Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Captain Kirk, Captain Pike, Real/Virtual Reality, Star Trek

In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers' senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles.
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The Secrets of Star Trek

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Star Trek

Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Father Roderick about Star Trek, on Catholic WIFI radio.
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“Past Tense”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Deep Space Nine, Time Travel

In the Deep Space Nine episode "Past Tense", economic crisis, urban decay, widening gap between rich and poor, mass unemployment, and homelessness - twenty years into the new Millennium - send Earth society plummeting into a dangerous period of social tension and upheaval.
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Star Trek: First Contact

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Faster-Than-Light Speed, Star Trek

The Vulcans knew previously of the existence of our life-sustaining planet, but considered human civilization too primitive and insignificant to be bothered with. But the invention of warp speed technology is the sign of a species sufficiently advanced to be worthy of interstellar attention.
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The Physics of Warp Drive

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Faster-Than-Light Speed, Star Trek

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya published an important paper entitled "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," which explains the principles of what has come to be known as the Alcubierre Warp Drive.
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“Threshold”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Faster-Than-Light Speed, Voyager

Lt. Paris is not dying. He is experiencing hyper-accelerated genetic mutations simulating the future biological evolution of the posthuman species. He and Captain Janeway undergo millions of years of coming posthuman evolution in a few hours.
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“Caretaker”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Voyager

The Intrepid-class starship U.S.S. Voyager is suddenly thrown seventy thousand light-years off course to a far corner of the galaxy in the Delta Quadrant. It is the region of space from which the fearsome Borg Collective emanates. The ship undergoes extensive damage.
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“Survival Instinct”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Seven of Nine, Voyager

Note Arthur Kroker's inversion of Deleuze & Guattari's concept as "Organs without Bodies": technology is infused with a genetic logic and assumes "living species existence." Žižek wrote about "organs without bodies" after Kroker and without acknowledgment, similar to his taking of many ideas from Baudrillard.
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Third Wave Cybernetics and Artificial Life

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Androids & Artificial Life, N. Katherine Hayles, Star Trek

A number of theorists have located the essential elements of the third wave of cybernetics in the bio-informatic movement of Artificial Life; the "female" flows, intensities, and turbulence of cyber-capitalism and the post-disciplinary "society of control"; or the fractal and viral stage of "fourth order" simulacra.
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“Q Who?”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Captain Picard, The Next Generation

The super-entity Q from the Q Continuum reappears on an Enterprise-D traveling at the outer frontier of space. The irrepressible near-deity, whom Captain Picard calls "next of kin to chaos," insists that his critique of humanity, first iterated in the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint", be given another hearing.
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“Scorpion”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Seven of Nine, Voyager

Played by former Miss America pageant finalist Jeri Ryan, outfitted in a skintight, lustrous catsuit and high heels that accentuate her breasts and buttocks, Seven of Nine radiates "available feminine sexuality," yet is paradoxically unaware of her "epidermal" exposure and blatant desirability.
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“The Offspring”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

But the real cause of Lal's breakdown and death was that she tried to live her destiny as an android in a fundamentally different way than the "simulation and seduction" of the human condition that is the cornerstone of Data's persistence.
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Is Data Human?

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, Androids & Artificial Life, Star Trek, The Next Generation

Richard Hanley, an Australian philosopher working in the Anglo-American "analytic tradition," constructs more than half of his book "The Metaphysics of Star Trek" (also entitled "Is Data Human?" in a second edition) on a misviewing of the episode "The Measure of a Man".
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“The Measure of a Man”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

Data goes from being on trial to being a provocative, transforming mirror who places our knowledge and certainty of ourselves into question. Data is radical alienation incarnate, as in the words of the Shakespeare sonnet: "When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state."
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“Brothers”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

It is the challenge of the advances of third-wave cybernetics that Data must confront if he truly wishes to move ahead to the full-fledged Artificial Life that he so intensely "desires." The brother who haunts me is the non-identity of myself to myself. I slowly learn that his doubling is the very condition for my existence.
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