• GreenMario@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The Earth First faction would totally gaslight everyone about the existence of the Borg.

    The Borg?! Ha! Yet another radical leftist Federation boogeyman! I’ll bet credits to navy beans that it’s just an excuse to expand Starfleet and take away your phasers! Wolf 359 was an inside job! But in case you do get infected with nanoprobes be sure to buy my Ivermectin^TM brand purity pills, only 4 bars of Gold Pressed Latinum!

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I would absolutely line up to be assimilated. I’d be guaranteed a job that mattered, I’d always be with family and friends, I’d be part of a group that was always working towards a common goal, and I’d be happy; the borg that are disconnected from the collective are clearly deeply distressed by the experience. Plus, I’d be stronger and more capable as a borg than I can even imagine right now.

    As long as people are making the choice to join the collective, why is it anyone else’s business?

    • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      That is the gimmick of the borg. Depending on the writer it is half about the horrors of comunism and the other part is about the horror of transhumanism. Both are rad though so hell yeah

      • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        For a solid 25+ years, I’ve been saying that the second it’s viable, I would happily replace all of my meat with machine. When you fuck your back up as an organic, congrats, now you get to have pain for the rest of your life. As a cyborg? Just replace the damaged part.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        laughs in socialist furry

        Oh no, they’ve come to take away my precious humanity and capitalism, whatever shall I do?

  • yumcake@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That’s CRAZY right?..Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

    How about the Borg’s willingness to join? What we’ve been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they’ve experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

    Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they’ve allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager’s return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

    That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation’s intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, “We come in peace”, assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to “come in peace”, casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet’s virtues to the rest of their race.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      So basically kidnapping and brainwashing them into believing we are good?

      Yeah, I doubt the Federation would be on board with that. They rather take the difficult route.

  • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    All the borg say they prefer borg at what point do we have to just listen to them and admit we are being rascist about it? In several episodes it is shown and being a pleasant experience of I recall correctly.

    • Noughmad@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      It’s all Starfleet’s fault, the Federation has expanded too much and has encircled Borg space for decades. Plus the Borg are good for making a multipolar galaxy, we should support them.

      • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I was more talking about the borg themselves reporting being happy but this did bring that weird rascist tone to it that I was talking about.

        • nxdefiant@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          I can’t recall anyone that was recovered from being a Borg begging to go back. In fact quite the opposite.

          It wasn’t like the Nexus where everyone agreed it was better even after the fact.

          • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Seven of nine, Heugh, the kids, I seem to Recall Picard saying it was p nice just not for him. I know everyone reported not liking thr process but the actual state of it has been reported as being mostly pleasant but It has been a while since I seen the episodes.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Assimi-milation!

    What a wonderful phrase

    Assimi-milation!

    Ain’t no passing craze

    It means no worries

    For the rest of your days

    It’s our problem-free philosophy

    Assimi-milation!

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago
      • Free healthcare

      • Free public housing

      • No debt

      • Spend all your days cruising the galaxy with your buds, looking for more people who want to join the party

      Yeah, I’m not clear what’s on this list that I’m not supposed to like.

    • Noughmad@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      The Federation doesn’t have capitalism either (well, again this depends on the writer, but Picard was quite clear about it in one episode).

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        better but computers in general aren’t very good at things. They’re great if you want to do a lot of calculations really fast but they just don’t have the reliability I look for in an internal organ

        also some teenager would hack into me and force me to dance or something

        • DroneRights [it/its]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          There’s a game about that. It’s called Exapunks. You play as an anarchist hacker who is slowly dying to a degenerative disease that turns your flesh into electronics. The medicine to keep your disease from progressing costs 300 dollars a day, so you learn how to hack from a zine and then start making money for your medicine and taking down capitalism. At various points you have to use your hacking skills to reprogram your nerves so your body will continue to function. Send a virus to tell your heart to beat and so forth. The gameplay is based on a modified version of assembly and actual programming puzzles that make sense in the context of the cyberpunk world.

    • muddi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I’ve seen this type of comment in scifi threads. It was about that one planet-consciousness in the Foundation series, some guy thought it would be hell to lose his individuality. But I think that people are confusing privacy or autonomy with individuality.

      Also the fact that individuality is already illusory to begin with – we are social animals, and if we truly tried to be absolutely individual, we’d end up as a feral child or some bizarre hermit. And ironically we live in an age where we are so alienated not just from others but our own selves, and our very species-essence as well

  • samus12345@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Modern people with tortured minds would probably be happier as Borg, but in Star Trek’s time they presumably have effective treatments for it so it’s not so appealing.

    In other words, yes, there would be a decent chunk of volunteers.