial rituals of power. I’m not sure how long afterwards (I always lose track of time when writing) it was when the woman finally spoke.

“Have you been here before?” 

The man must have shook his head, but I didn’t see it. “So why did you tell me to meet you here?” the woman asked, a new note in her voice.

I looked over to see the man shrug. He was thin–too thin, I thought, and a little uncomfortable in his own body. He raised one hand in a meaningless gesture. “Well, it’s near where you said you worked. I was going to be driving out here all this way anyway, so I didn’t want you to have to go far.” His voice was oddly flat, and he didn’t meet her eyes.

Her voice now held an unmistakable undercurrent of tension; it might have been anger or some other suppressed emotion. “And you didn’t think to ask me where I’d like to go? You know I live just around the corner.” She had blonde hair and those odd little bangs. She was wearing flesh-colored lipgloss.

He looked down at his phone, scrolling through the menu again. “Well…” he ventured. “You told me to pick the place. Since you said I’d be driving farther. I thought…”

“Well,” she said, “obviously I assumed you’d pick a place you’d been to before. Or at least because the food was something you liked.” 

He didn’t respond; he was looking down at his phone still. 

She looked vaguely in my direction; I turned back to my laptop. “Picking an interesting or exotic restaurant would have shown personality. Or picking a safer restaurant you’d been to before would have shown that you cared about me having a nice time. Or you could have responded by asking me to pick a restaurant since you knew I knew the area better and wanted to show you valued my preferences. And because of the dietary restrictions I listed on my profile.” Her voice now was not angry, but unfocused, like someone reading off a Powerpoint slide. I glanced back at her face; she was looking right at me. I turned quickly back again to my laptop screen, and tried hard to focus on Ambrose of Milan’s meeting with Magnus Maximus rather than the one in front of me. It was difficult. 

The man sighed. “The Monte Cristo Sandwich looks good.” I glanced over to see him looking around vaguely for the waiter, one hand raised awkwardly again.

Three Lessons for Starfleet Academy

Star Trek has reached a crisis and juncture and turning point--which is not unusual.

If my very lengthy series of essays on this blog laying out (in rather inaccurate fashion) the history of Star Trek have anything to say, it is that Star Trek is not and never has been a simple, single formula or genre or thing or "vision" of Gene Roddenberry or anyone else. Most of what makes Star Trek interesting to me, in fact, is the intensely collaborative nature of the (now extinct) genre of network television, and how tied Star Trek has always been, not to any particularly original treatment of science fiction or politics, but rather with the ever-shifting personal and political and utopian visions of America looking at itself.

Anyway, more or less since the year 1966, Star Trek has been in crisis: beginning with the initial crisis of its failed first pilot, extending through the crisis of its too-expensive budget and too-low ratings, through the crisis of its first cancellation, through the crisis of its second cancellation, and ending with the crisis of its true and final cancellation after its third season. 

Then began the terrible monstrous crisis of trying to revive Star Trek, which took up most of the 1970s, got a lot of people fired, and resulted in dozens of unproduced scripts, lots of unused design work, one terrible cartoon show, and one terrible (but sublime) film. Then there was the terrible horrible crisis of TNG's birth and first two years, then the crisis of how to do a TNG spinoff in the '90s, and a lot of other crises that I refuse to summarize in this sentence.

Certainly Star Trek has been in crisis since the year 2005, when Star Trek Enterprise was unceremoniously cancelled after four seasons. There are a lot of things one could say about Enterprise--and maybe one day I'll say them--but perhaps the most relevant is that its demise is impossible to untangle from the gradual and now irreversible decline of network television, television networks, and indeed television itself. 

In 1995, Star Trek Voyager had debuted as the flagship show of the new network UPN; in 2001, Star Trek Enterprise took over that role; in 2005, Star Trek Enterprise ended; and in 2006 UPN itself went the way of the dodo. Its successor, the CW, has like most of network television continued to limp along til the present day, gradually losing viewership and profitability and shows: it now runs more or less exclusively sports, news, reality, and variety shows, with its last produced scripted drama show set to end this summer. 

A few years later, though, Star Trek took to the big screen, attempting to join the "Marvel rush" of would-be blockbuster films greenlit by executives desperate to find any even vaguely comic-book-esque franchise (Battleship? Emojis?) to share in the bounty: and, like most of their peers, met with mixed success. JJ Abrams' Star Trek produced three successful, popular films that nonetheless were considered disappointments by the studio for not matching the grosses or profit margins of true blockbusters: and Star Trek was once again left to die.

While all this was going on, a little website called Netflix was introducing on-demand streaming to the world: an event that not only accelerated the decline of network television, but also led to a desperate attempt by any and every studio to replicate Netflix's success. In 2014, CBS, the owner of the Star Trek shows, released CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus), a transparent desperate cash grab with a complete dearth of original content whose main selling point was that it had the old Star Trek shows available to watch. And so, a new era began, where the hoary network-television entity Star Trek would be retailored for a new age of free-flowing subscriber cash, maximal budgets, and an ever-increasing demand for content. 

And then, of course, the streaming economy completely collapsed, and studios began cutting back massively, cancelling and reducing budgets across the board in a desperate attempt to figure out how the new model of streaming television could possibly be profitable. 

Hence, the latest Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy was cancelled shortly after the airing of its first season ended, and probably more than a year before its already filmed second season was set to be released (the date has not yet been announced): as I write this, its sets are being auctioned off publicly for peanuts. Strange New Worlds, despite having two seasons left to air, has also already finished filming its fifth and final season: and for the first time since Star Trek Discovery began in 2017 there are no Star Trek productions filming anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, Paramount is in the process of being bought out by Skydance, run by the son of Trump ally and CEO of massive-beneficiary-of-circular-AI-deals Oracle Larry Ellison in a monopolistic bargain that numerous Hollywood and Star Trek stars are currently protesting, but which many people on the Internet either hope or fear will make Star Trek stop being woke--reactions themselves occasioned by the massive, politicized online backlash to Starfleet Academy for being woke and/or having a gay Klingon. And as the Culture War (and also a real war) rages on, Star Trek fans around the world wait, and watch, and bemoan the fact that (undeniably) Star Trek is In Crisis, that (once again) Star Trek As We Know It Is Over, and wonder if anyone, anywhere can perhaps (in a stunningly original neologism that I just came up with) Make Star Trek Great Again.

As the dust settles, though, those of us not engaged in furious online debates over Wokeness (an online term for things that are cool from the year 2015) versus Anti-Wokeness (an online term for American conservatism from the year 2019) can once again take stock, reflect, and post absurdly long essays on Star Trek to our blogs. Or as Quark said, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

Abstracting (quod sit impossibile) from the political and economic situation of America, the fact remains that a lot of people have not been particularly happy with the 2017-2025, streaming-bubble, Alex Kurtsman era of Star Trek. Some of those people have been merely grumpy old men who vastly prefer rewatching another episode of Star Trek TNG to watching any new show whatsoever or spending time with their wives; but some have been people who had legitimate issues with the actual creative quality of these shows. And what is more, this era of Star Trek, taken as a whole, has in fact resoundingly failed to recapture the general audience lost to Star Trek c. 2000, so that Star Trek is less culturally relevant in the year 2026 than it has ever been, even during the 2005-2009 interregnum, and is more or less the least culturally relevant franchise still producing content--significantly less relevant, alas, than The Fast and the Furious, whose proposed eleventh film is currently bogged down in production hell.

Hence, it is my goal in this post to Do My Duty as a Star Trek Fan (i.e. tedious old man) and do the hard work of drawing some lessons from the recently completed era of Star Trek to, hopefully, offer to future generations and/or future runners of the Star Trek franchise. Unfortunately, it is too late for the actual writers and producers of Starfleet Academy to benefit from them: but the below "lessons" are still offered in the somewhat aggressive, ironic, tongue-in-cheek spirit of one educator speaking to another. 

Star Trek has in its history been run by everyone from an ex-Southern-Baptist ex-cop (Gene Roddenberry) to a Jewish ex-Quiz-Kid (Harve Bennett) to a Jewish writer of Sherlock Holmes novels (Nicholas Meyer) to a Jewish actor-turned-director (Leonard Nimoy) to another Jewish actor-turned-failed-director (William Shatner) to a Jewish documentary producer (Rick Berman) to a Jewish writer with a blue beard and an obsession with Las Vegas (Ira Steven Behr) to a Jewish writer of Transformers films (Alex Kurtsman): and I for one am eagerly awaiting the next anointed one in this storied lineage.

For after all, when Woke and Anti-Woke both disappear into the mists, reality will remain: and so will things like aesthetics and framing and character and story and plot and themes and meaning and the true and the good and the beautiful. Also, just FYI, budgets really matter.