I’d not really considered it before, maybe it was just the way that I had assumed the holodecks were just a ‘feature’ or another ‘set’ for Star Trek to live out some random storyline when travelling through the delta quadrant got all a bit boring and samey. I mean, sure, space is a big place.
But the further we go into this isolation time the more I realise how forward thinking the obviously very isolated and maybe lonely writers got and how they needed to be able to flex their creativity and storylines a bit by having places where projecting a story and narrative could be done at hologram level.
I always really loved the notion of the EMH, the emergency health hologram doctor, on call twenty four seven always ready to jump in and help, with side passions and evolving skillsets, he even nearly become famous for his singing to a whole species and planet who had never heard of music.
Holodecks then, make so much more sense to me now. This crew in the vacuum of space. Dead space on the majority, gases and the occasional nebula, hardly the stuff of creative release or cocktail & dreams now is it?
But after work time and as long as you have your scheduled/allocated credits you get to live out your best life in a virtualised world inside the holodeck, design your own perfect life and away you go, keeping the human brain entertained and remove the hum drum of the greyscale set of motions you are normally limited too.
Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash
We are kinda entering alpha stages of the notion of our connected spaces in many ways and while it’s gonna need some quite advanced discovery of quantum entanglement to really deliver on the framework of a real holodeck the idea of remote viewing and distance learning is a reality already today.
With everyone home people are deep diving technology — hardware and software like never before, rapidly finding what’s not fit for purpose.
this is a boom time for ‘makers’ who automatically will have audiences desperate to eat up the best offering of a new ways of working for the non geeky crowd that just want things to get out of the way and distill it down to it’s simple assets — I think blockchain tech will do that too.
We’ve already seen quite the explosion of crypto worlds being developed and some faster than ever before — now those coders are home they are putting more time into those side hustles faster than ever and we are seeing updates daily.
maybe it’s all a time frame thing also, all these roads leading to different audiences investing in the next wave of enabled remote technologies — where you stake some fiat into digital currency which buys you a plot of virtual land on the back of a cloud server instance somewhere.
Black mirror brought about some interesting visuals to pass in their latest episodes when they talked about fake social interaction and the removal of the he/she in virtualised characters — the need to get back away from the ‘real world’ and instead live out the fantastical ones our desires crave.
What does a hyper connected world look like, when lag and latency are a thing of the past and your life journal of you is a remote control click or voice command away, how does isolation then become this familiar bed fellow of the experience of interacting in the physical if the short term mindset is built now for distance.
As we make our way through Star Trek DS9 season one and beyond I’m hoping that we get some more ‘holodeck’ stories as I really miss the janeway era of all things holodeck and I’d love nothing more right now to be outside in the grass and the sunshine building with virtual tools or painting in thin air with haptic brushes.
Also thinking about ‘cloud atlas’ that’s a film that never got the respect it deserves as well, in some ways that feels very hologram like with lots of different elements running in parallel yet interacting in different time periods, where decisions made here have massive impact elsewhere.
I still find it crazy that a guy sitting in a studio across the other side of the world can operate a 5g job and he can do his job as if he was sitting right there doing it. Of course, not as sensory as if he was physically there but he can still do the basic foundations. I expect this will evolve rapidly and we won’t recognise the world once we get to properly step outside to see it.
Let’s hope it’s less planet of the apes and a little more side order of castaway — that we all hit our stride at the crossroads of life and decide to become more rounded human beings rather than stare into the mist of our holo screen terminals of isolation.
Have a Beer,
__humble x
