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4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2017–2025
3:05 · 719K views · Jul 9, 2012
A short Star Trek: The Next Generation clip about how money no longer exists in the 24th century. It shows the crew explaining a post-scarcity economy to people from the 20th century.
HN commenters link it to illustrate Star Trek's moneyless economy in discussions of post-scarcity and the future.
4 comments from Hacker News
The core problem TFA describes isn't complexity, capitalism, or bots. It's the lack of trust. People are fine w/ a few big players (or even one big player) as long as you can trust them, but we don't trust the players anymore: Google, Mastercard, our governments, etc. We think they're all corrupt, and broadly we're right [0]. Blockchain's answer is "OK we give up on trust", but humans can't live that way--or at least strongly don't want to. Successful markets, courts, schools, workplaces, all arise out of a culture of trust and accountability, not the other way around. Unless we hold these institutions accountable they will inevitably decay; our markets will become lemon markets; our courts will become kangaroo courts; our schools will become insipid daycares; our workplaces will become surveillance salt mines. There is no technology that allows us to abdicate our duty to justice and to each other. There's this episode of Star Trek: TNG [1] where the crew rescues some 20th century humans. One's a blowhard who keeps using ship-wide communications to make random demands, so Picard finally marches down to the guy's quarters to explain that comms are for ship business only. The guy is like "well if they're so important why don't they require an executive key?", to which Picard replies "we're aboard a starship so that is not necessary, we're all capable of exercising self-discipline". There is no tech, no bureaucracy, no system of rules and regulations that can save a culture unwi
> Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too? The Star Trek TNG formulation for this is that scarcity of everything was eliminated with the invention of matter-energy conversion technology, along with limitless energy-generation tech like matter-antimatter reactors. In a universe where all advanced civilizations can convert energy into food, clothes, equipment, etc, and energy is effectively limitless, at least relative to human needs, then money becomes obsolete and people no longer use it for anything. At least one episode covers it: this video I've always assumed any other post-scarcity sci-fi adapts the same premise - unlimited energy + matter-energy conversion = money is non-existent.
Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise: this video
Like that one episode of TNG where they wake up all the people from the nineties, but it's one guy who keeps asking Picard how much BTC is at, how the blockchain is doing, etc. edit: this video