The Borg are going to be our future, if we need to properly adapt to true interstellar space travel, and the way we're already merging with our technology. But I hope we do not have the Borg's foreign policy.
I, personally, do not want a mandatory hive mind. My thoughts are my own, and I like it that way. "If there is to be a brave new world, our generation will have the hardest time living in it."
I didn't have a problem that B&B decided to introduce a new race with the Xindi because it injected some much needed mystery, intrigue and excitement into the show. I also wouldn't have minded either if they had have used the Romulans--afterall we did see they could be used in an effective way in season four. All I cared about was if the stories whether centered on Xindi or Romulans were entertaining. I actually liked the Xindi and the writers did construct a rather interesting mythology for season three. I also thought it was important that we see yet another TCW faction(granted between "The Expanse" and "Azati Prime" the writers decided to make it less of a TCW conflict than just a conflict involving transdimensional aliens with the ability to examine timelines). This was a race, unlike the Suliban, who had a personal stake in changing history. If people have problems with using the Suliban they can easily rationalize their presence being due to temporal interference and then they can easily just assume that the genetic improvements the Cabal received had a death gene hidden in them. Afterall would a time traveler from the future who can't physically interact in the past be at the mercies of his proxies who have these genetically engineered abilities and technology after he no longer needed them. And the Xindi had all sorts of internal problems. Who is to say that without a homeworld they became significant. They might have finished each other off in a second violent civil war.
The Borg's hivemind is bad because it is invasive, aggressive, and dictatorial, everybody is part of it against their will and expendable. A communal hiveman where individuals are allowed to join and leave at their digression, and protect their inner thoughts, does not sound so bad.
Agreed. However, given the nature of humanity, how long before someone decided maybe they didn't want people coming and going as they pleased?
Maybe that "somebody" would be drowned in the flood of thoughts and not enact anything to the detriment of others? And we could include benign AIs into the mix as well and they would keep morally wayward individuals in check, with evil AIs like Skynet being the stuff of pulp sci-fi (alongside evil cyborgs and androids).
That's an interesting idea, so long as the "collective" itself didn't go all self-deluded and Borg-y.
If the Borg have trillions of minds working together, how come they cannot invent anything on their own and steal technology from other civilizations, including their people too? That is why Janeway and her small crew could think up of a weapon that could counter Species 8472, while the Collective were trying to pound at Species 8472 with everything they knew about without thinking up original tactics quick enough. Why would a collective be so... inefficient? john titor, did you get your avatar from this?!
Because the Collective's controlling intelligence doesn't literally join the minds of all drones. It engages in an act of mind control first -- altering the person's thoughts and beliefs to bring it in line with the Borg's objectives, then allowing them to link. There's no actual original thought within the Borg Collective, because that would constitute a threat to the Borg's absolute control over its drones.
^ No, I don't think it does. It's a collective mindset. The collective - who knows how (who knows how bees and ants do it) - has developed a particular approach, become a kind of character, really - and everybody who is assimilated has to conform just because the individual is suppressed by the enormous mass of the whole. I guess it would be possible to change the collective's...character, but it would take huge numbers of individuals managing to retain and assert the same precise trait even after assimilation.
As an interesting "thought experiment," what about comparing the collective hive mentality of the Borg to the collective consciousness of Gaia, from Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth (for those of you familiar with the Asimov series)? In the books, Gaia is, essentially, a planet with a single consciousness, but whose individuals also manage to maintain a measure of independent thought. Your thoughts run very closely to the central conflict of the Foundation books, as explored through the character of Golan Trevize. He chooses Gaia, but later has a great many misgivings based on the exact thoughts you just stated. More practically, it's the central question with respect to governments and society: How much liberty are you willing to concede in exchange for safety, security and the essentials of living? As politics demonstrate, that line is by no means easy to settle upon. As for the Borg, they simply don't seem to concern themselves with such moral dilemmas -- which makes them all the more threatening. Because their basic "philosophy" is so different from our own, very little common ground can be found between us and the "collective" -- which stands in stark contrast to the common ground found between LaForge and Hugh. They don't seem themselves as evil villains -- but that doesn't mean that they aren't.
That's basically my interpretation of the Collective, yes. We've seen that assimilated individuals espouse certain beliefs about themselves -- "My primary function is to serve the Collective" in "Survival Instinct" -- and that they retain some individual will and agency, but that it's an individual will that conforms to that of the Collective (for example, Seven of Nine mouthing off to Janeway and Tuvok while she was still a part of the Collective about how the Borg would not accept Janeway's plan to refrain from using a weapon of mass destruction, and then pausing as though to listen to new instructions before immediately doing an about-face). And of course there's Locutus, who developed an entirely new personality and set of beliefs. In essence, a victim of the Borg is first a victim of mind control, and then has their altered minds joined with many others. And then of course, we saw the Queen and the Collective disagree, with the Queen overruling the Collective and giving it new instructions in "Endgame." So it seems pretty clear to me that the Queen is the controlling intelligence, that Borg technology alters people's minds to be submissive to and supportive of the will of the Queen, and that the Collective is merely the linkage of all of those altered minds.
I assumed the Queen herself was either something the Collective created after a time to better organize the Collective, and that the Collective started out as a few lines of computer code in the first Borg which grew and grew as the Borg's numbers did. In a sense, the Collective is essentially a man-made God birthed from the sheer number of Borg and basic programming within them.
That's kind of what I more or less thought, too, Anwar. She - and I do think she was pretty cool in the beginning - isn't so much a controlling individual as she is the embodiment of the...the institutional will of the Collective.
The problem is that we have literally seen the Queen order the Collective around. In "Endgame," when the Borg detected Voyager in their Magical Nebula of Doom (TM), the scene shifted to the interior of Unimatrix 01. The voice of the Collective itself was heard ordering the destruction of Voyager. Then the Queen contravened the order, saying, "No, let them live." The Collective obeyed the Queen. No non-Borg were present in the sequence. So we have seen direct, irrefutable evidence that the Queen and the Collective are separate intelligences and that the Queen controls the Collective.
Or we can rationalize that each Cube has it's own mini-Collective (like separate servers for a massive network) and the Queen was created when the Collective realized it could work out to have a some of administrator to manage the multi-collectives. So the Queen was doing her created duty and managing that one Collective branch. So there is one massive central Collective that basically now leaves much of the work to the Queen it made, but if a situation arose it would overrule the Queen. We just have yet to see that happen.