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Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Borg?

16:08 / 13.08.01

There's a kind of feeling that the Borg are truly something to fear --- not the actual aliens, but the idea that we could become like them.

So I ask the question, that, assuming something like this is possible, is it something to fear? Certainly it is if we become exactly like them, spouting out "resistence is futile" and capturing everyone who is not a borg, forcing them into a collective. In Star Trek, they're always cold and full of hatred. Am I truly to believe that connecting my mind to anothers, essentially using a kind of telepathy, would make me an evil bastard. I would think it would make me MORE compassionate. I wouldn't expect to feel the hellish life they portray in the TV show. Rather, I would expect it to be fun, sexy, and ecstatic at times. Perhaps the loss of one person would be harder. Or perhaps the loss of one person would be easier. But, either way, that loss would be more like a loss of me than losing my friends is today.

What do you think?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

16:24 / 13.08.01

I think we might need to define terms here, because the idea of the Borg was fucked up good and proper, and made worse by ST: First Contact and ST: Voyager...

Interestingly Isaac Asimov's Foundation books end with humanity turning into a more touchy-feely version of the Borg, a different way of looking at the same thing.

And do we become one consciousness when our universe emerges from the larval state that Grant talks about?

17:12 / 13.08.01

Star Trek aliens are almost always exaggerations of some trend or type people chat about here on Earth.
Old style Klingons: dem Russkies.
New style Klingons: dem corporate Japanese.
Borg: multinational corporations.

Zen fascism. Bliss of colony mind. Gap clones.

All the same.

18:43 / 13.08.01

This much is true. But we still have the image of the collective as an evil trait. If you mention the concept to someone, you're more likely to get a fear of losing "who they are" and becoming a number, or becoming "just like bees" (spoken as though such a thing is something to be worried about).

Isn't one of the things that would develop out of a collective mind power, and doesn't power corrupt? I take the view that a collective mind would realize that adverising itself is more effective at growing than doing the evil capture and assimilate thing. Tell us it's all great in here and you should join us. Leave when you like. But you rarely want to leave.

But, still. It's power. And power corrupts.

Ellis

18:50 / 13.08.01

I always thought of the Borg as a religious cult, once you are assimilated you can never leave, you become nothing and act only towards the greater good- like most idealogies really.

[ 13-08-2001: Message edited by: Ellis ]

07:00 / 14.08.01

This concept has been discussed in the works of Joe Haldeman and JF Hamilton.

Results of sharing some brain space
a) results in much greater empathy. It becomes pschologically impossible to harm another human being. (forever peace)

b) results in entire loss of self. A kind of insect hive mind is created. The individual components are all very happy.

c) a kind of mental internet. People in the loop can choose which thoughts to send and recieve and can retrieve anything they are interested in from a shared pool. Results in a kind of happy fluffy techno-utopia.

I`d guess that the results of a collective would depend on how much is shared and who was doing the sharing. Pulling people by force into the collective would mean every new mind added brought fear and unhappyness.
Adding people that were well adjusted and happy to participate would create a nice fluffy collective ripe for attack by cultures that were more aggressive.

The only real way to find out is by connecting people and seeing what happens.
*looks around for his lab beagles and his soldering iron*

12:37 / 14.08.01

But surely ya Borg reflect ya standard US pro-individualist line. Cultures like the Japanese or some continental European ones are less aghast at the idea of collective decision making and responsibility. And, of course, ya Borg also represent a dark longing to lose your identity in a proto-fascist mob (or desiring machine for the D&G heads amongst us) - hence all the sexy fetish get up - they look like junkies or perverts as much as zombies (destroying the Ego and letting the Id run rampant on a galatic scale).

Moving on from Meeja Studies 101, an interesting proposition is to what extent you mind is already a community, a hive of inter-related systems that maintain the fiction of single, unified self. We are already Borg, just in denial.

A big mistake is to assume the feelings and senses of conjoined minds would simply be additive. Simon Ings - http://www.fisheye.demon.co.uk/home.html - is good here. You would experience new senses. Imagine the flash of a phantom limb sensation as another body attached to the network scratched their arm. Imagine feeling someone else's emotions - would you recognise what they were? Would either of you? Would there be an esperanto of the emotions or tower of babel?

What would happen if the Collective developed an MPD condition?

[ 14-08-2001: Message edited by: belbin ]

ynh

17:15 / 14.08.01

Then there was the Voyager episode that had the hippy colony of Borg folks that had been diconnected from the collective but not eachother and were quite happy sharing everything. Isn't this why the Queen was introduced, to increase the Bee metaphor and downplay the sociolist/communist one? I don't know if I'd be happier or anything-er but I think I'd like to try it.

I don't think an colony-MPD would even be recognizable in the way we conceptualize it right now.

14:53 / 15.08.01

That Queen Borg really ruined the metaphor -- part of the horror of the Borg was that, like the Internet, no one was in charge - every ship was just a node.

Ganesh

15:06 / 15.08.01

Greg Bear did it all so much better in 'Blood Music'. Once more, the gulf of imagination between written and television science-fiction yawns wide...

16:55 / 15.08.01

I have an extra copy of that I loan to "friends."

18:40 / 15.08.01

Yeah, that's an interesting one -- but it's more biological than mechanical/electronic (both in the presentation and in the way the implications are followed up on - the network becomes an ecology, more like).