believe in anything

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce — gold’s price as I write this — its value would be about $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

I know wasting time is not necessarily narratively interesting, (though it can be. How one wastes time says a lot about a person) but Star Trek [DS9] is at least in lip-service a post-scarcity world, and the Federation is not at war until Season 6. Wasting time and/or fucking around would be a lot of what people did with their lives. It’s a lot of what we do now, and we’re not even close to post-much at all. No one is frivolous in the future. No one exhibits poor or even mediocre time management. All are paladins of self-organization.

Wasting time has a unique pleasure (some call it slack) that we as humans are kind of addicted to. We’re starting to do it collectively on our social networks now, to waste time in a connected way. The universe of DS9 is culturally incredibly old-fashioned—all the aspects of life that were important to a 19th century officer can be found in spades, both in-show and in a meta-sense. In a world with faith in its higher-ups, as Star Trek purported to be, it is terrifying to see the paladins playing WoW. They should be defending justice even in their sleep—and this too is a very old idea.

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In fifteen years or so, we’ve leapfrogged the social norms of Star Trek on the back of the Internet. It’s amazing to me just how quick the transition was—of course we’re still in it—and that more recent Star Treks have not and probably will not engage with this new reality either. Star Trek is a butterfly in a glass. It is no longer meant to predict or exhibit the future, but to quietly stand for the world of the past