It's Borg vs. Borg for the future of entertainment

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Their continuing mission …

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” launched a half-decade before the Cold War ended, but it's still an “end of history” artifact. 

Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his squeaky clean emissaries of neoliberalism scrubbed “Star Trek” of its crankiness and its libido, promoting nothing so much as the idea of endless abundance and eternal, uncompromised choice. 

The Federation had solved the troublesome bits of humanity and the market. Distress beacons pulled the Enterprise toward slickly packaged moral quandaries week after week. From his skin-tight, minimal uniform to his own bald head, Patrick Stewart projected a tabula rasa to the far reaches of the universe, hammering out the objective truth with each new society he encountered. 

When it came time to create a villain for these free-floating foot soldiers of free trade, a competing empire where the individual is fully subservient to the greater good of the collective just made sense. Enter the Borg, a robotic society of authoritarian automatons hell-bent on bringing all technology in the universe under their control. 

It would take too long to tell you what happened next in the world of “Trek,” but the story in our own world is remarkably simple. The Soviet Union fell. Things got unipolar. Rising wages and cheap credit allowed Americans to buy massive, newly constructed houses and fill them to the rafters with plastic junk. Regulations on media ownership loosened, antitrust statutes were shoved into a cobwebby attic. Out in California, hundreds of miles from the soundstages of Burbank, the Borg lingered.

 A villain that incorporates each new technology it finds to its ends can never really be counted out. Sure, the Borg wasn’t a red(eyed) menace anymore, but the winners of the Cold War still wanted to remove the ability to choose. Media corporations quickly gobbled each other up. Disney came to own multiple streaming services, several movie studios, comic book publishers, cable channels and the Muppets. iHeartRadio owns everything on the right of the dial. Corporations pitched a sneaky freedom of choice between several companies that they happened to own. “Here’s your individualism,” they said. “Choke on it.”

 Which brings us to the media news of the week. Paramount and Netflix are competing to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, a conglomerate of movie studios, DC Comics and most of the cable television networks not already owned by Paramount. Netflix’s deal could spell doom for the movie-going experience, as Netflix has shown little care for the future of movie theaters. Paramount, a company that leads its offerings with the name of a famous movie studio, would be a more likely advocate for keeping the movie business separate from the home entertainment side of things. 

In true Borg fashion, there’s not really a choice for anyone looking to pick a rooting interest in this billionaire slapfight. The point is endless expansion, a way to make the numbers in the ledger go up and up forever. Both Netflix and Paramount are working toward a future where resistance is futile, a far-off date where there’s 500 channels and they’re the only thing on.

What do you think? Do we have a dog in this fight? Will all our popular art be assimilated? Is there any hope for a repeal of TCA 1996? Sound off in the comments.

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