The Ship Itself

I saw Star Trek into Darkness again this weekend, same movie twice in three days, something I don't normally do. I wondered why to myself afterwards. What makes me want to see a movie again, especially back-to-back? As you might tell from my review, or possibly your own experience, the movie is good, very good in places, but certainly not the best-thing-I've-ever-seen great.

So why was I so enthralled? What was I hoping to get out of a repeat viewing?

To me it boils down to two images, one of which is a SPOILER and one of which is definitely not.

First, I loved the image of the monster crying. Benedict Cumberbatch does a phenonemal job selling a sinister and yet devoted Khan Noonien Singh. There is something so perversely right about the helpless rage he lapses into after surrendering to Kirk. He was convinced the others exiled with him had been killed and now he saw the possibility that they would be saved. The idea of these genetically, genocidal maniacs running around "continuing their work," is appalling but so is your own empathy for Khan in this moment. Khan is the beautiful monster as played by Cumberbatch: clever, manipulative, malevolent but still essentially human. That's not to slight Ricardo Montaban's take on the character obviously, but just to point out this movie's fully realized villain.

The other image I like follows the first act, immediately after the crew of the Enterprise has saved the primitive inhabitants of Nibiru. The Nibiru priest traces the silhouette of the star ship in the red sand which quick dissolves into the Enterprise racing across a field of stars on its way back to Earth. That image, of the ship and the stars is sails through, deftly expresses for me what is special about the show and the movies. The iconic NC-1701 form holds this sense of great speed and purpose, the promise of limitless exploration.

I find it difficult to be ironic about this aspect of Star Trek. In one sense, I know that the original design was inspired by stove parts and the model itself was made out of balsa wood and baling wire. I don't care. The union of saucer, nacelle and hull into a balanced organic shape evokes something that no other space ship (Star Wars, 2001, etc.) really matches. A sense of a working, functional thing with a background, a history, and an ongoing mission.

Consult the design notes on the original models and you see how some of the extremely vague notions from Gene Roddenberry got turned into the framework for the entire show. The nacelles are held outwards from the rest of the hull, suggesting engines of great power and danger. The saucer evokes something familiar and alien simultaneously: flying saucers and UFOs. The hull resembles a nuclear submarine, the aft shuttle bay the doors of a dirigible hanger. And yet when these diverse and somewhat contradictory elements get placed together something logical and terribly romantic emerges.

So yeah, I watched the show a second time and partly that was because the movie was funny and exciting and partly because when you peel away all of the 21st century spectacle, there's still something incredibly inspiring about a lone human ship setting course through all of the vast unknowns of the 23rd century.

Star Trek into Darkness review

Star Trek into Darkness poses a challenge to review without spoilers. So much of what makes it worth talking about, as a Trek fan, is bound up in the interplay between the mythology of Star Trek and the requirements of a summer blockbuster. Nevertheless, it's possible to talk about the first third of movie without getting into too much trouble so I'll start there.

J.J. Abrams' second movie opens on the planet Nibiru with James T. Kirk (again played by the very versatile and energetic Chris Pine) fleeing through a scarlet forest away from some sort of wicker ziggurant. He holds a scroll in his hand, which he informs Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban who at this point owns Bones' folksy snark) he saw the natives of the planet prostrating themselves in worship over. Overhead we see the roiling smoke of the volcano where Spock, Sulu, and Uhura (Zachary Quinto, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana) are getting ready to drop a 'cold fusion device' into an active volcano, freezing it before it destroys Nibiru (you have to smile that even with all of the lens flare embellishment, the reboot still hews to certain technobabble traditions).

None of this, the chase scenes, threatening volcano, strange alien races gets in the way of the reason why I watch Star Trek. The characters. What's pulled me into Trek since I was a kid is the vision of exploring the galaxy alongside your best friends and despite Abrams' love of twists and turns, it never loses touch with Roddenberry's youthful insistence the future could be like leaving college and joining the Peace Corps.

Not that this vision isn't challenged the second Kirk returns to Earth. Of course Kirk rescues Spock from the volcano, and manages to save the inhabitants of Nibiru. And if the Nibiru people did see the Enterprise rising out of their ocean, Kirk has no trouble saying: "who cares?" Pine's take on Kirk is absorbing and fun without really being Shatner's Kirk. As +Matthew McComb pointed out, this is Kirk as played by someone who can act. This might be a mixed blessing. Pine is able to give his Kirk a more interior life than Shatner, but that subtle reflectiveness undermines his aura of command and destiny. It would be laughable to imagine an Admiral demoting Shatner's Kirk and all-too-inevitable happening to Pine's Captain.

Fortunately Star Trek is an ensemble work, no character works alone to save the movie and here is where it can be safely said the strongest decision the reboot ever made was in casting. Zachary Quinto's Spock is an ideal foil for this more defensive and vulnerable Kirk. Where Leonard Nemoy was always able to project a certain campy dignity to Spock, Quinto shoots for a more painfully sincere, comedy straight man take on the character. This works just perfectly. Quinto's less self-aware Spock requires Pine's more self-aware Kirk, the two balance like an equation.

One of the themes of this movie appears to be consequences. Kirk's actions on Nibiru have an impact  on his career and relationships. Vulcan's destruction in the last movie has darkened the mood of Star Fleet. The admirals have become more inflexible, more regulation obsessed, and yet simultaneously more resigned to conflict and militarism. We're informed the Klingons are testing the Federation, taking over worlds on the alliance's periphery.

Just as we're adjusting to this dour tone, an explosion rips through the chrome towers of London. A figure quickly identified as a Star Fleet officer John Harrison (a utterly chilling Benedict Cumberbatch) claims responsibility although his motives are at first unclear. Star Fleet assembles to address the attack according to regulations and as Kirk quickly realizes, made themselves a convenient target. A jump ship piloted by John Harrison rakes the conference room with phaser fire, causing a great deal of mayhem and death.

Even in the first few glimpses of Harrison, I had a sense of a great potential villain. Cumberbatch, probably best known for his role on BBC's Sherlock, has an icy baritone voice matched with a psychotic's 1000-yard-stare.

Enraged by the cowardly attack, Kirk volunteers to follow Harrison to his refuge on Kronos, the Klingon homeworld. At this point the movie begins to take on the guise of a revenge film, certainly a well-established trope for summer action movies.

Which is where I got nervous. A few of the trailers made it seem as though the franchise had lost it's way. They emphasized the 'cop who doesn't care about the rules,' aspect of the story without offering a single scrap of Trek's trademark humanism. Star Trek can go dark, but it very rarely allows itself to wallow in depravity or atavism.

One of the best parts about this movie is how that revenge flick mask is constantly tugged askew. Harrison is probably the best villain in the franchise since First Contact, but he's a complicated menace with very clear motivations. In addition, Spock never let's Kirk slip into easy vengeance. Star Fleet gives the Enterprise a few guided missiles for a surgical strike on the killer.  If this was any other franchise, I would've assumed that would be that. But Star Trek remains different and I found myself gratified that an action movie can still find ways to point out obvious examples of the right thing to do.

 Maybe it's just my unfortunate viewing choices recently, but I have seen entirely too many Jack Bowers. On The Following it's gotten to the point where the first and last interrogation technique is the shooting the bad guy in the knee cap. I appreciate a movie that can look at evil in the face and still decide to show people taking the ethical and moral path.

Star Trek into Darkness is not the best action movie ever or even the best Trek movie, but it is very good. And maybe, just maybe, timely.

Real problems

Let's talk about real problems.

Not Benghazi. Not the IRS. Not even the deficit.

Lets talk about the future.

You see, the mainstream media is just beginning to awaken to the fact that something has changed over the past decade. There are no longer enough jobs for everyone and the number of employed people keeps decreasing a little bit each year. This has been happening since the turn of the century and it promises to accelerate.

Partly this stems from the nature of the workforce. Demographically, we're getting older. As people live longer, a greater percentage of the population is retired or on disability. But a share of the blame goes to technology.

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the introduction of automation and mass production still required labor. Someone had to operate the increasingly sophisticated machines or design future machines. But we are reaching the cusp of a great wave of change. Machines are beginning to design other machines and smarter technologies are taking over jobs traditionally thought safe from automation. I've already talked about this a little bit and at the time I mostly used it to meditate upon the value of work. I offered up some suggestions to address the issue but put no stock in any of them because that wasn't really point of my essay.

However, I've noticed a subterranean movement towards one of the suggestions: Guaranteed Minimum Income. The basic idea is that society guarantees all citizens or residents of a country a certain basic income regardless of employment status or education. In the United States the idea is often referred to as 'negative income tax:' earn less than the poverty line and then receive $10,000 (or some other amount) every year.

Whatever you call it, let's be clear about what we're talking about: redistribution of wealth. When wealth from one set of the population is taken (through taxes or penalties) and then an equivalent amount of wealth is given to another set of the population, redistribution is taking place. Now I'm fine with that but in the spirit of candor, let's be clear: redistribution in any form is not exactly universally popular. When half of the population still can't see the benefit of universal health care, and makes noises about 'makers and takers,' codifying basic income is not going to be easy.

Is it worth the fight?

I was ambivalent about the proposal for a guaranteed minimum income when I first heard about it but couldn't put my finger on precisely why. I think I have it now, though. My brother passed along an article that you might have seen about the first field trials for memory implants being ready in two years. This is exciting stuff, technology like this may begin to bridge the gap between the black box between our ears and the technology we rely upon. Is it much of a leap to go from reconstructing existing memory to developing external memory. And once the idea of human memory, human experience, can be stored and replicated, could we not have increasingly accurate simulations of digital people? Simulations so perfect that it is no longer possible to dismiss 'bots,' as annoying distractions.

Let's say in the future, fifty years or even seventy five years (I don't think for a moment it will take that long, but for the sake of argument...) it is no longer possible to detect artificial personalities on the basis of conversation alone. How then would we know who was 'real' and who was digital? How would we know then who deserves that $10,000 guaranteed income and who doesn't? One could imagine swarms of 'just-good-enough' fraud bots springing into existence to claim their salary and then donating everything they own to their favorite charity, or political action group, or foreign country.

I don't think these are insurmountable problems but I am saying these are problems. As long as the media wants to start having conversations about how you continue to have a society once the jobs disappear perhaps we should make the conversation as broad as possible.

Personalized Toys

On one level, this advertisement from Disney isn't that special. I remember going to Disney way back in the late 80s and getting some custom-made plastic gewgaw that I promptly threw in the bottom of the old toy bin as soon as we returned home. I also had mugs with my dogs face on it and I'm sure everyone has given at least one 'Build-A-Bear' stuffed animal or engraved knickknack from "Things Remembered." However, I do think 3D printing offers up something new.

For one thing, the 11 year old version of me would have gone insane for this kind of thing. Just in the interest of honesty, that needs to be said. But I also know that the possibilities of this technology would have been just as compelling. With a little tinkering, you could imagine actual action figures with a real person's face on them or stuff animals with stylized rendering of a real pet. I'm not sure everyone would want this, but you have to imagine there would be some kind of market for it.

The only problem is that I'm not sure this future really involves toy stores as we know them. Once the price comes down for commercial 3D printers, a lot of this stuff will probably be bought as a design from a service like Amazon and simply rendered at home.

The other question is whether or not having children play with their own rendered images is a good thing.  Creative play bringing a person's own identity into the mix adds a dimension of immersion. However, one has to wonder if our culture isn't already raising an impressive number of narcissistic individuals swept up in their own exquisitely tailored mental terrariums.

Some obviously great ideas

Saw this video a couple of days ago and thought its genius was self-evident.


http://youtu.be/BgYFL7x2ecw

Just in

Preview for Ender's Game. Enjoy.

Work: What's it Good For?

I love my job.

Okay? I love going to work each day and teaching what I know about ancient history to middle school students. I like the challenge of my job and like taking small steps every day to be better at what I do. I'm one of those very lucky people that has the job they would have picked. If I won the lottery tomorrow I really would go to work the next day.

In other words, I'm lucky and I know it.

However, a question has been pressing on my mind more and more recently. Why do we have to work? Clearly, until artificial intelligence progresses, someone needs to be in a classroom helping and encouraging young learners. So I have a few more years of relatively stable employment. But that's just not the case for every industry.

Think about it. Manufacturing jobs are moving back to the states, but they're being filled by robots. Craigslist employs 35 people, makes a respectable amount of money, and has destroyed the market for classified ads across the country. There are search programs sophisticated enough to do most of the legal discovery process once employing legions of paralegals. The idea of technology rendering jobs and businesses obsolete is nothing new. However the speed at which entire industries find themselves irrelevant continues to accelerate.

So, I'll ask the question again. Why is that a problem? Why can't we accept that more and more people now living simply don't have any feasible way to get a full-time job. 6.7 million Americans have left the job market since 2007, and the labor participation rate is at an all-time low of 63.3%. Any study you read will tell you that the longer this subset of the population goes without a job, the less likely they will ever find a job. Perhaps we should move away from ensuring everyone has a job and making sure that people can survive?

I know, I know. You probably have the same answer I do, which is: people need to work. People who don't work lack direction in their lives and probably have trouble finding meaning in their lives. There's something noble about work. I've heard it all.

I'm just not sure I believe it anymore. I want to keep working for as long as they let me but I know for many people that's just not an option anymore. As the pace of innovation increases, more and more of a person's professional life gets spent training for every-shorter periods of employment. At some point you have to wonder, is it really worth all of this preparation just for a chance at the brass ring?

So what do we do? Hand out a guaranteed income to make sure the economy functions in much the same way it always has? That's sort of like using socialism to prop up capitalism. Do we move towards a new economy derived from social networks and crowd-sourcing? It's difficult to imagine what this would look like, if it's even feasible. There are myriads of possibilities, in varying degrees of likelihood.

Maybe we do nothing. The rich stay rich, increasingly the only beneficiaries of the capitalist game. The poor rely of every smaller government entitlements, supplementing their quality of life with goods created cheaply from technologies such as 3D printing.

I don't know. My point is, I wish someone would start asking a very simple question:

Why do we all have to work?