The Borg Are Scarier Now Than Ever

[slappy]

I remember being like 10 or so and seeing the Borg for the first time and freaking out (was it really that long ago????). They got tiresome over time, but I remember thinking how strong the core concept was. I never thought anything like that was remotely realistic though.

Fast-forward to today. People walking around with machinery jammed in their earholes, talking to nobody in particular. Being more absorbed in the device in your hand than the person next to you. Insisting that everyone stay online, in sync, tethered to one another at all times lest something catastrophic happens. You can try and not be on Facebook, but they'll hunt you. If you run, GPS will find you. Once you're on, you become the hunter. Add friends. Add more friends. Add your family. The deeper in you are, the more of your personal info they steal from you. Every bit of individuality is stripped away in favor of the collective.

I hear they're developing surgical eye implants to send digital relays directly to your brain. No lie. We already know nanotechnology is is developing in strides.

The Borg aren't coming. The Borg are here.

 

[Shatnertage]

All those things are just tools that you can choose to use or not to use. It's no more inherently dehumanizing than the substitution of written records for oral traditions.

There are already millions of humans walking around with artificial parts--pacemakers, artificial joints, even contact lenses if you want to get technical.

 

[Christopher]

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

 

[antiquityscion]

The Borg weren't scary because they were cybernetic, they were scary because they were basically space-zombies.

 

[Subcommander R.]

I've jokingly called the bluetooth 'a Borg phone' for years. Its like in BOBW when they see Picard across the room, then he turns and has Borg attachments. Well its like that, only they're talking.

Also, the Borg definitely scared me as a kid. Simply because they were scary. Now they're scary in a different way, the lack of individual personality.

 

[DS9]

I thought the Borg were cool when they came out in TNG and when I recently watched a Voyager episode, I realized how scary they actually are. The fact that when the collective talks it sounds like 1,000 people talking in sync is haunting.

 

[Gaith]

You want frightening predictions of interlinked humanity, check out the Ray Bradbury short story "The Murderer."

 

[DoBa]

I remember taping a laser pointer to my head and pretending to be one.

 

[Anwar]

You want frightening predictions of interlinked humanity, check out the Ray Bradbury short story "The Murderer."

I actually enjoyed the TV version of that story more, myself.

 

[GalaxyX]

I remember taping a laser pointer to my head and pretending to be one.

I never taped it, but I did put one in my ear a couple of times

Personally, I think what's supposed to be scary about the Borg is that they take control of your body and mind, kind of like the Go'auld. The Gu'auld do it biologically, while the Borg do it technologically.

This all ties in to the fears of being demon posessed, which is a theme in some of the most popular horror movies, like "The Exorcist". But whether it's a spiritual hijacking, a biological one, or a technological one, it all ends up being the same. You can basically see thru your body, but lose complete control in what to do, and you get to watch horrors done by your body without you being able to do a damn thing to stop it.

THAT's what's scary about the Borg.

 

[rfmcdpei]

I remember being like 10 or so and seeing the Borg for the first time and freaking out (was it really that long ago????). They got tiresome over time, but I remember thinking how strong the core concept was. I never thought anything like that was remotely realistic though.

Fast-forward to today. People walking around with machinery jammed in their earholes, talking to nobody in particular. Being more absorbed in the device in your hand than the person next to you. Insisting that everyone stay online, in sync, tethered to one another at all times lest something catastrophic happens. You can try and not be on Facebook, but they'll hunt you. If you run, GPS will find you. Once you're on, you become the hunter. Add friends. Add more friends. Add your family. The deeper in you are, the more of your personal info they steal from you. Every bit of individuality is stripped away in favor of the collective.

I hear they're developing surgical eye implants to send digital relays directly to your brain. No lie. We already know nanotechnology is is developing in strides.

The Borg aren't coming. The Borg are here.

Disagree, strongly. The scary thing about the Borg is the way that they take you over physically, making you a spectator as what was your body becomes its meat-puppet.

Increasing dependence on technology that increases connectivity between people does not mean a willingness to lose identity. Look at species in the Federation which are telepathic, having a natural counterpart to the Borg mass mind. Were the Betazoids or Vulcans more likely to welcome the Borg than humans or Andorians? If anything, I can imagine telepaths--and networked non-telepaths--being more upset by the loss of individuality and free will inflicted by the Borg on their victims.

 

[Ubik]

See, here's the thing. The Borg COULD have been a scary warning about the dangers of dependance on technologies, but the Star Trek writers, not often caring much for hard science fiction, never really went that direction, and instead they were scary just for being space zombies. Q Who is scary for the same reason Night of the Living Dead is scary.

 

[Christopher]

^I would say, rather, that Star Trek has historically rejected mass-media sci-fi's Luddite paranoia about technology and has instead taken a more optimistic, humanistic view of technology as a valuable tool for improving the quality of life and expanding human power and understanding. True, there have been occasional stories expressing the dangers of letting technology take over too completely -- "What Are Little Girls Made Of?," "Return of the Archons," "The Ultimate Computer," etc. -- but this is also a franchise that gives us android and hologram heroes, a captain with an artificial heart, a pilot/engineer with bionic vision curing his blindness, and a generally high-tech future in which technology serves humanity rather than oppressing it.

Let's remember that the Borg didn't really become "space zombies" until First Contact. Originally they were simply a collective of drones that had no interest in individuals, only technology. "Q Who" indicated that they were incubated from infancy as cyborgs. When assimilation was introduced in "The Best of Both Worlds," it was portrayed as a change from the Borg's usual methods, an adaptation to humans' hierarchical social structure (and of course was really a retcon for dramatic reasons, since you can't tell many stories about an enemy that has no personal interest in any of your characters). Similarly, Hugh in "I, Borg" and the liberated Borg in "Descent" were portrayed as total blank slates, drones with no prior identity or history, leaving them lost and vulnerable when the Collective was taken away. It was FC that radically reinterpreted the Borg as "zombies" that aggressively targeted individuals and converted them into more Borg, and Voyager that elaborated on that by painting the Borg as made up entirely of assimilated beings who tended to reassert their own personalities and identities when severed from the Collective.

 

[SPCTRE]

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

 

[TheGodBen]

The Borg aren't coming. The Borg are here.

I wouldn't have been so scared of the Borg as a child if I had known that the majority of the collective's bandwidth was used to transmit pornography and funny cat pictures.

The Borg collective and the internet are completely opposite things. The collective is used to control the drones and quash their individuality, while the internet in an optional medium of communication that allows people to express themselves to others. The perfect example of this is what happened in Egypt where the initial protests against the government were organised on the internet, which led to the downfall of an oppressive regime and potentially the spread of liberalism and individualisation.

 

[Ubik]

^I would say, rather, that Star Trek has historically rejected mass-media sci-fi's Luddite paranoia about technology and has instead taken a more optimistic, humanistic view of technology as a valuable tool for improving the quality of life and expanding human power and understanding. True, there have been occasional stories expressing the dangers of letting technology take over too completely -- "What Are Little Girls Made Of?," "Return of the Archons," "The Ultimate Computer," etc. -- but this is also a franchise that gives us android and hologram heroes, a captain with an artificial heart, a pilot/engineer with bionic vision curing his blindness, and a generally high-tech future in which technology serves humanity rather than oppressing it.

Let's remember that the Borg didn't really become "space zombies" until First Contact. Originally they were simply a collective of drones that had no interest in individuals, only technology. "Q Who" indicated that they were incubated from infancy as cyborgs. When assimilation was introduced in "The Best of Both Worlds," it was portrayed as a change from the Borg's usual methods, an adaptation to humans' hierarchical social structure (and of course was really a retcon for dramatic reasons, since you can't tell many stories about an enemy that has no personal interest in any of your characters). Similarly, Hugh in "I, Borg" and the liberated Borg in "Descent" were portrayed as total blank slates, drones with no prior identity or history, leaving them lost and vulnerable when the Collective was taken away. It was FC that radically reinterpreted the Borg as "zombies" that aggressively targeted individuals and converted them into more Borg, and Voyager that elaborated on that by painting the Borg as made up entirely of assimilated beings who tended to reassert their own personalities and identities when severed from the Collective.

"Mass media sci fi's Luddite paranoia"? Science fiction has been examining the dangers of unchecked technological progress ever since Mary Shelley, with writers as disparate as H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Greg Bear all exploring the issue in various ways. It is not mere "paranoia" to question and examine the possible negative consequences of exponentially developing technologies - it is, indeed, one of science fiction's primary tasks. Of course there are benefits to technology, as all those writers I mentioned (expect perhaps Shelley) have also examined, but that examination must include the possible negative changes to human nature that may also necessarily follow. TNG was always intensely naive about that (even today, internet usage is changing the very nature of human interaction and friendship, and not, one might say, for the better), and that's why, even with the Borg, they chose not to delve too deeply into the themes of technological oppression.

And say what you want about the Borg in Q Who, they were filmed like zombies. They had pale faces, they walked slow, they were often filmed in shadow, and you couldn't communicate with them. And they never stopped coming. Space zombies is what they were from the start, and the only reason they were so popular is because they were indeed very scary space zombies.

 

[Marten]

They are scarily stubborn, I'd say.

 

[Christopher]

"Mass media sci fi's Luddite paranoia"? Science fiction has been examining the dangers of unchecked technological progress ever since Mary Shelley, with writers as disparate as H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Greg Bear all exploring the issue in various ways.

Yes, but in prose SF you've had much more of a balance between cautionary tales about the dangers of technology and sense-of-wonder explorations about the positive potentials of technology. In the mass media, outside of Star Trek, it's been rare to find the latter.

And I don't really agree that Shelley's Frankenstein is about the dangers of technology, since there's hardly any technology in it. The undescribed methods used by Victor Frankenstein are grounded as much in alchemy as anything else. Also, I don't think the message of the novel is "It's a sin to create life," as is often assumed. I think the message is, "When you create life, treat it well, because if you reject and abuse your creations, they will be warped by it and turn against you." The tale is mostly narrated by Victor, who naturally paints the creature as evil and denounces his act of creation as sinful, but I think that's a classic case of an unreliable narrator. The creature's own narration makes it clear that he would've been the kindest of souls if he hadn't been a victim of abuse and xenophobia from the moment of his birth merely because he looked different.

It is not mere "paranoia" to question and examine the possible negative consequences of exponentially developing technologies - it is, indeed, one of science fiction's primary tasks.

It is paranoia if you only see the negatives, which is my point. ST is one of the few works of mass-media SF to celebrate the positive potentials of technology.

And say what you want about the Borg in Q Who, they were filmed like zombies. They had pale faces, they walked slow, they were often filmed in shadow, and you couldn't communicate with them. And they never stopped coming. Space zombies is what they were from the start, and the only reason they were so popular is because they were indeed very scary space zombies.

Well, I will never for the life of me understand why zombies are popular. But while you may be right about the superficial presentation (though I think it was more about making them seem dronelike and mechanical), it wasn't until FC that they were fully retconned into the standard "zombie" paradigm of infectious monsters, things that went after people and turned them into more of themselves. "Q Who" presented a Borg species whose attitude toward living beings was merely one of obliviousness -- they were only interested in our machinery and would only harm us if we got between them and the stuff they cared about. Something really powerful that doesn't notice or care about your existence can be scary in the sense that it poses a threat if you get underfoot or in its way, but it's a detached, impersonal threat, like a hurricane. It's not the same kind of scary as a monster that's specifically after you, that's actively seeking to strip you of your "soul." Indeed, that's why Michael Piller introduced the "assimilation" retcon in "The Best of Both Worlds," because making it more personal made it more dramatic. But as I said, it was presented there as a change from their standard approach. There's no denying that the presentation of the Borg was radically altered in First Contact and beyond.

 

[Anwar]

It was a bad idea for them to give all the Borg instant assimilation powers. Assimilation should've been something they needed proper equipment to do, on their ships.

 

[Anwar]

It was a bad idea for them to give all the Borg instant assimilation powers. Assimilation should've been something they needed proper equipment to do, on their ships.