When I was in High School, I fell madly in love with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The fascinating characters, the (at the time) amazing special effects, the stories, the optimism, but most of all, the technology.

My eyes dazzled seeing huge touchscreens, digital tablets, and incredible spacefaring vessels every Thursday night.

Star Trek was incredibly cool, not just because it gave a somewhat realistic depiction of very advanced tech, but also of a very advanced and liberated society.

In the 35 years since that one summer watching ST:TNG reruns every evening, I've watched our technology slowly catch up, but our society has only stagnated since then, and indeed greatly relapsed.

On the technology side, we now have incredibly advanced computers, somewhat convincing "Artificial Intelligence," digital tablets, some basic energy weapons, some basic medical scanning, and a stable, long-term human base of operations in orbit.

On the society front, we had the end of the cold war, the stability of the 90s, and then Bush Jr.'s questionable 2000 electoral victory, 9/11 and our horrid responses to it, endless wars in the Mideast, the erosion of Constitutional Rights in the U.S. in the name of "safety from terrorism," then the fanatical and racist reaction to Obama, Republican entrenchment and the rise of the Tea Party, total governmental gridlock, and of course, the orange-tinted mini-Antichrist.


I don't much care about new technology anymore. I followed tech advancements with keen excitement from the early 1980s through the 2000s, but lost interest sometime in the mid-2010s. I think the infamous new MacBook of 2015 with no USB-A ports and its terrible keyboard was a signal that not only had Apple fallen from "grace," but tech itself was no longer exciting.

There are modern design elements that I find exciting, like the industrial design of the recent iPads and their keyboards, the folding phones and folding all-screen laptops (making a little sandwich with a thin, detachable keyboard that rests between the two screens when closed). Those physical/industrial designs are really neat, but they're merely beautiful window dressing for a caustic soup of bad UI design, bloated software, and privacy invasion on the OS front. Hard pass.

But back to Star Trek, I don't really care if — no, I honestly don't want humanity to develop phasers, warp drive, or necessarily even super-advanced medical tech within my lifetime. What's the point of buying a bulldozer if you're going to give the keys to a toddler? That's a horrible idea! Humanity is still very much that toddler. (Dang, I guess that means that Q was kinda right all along!)

Every time I see some new advance in A.I. or Quantum Buzzwording, I just honestly feel a kind of disgust, because every single advancement is just more ammunition in the hands of people who are happy to allow the kind awful injustices we're seeing every day to go on in the earth for the sake of their own enjoyment and enrichment.

What I yearned for mostly out of fear-of-the-unknown as a youngster, I now yearn for out of hope as someone increasingly advancing through middle age: a society that is just.

The Just Society is exactly the kind of society that ST:TNG described. Even if it utterly failed to realistically describe how such a state of civic grace was attained, at the very least it gave some hope that it was theoretically possible.


100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 29


Libraries are awesome

Mon 07 April 2025 by R.L. Dane

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of answering some interview-style questions from Hyde that got posted to his blog series, Over/Under.

Give it a read, as I had a lot of fun writing my responses, such that I forgot to actually answer "Overrated/Underrated" to some of …

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Technology has promised so much, has *delivered* so much, and yet, I'm horrified.

Sat 15 February 2025 by R.L. Dane

I was an 80s kid. I grew up in a booming and optimistic time. The future held so much promise: all kinds of cures for disease, technology and automation would free humanity from the drudgery of labor (heh), and the Information Age would bring an acceleration to learning and innovation …

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You can *never* be apolitical

Thu 06 February 2025 by R.L. Dane

Content Warning: This post deals with religion and politics


Last Sunday, I did something that I really don't like doing.

I left church early.
With a heavy and conflicted heart.

The Sunday prior, I walked into church and spoke briefly with the pastor. I told him I was shocked to …

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"Ableism" and the Linux Aristocracy

Tue 07 January 2025 by R.L. Dane
This is Part IV of the series, "Don't use what works for you."

Being an armchair FOSS advocate, there are a lot of anti-FOSS arguments I've become quite used to seeing and answering. Some of them are honestly just pretty dumb:

eloquent_FOSS_apologia();

Well, I just don't CARE about that!

Well …

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Mozilla and the Death of Virtue

Sun 08 September 2024 by R.L. Dane

A fedifriend mentioned me yesterday on a post about a recent kerfuffle regarding some decisions that Mozilla has been making, particularly in regards to buying an advertising company (and integrating advertising into the browser) and adding "A.I." features into recent builds of Firefox.

I had intended to reply with …

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The Toxicity Dance

Sun 14 April 2024 by R.L. Dane

There's been some kerfuffle today on the fediverse over the issue of toxicity in the Linux and Open Source community. "Toxic" is one of those trigger words that immediately gets fingers a-pointing. The great irony is that just to mention the word "toxic" can in itself be a toxic statement …

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The unfolding horrors of Toxic Masculinity

Tue 02 April 2024 by R.L. Dane

Content Warning: This post deals with the issue of toxic masculinity. If that (or the discussion thereof) is upsetting to you, please skip this one. Also, a minor bible reference is included.

I thought I had a pretty fair grasp on the idea and archetypes of toxic masculinity. I am …

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Use what works for good

Tue 26 December 2023 by R.L. Dane

Exactly a month ago, I wrote an article challenging the prevalent pragmatist-argument for choice in the digital world.

I'd like to refine that thought a bit further, based on recent experiences.

A little over a week ago, I started crafting an article covering FOSS keyboards for Android. This is one …

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LLMs are Perfect

Sat 02 December 2023 by R.L. Dane

LLMs (Large Language Models, colloquially referred to as "A.I.") are perfect...

Perfect exemplars and the very embodiment of the brain-rot of our society.

Much like so many loud voices in society today, the LLM is incapable of discerning reliable from unreliable sources, identifying the origin and validity of a …

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