Enterprising Individuals

Double check your TOS this week (that's Terms of Service) as Dr. David A. Banks comes back to the show to assess the state of data security and implementation in the Star Trek universe! No one in Trek has an ID or a social media account or watches cable news . . . instead, they're a bunch of Shakespeare-loving, flute-playing beatniks who take their benevolent surveillance state for granted. How did humanity go from dragging Zuck up on Capitol Hill to being OK with having to argue with a computer to keep from dying in the cold of space?In this wide-ranging talk, we look at Trek's conspicuous lack of data privacy, the crew's Victorian pastimes, the role of the media in Trek, "big data" (not Data), and we ask, "Just who's on the Federation Council, anyway?" Plus, we talk future news networks, having "admin" as your auto-destruct password, how the cop procedural killed the western, the David Simon season of DS9, scamming your Andorian grandma's welfare, losing the Spotify servers in WW3, Ensign Tilly's Instagram