sadness of america/bad postmodernism

[Otto]

Baudrillard and Trek-nology (Or Everything I Know I Learned From 
Watching Star Trek and Reading Jean Baudrillard)

"It was my childhood in New York in the late 1960s. As a good Jew, I was 
supposed to acquire a Jewish education. But instead I loved Star Trek. 
Everything I know I learned from watching Star Trek. Among other things, 
I learned to love science. This made me a good American. So I went to 
the elite technology university. But I didn't like the complicity of 
science with the Vietnam War that existed there. So I dropped out. I was 
radicalized. I then went to the elite humanities university. But the 
American radical thinkers were all Marxists. Then I read Jean 
Baudrillard's book The Mirror of Production. I grasped that Marx was not 
radical enough. Everything I know I learned from reading Baudrillard. 
Later I tried to practice a compromise between technology and the 
humanities known as sociology. Then I read Baudrillard's book In the 
Shadow of the Silent Majorities. There he says that sociologists, just 
like marketing executives and politicians, want to socialize the masses. 
But the masses resist by going silent and "playing dead." They disappear 
into over-consumption and fandom.
            The disappearing act of today is techno-culture, or more 
precisely, Star Trek. Star Trek is the most prevalent "icon" of 
techno-culture. Physicists, engineers, computer programmers, graphic 
artists, and media practitioners are its adamant fans."

Alan N. Shapiro
(Frankfurt, Germany)
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/shapiro.htm

	

	
		
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