I never even thought about Picard’s vineyard like that. It is odd that a society that seems largely modeled off of libertarian values would include generational estates. The concept of usufruct may have been unknown by the writers of TNG when they were fleshing our Picard’s past. Or it was just a bit of our cultural bias bleeding into this “utopian” setting.
Raffis story doesn’t get a pass though. It seems like they were going for gritty and edgy in a way that was straight up contradictory to the federations ethos when they came up with that bs. The whole first season of Picard was pretty backwards in its portrayal of the federation imo. Haven’t watched the 2nd or 3rd season yet so idk if they unfucked any of the worst stuff
Libertarian in the OG sense, more commonly called libertarian socialism or anarchism. Didn’t realize I left the socialism bit out. I hesitate to call the federation anarchist because there’s still plenty of hierarchy but it seems to be modeled after a vaguely left-libertarian ideology of some sort
The original Liberals were actually a bunch of mill owners in 19th Century Manchester (at the time the most technologically advanced city in the world) who got together to ask challenging questions like “why should we have to pay taxes?” and “what if we basically owned our employees? And their children”.
Marx and Engels lived there for a time and witnessed the conditions the working people lived in first-hand.
Libertarianism is explicitly based on the ideas of Manchester School Liberalism. The British Liberal Party of the 19th Century was all about free market ideology, in contrast to the (theoretically) more centrist modern party. In Victorian Britain, Liberal own you.
Broader socialism has its roots in the French revolution and liberalism too. But you don’t see anyone making a case that Marxists are liberals due to their common ideological heritage. Because it’s silly. It’s almost like divergent ideologies have to originate from somewhere and within a particular historical context. It’s unproductive and pointless to say “z came from y and y from x so z is the same as x”
If your only exposure to the word libertarian is from tech bros and “don’t tread on me” bootlickers, then sure. But libertarianism goes all the way back to the French revolution and was one of the earliest forms of socialism. The right wingers co-opted it a while back and it’s been commonly associated with that ever since. Anarchism is the more familiar term nowadays despite only being a subset of left-libertarian thought
The “utopian future” for Star Trek has always been pretty vague. They almost never showed civilian life in the Federation, so we didn’t see much of it. Mostly it served as an excuse for a bunch of people in a heavily-armed ship to travel around and preach their own superiority to the primitives they came across while adhering strictly to a military chain of command that’s held up as the highest ideal.
People wonder why there are so many fascists in the Star Trek fandom. I always thought it was pretty obvious.
“On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it’s easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise! Out there, in the Demilitarized Zone, all the problems haven’t been solved yet!”
Deep Space Nine is the best of Start Trek and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. It wasn’t afraid to criticize it’s self. Could Picard have done what Sisko did in The Pale Moonlight? I don’t think so, Picard would have lost the war with the Dominion.
And in fact, just about anywhere we see Starfleet officers mixing with civilians, it’s invariably a seedy bar of some type. The place where Dr. McCoy goes to charter a ship to Genesis with the “place you name, money I name unless bargain no” guy, all both buildings of Paradise City, the place where Picard gets stabbed by a Nosican…
I e always found the economics of Star Trek to be confusing. In some episodes, they act like they don’t even understand what money is but then in others you see them buying things. The Picard family owning a vineyard and Sisko’s dad owning a restaurant proves that private ownership of land and property are still things that are present in the Federation. How did He get the restaurant? Was it given to him? Did he buy it? If so, what did he buy it with?
In DS9, we see the crew buying things from Quark but where did they get their money? Does Star Fleet pay salaries? Are officers deployed to places that use money provided with some kind of stipend?
I might need to do some googling to see if I can find some discussion on Federation economics.
Pretty sure officers are provided with a stipend when they’re deployed to places that use money. I remember sisko mentioning something along the lines of receiving pay but not having much use for it. That’s reflected in how he handles situations where he has to pay for something, buying information from quark comes to mind. He barters as a formality/to keep quark from getting too big headed and then just kinda chucks latinum at him, like it doesn’t mean much at all.
As for siskos family restaurant, unless I’m remembering incorrectly, I think Benjamin’s dad was the first one to have it. In which case it doesn’t really contradict the private property aspect. This goes a bit into anarchist concepts of private property so fair warning. There’s this concept called usufruct, which is a progression of roman ideals of ownership. Basically “use it or lose it”, where you can occupy land for any given purpose (in this case a restaurant) so long as it’s being used you’re welcome to occupy it. When you die or decide to close up shop, the land isn’t passed to someone in your family, it goes back into the Commons for another person to use. Picards vineyard does throw a wrench into that though, because it’s clearly established that his family has owned the land for generations. Which is pretty wack
I’m old, and that term is now to me, sorry if I am thinking incorrectly on this. With Usufruct, if Picards family was operating the Vinyard and no other’s were interested or had the ability to be part of their business management infrastructure, it could be “handed down” through management of the business which would happen to be the members of their family? May not be completely likely to happen, that no one else would be part without some nepotism, but for storyline sake let’s say it happened. Would that make it work?
It is a complicated business infrastructure and could be argued the housing/estate is part of the usage agreement as it leaves other properties available in the community? Rearranging a working Vinyard just to reallocate the housing portion seems like it could damage the business goods long term.
Thanks for any input, I have been learning lots of new things since joining the fediverse!
Usually communities that implement usufruct put systems in place to avoid pitfalls like nepotism. Agriculture is a very common area for usefruct or some similar system to be implemented too so we have plenty of realworld examples to draw comparison from. Lottery systems are popular, where all of the plots will be put into a pool every x amount of time (anywhere from 1-5 years usually) and randomly granted to people in the community. And there are often measures in place to make sure people aren’t given a plot that’s not too far from their house to avoid logistical/infrastructure complications.There’s plenty of other ways it’s handled as well, I’d be happy to link some stuff if you’re interested.
I’m not familiar with how this is handled with things like vineyards or other crops that are heavily dependent on certain soil and climate conditions and as such couldn’t be relocated as simply. Usufruct in its modern forms is largely considered within the scope of the degrowth movement, where local independence and sustaianability is heavily emphasized. So instead of large monocultures community members are encouraged to practice forms of subsistence farming, having more crops grown on one plot that would enable people to feed themselves and their community. Rather than a town having a vineyard, several people would have a handful of rows of grapes on their land. What they do with them after that is their prerogative. Towns could have a communal winery or perhaps those interested in making wine may just have a few barrels tucked away in their basement. It’s also worth mentioning that communities that implement a system like this would likely have very different ideas of personal and private property than you or I. Something like an estate may be consciously avoided to avoid the concentration of wealth or power within a given family.
To bring this back to star trek; they’re living in a post scarcity society that has food replicators. And as such picards home town may have done away with conceptions of usufruct in the way we know them today. They may be a-ok with family estates, perhaps with certain parameters in place to maintain equality in some manner. Land isnt intrinsically tied with wealth and power (at least on earth) at that time. I could go on for ages about axes of domination, inequality, the principles of free association and plenty of other stuff that could be involved with how picards family may have come to have a vineyard in an allegedly socialist, libertarian society but I’ll leave it here for now lol.
Thanks for commenting, it was fun being able to share some knowledge and chew on it a little!
Hey, thank you! That was super interesting. I would imagine working communities like that would be much more localized for infrastructure of daily needs. Since I do not have much to offer on the real world side of things, and I like to idealize the Star Trek future, I’ll share what my brain is using as a place holder for this one at the moment.
Maybe his family’s vineyard is so good and well liked, that not just the community but the whole region enjoys being known as the home of that wine. Since the Picard’s are good people they do not take advantage of their place as caretakers of the Vinyard. Maybe there are large gatherings and events even, that take place on the grounds. Fall festivals, weddings, Bah Mitzvah’s (sp?), etc.
Yes, all of that! If anything, Chateau Picard should be a collective of equal volunteers who just really love squashing grapes with their feet in rural France. Iain M Banks novels deal with this aspect of Utopianism much better.
Honestly I think it’s a bit of cope from the writers not wanting to deal with the ultimate consequences of the world building decisions (which is fine). I’m sure people want to make stuff in real ways but industrial size vineyards? Eh, why not replace it with a lush biologically diverse forest with some wine bushes spread about and little drones harvesting in a smart way.
I think of it like a homemade carrot cake versus a store bought individually wrapped slice.
Technically that factory made carrot cake is perfect every time. It is the same recipe, color, and quality as the one next to it and the one you bought last year. That said I would nearly always prefer a homemade or bakery made carrot cake more. Nothing wrong with grabbing the “perfect” one in a pinch, but it is missing something that I can’t quite describe. Maybe it is a more generic recipe, or maybe it is the preservatives, but there is a difference.
It shows up more than once, but I think the first time is shortly after the girl goes to see Picard. Probably episode 2 or 3. There were workers and machines in the fields and I remember thinking, why even have the people if the machines beam the grapes right off the vines?
It sounds to me like they we were going for more of a realistic future than a utopia. The money free utopia thing never seemed that important, I suspect it’s only used in later shows for consistency with TOS. It’s far more important to trek to criticize and reflect modern society, which is a lot harder to do if your characters are living in a utopia. I haven’t seen Picard yet though, so I’m just extrapolating from your description.
It’s far more important to trek to criticize and reflect modern society, which is a lot harder to do if your characters are living in a utopia.
I disagree… if anything, the opposite is true! Having “Federation utopia” makes it incredibly easy to critique modern society. Just introduce planets which have whatever element of modern society you want to comment on, and then draw a painfully obvious comparison to the perfection that is humanity in the 24th century, and boom, it’s done! Heck, you could even make an entire alien race to critique an element of modern society like capitalism, not that anybody would do something that obvious :P
I feel like TOS and TNG lived on this a little too much, especially in early TNG seasons. It was what made DS9 so interesting when the writers flipped the script. Instead of spoon feeding you the critique of modern society in the form of planet-of-the week, they throw in stuff that makes you question whether the federation utopia approach is actually right, or if it’s too naive.
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I never even thought about Picard’s vineyard like that. It is odd that a society that seems largely modeled off of libertarian values would include generational estates. The concept of usufruct may have been unknown by the writers of TNG when they were fleshing our Picard’s past. Or it was just a bit of our cultural bias bleeding into this “utopian” setting.
Raffis story doesn’t get a pass though. It seems like they were going for gritty and edgy in a way that was straight up contradictory to the federations ethos when they came up with that bs. The whole first season of Picard was pretty backwards in its portrayal of the federation imo. Haven’t watched the 2nd or 3rd season yet so idk if they unfucked any of the worst stuff
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Libertarian in the OG sense, more commonly called libertarian socialism or anarchism. Didn’t realize I left the socialism bit out. I hesitate to call the federation anarchist because there’s still plenty of hierarchy but it seems to be modeled after a vaguely left-libertarian ideology of some sort
The original Liberals were actually a bunch of mill owners in 19th Century Manchester (at the time the most technologically advanced city in the world) who got together to ask challenging questions like “why should we have to pay taxes?” and “what if we basically owned our employees? And their children”.
Marx and Engels lived there for a time and witnessed the conditions the working people lived in first-hand.
Libertarians aren’t liberals
Libertarianism is explicitly based on the ideas of Manchester School Liberalism. The British Liberal Party of the 19th Century was all about free market ideology, in contrast to the (theoretically) more centrist modern party. In Victorian Britain, Liberal own you.
Broader socialism has its roots in the French revolution and liberalism too. But you don’t see anyone making a case that Marxists are liberals due to their common ideological heritage. Because it’s silly. It’s almost like divergent ideologies have to originate from somewhere and within a particular historical context. It’s unproductive and pointless to say “z came from y and y from x so z is the same as x”
Libertarian socialism sounds like a contradiction to me.
If your only exposure to the word libertarian is from tech bros and “don’t tread on me” bootlickers, then sure. But libertarianism goes all the way back to the French revolution and was one of the earliest forms of socialism. The right wingers co-opted it a while back and it’s been commonly associated with that ever since. Anarchism is the more familiar term nowadays despite only being a subset of left-libertarian thought
The “utopian future” for Star Trek has always been pretty vague. They almost never showed civilian life in the Federation, so we didn’t see much of it. Mostly it served as an excuse for a bunch of people in a heavily-armed ship to travel around and preach their own superiority to the primitives they came across while adhering strictly to a military chain of command that’s held up as the highest ideal.
People wonder why there are so many fascists in the Star Trek fandom. I always thought it was pretty obvious.
“On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it’s easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise! Out there, in the Demilitarized Zone, all the problems haven’t been solved yet!”
Deep Space Nine is the best of Start Trek and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. It wasn’t afraid to criticize it’s self. Could Picard have done what Sisko did in The Pale Moonlight? I don’t think so, Picard would have lost the war with the Dominion.
And in fact, just about anywhere we see Starfleet officers mixing with civilians, it’s invariably a seedy bar of some type. The place where Dr. McCoy goes to charter a ship to Genesis with the “place you name, money I name unless bargain no” guy, all both buildings of Paradise City, the place where Picard gets stabbed by a Nosican…
I e always found the economics of Star Trek to be confusing. In some episodes, they act like they don’t even understand what money is but then in others you see them buying things. The Picard family owning a vineyard and Sisko’s dad owning a restaurant proves that private ownership of land and property are still things that are present in the Federation. How did He get the restaurant? Was it given to him? Did he buy it? If so, what did he buy it with?
In DS9, we see the crew buying things from Quark but where did they get their money? Does Star Fleet pay salaries? Are officers deployed to places that use money provided with some kind of stipend?
I might need to do some googling to see if I can find some discussion on Federation economics.
Pretty sure officers are provided with a stipend when they’re deployed to places that use money. I remember sisko mentioning something along the lines of receiving pay but not having much use for it. That’s reflected in how he handles situations where he has to pay for something, buying information from quark comes to mind. He barters as a formality/to keep quark from getting too big headed and then just kinda chucks latinum at him, like it doesn’t mean much at all.
As for siskos family restaurant, unless I’m remembering incorrectly, I think Benjamin’s dad was the first one to have it. In which case it doesn’t really contradict the private property aspect. This goes a bit into anarchist concepts of private property so fair warning. There’s this concept called usufruct, which is a progression of roman ideals of ownership. Basically “use it or lose it”, where you can occupy land for any given purpose (in this case a restaurant) so long as it’s being used you’re welcome to occupy it. When you die or decide to close up shop, the land isn’t passed to someone in your family, it goes back into the Commons for another person to use. Picards vineyard does throw a wrench into that though, because it’s clearly established that his family has owned the land for generations. Which is pretty wack
I’m old, and that term is now to me, sorry if I am thinking incorrectly on this. With Usufruct, if Picards family was operating the Vinyard and no other’s were interested or had the ability to be part of their business management infrastructure, it could be “handed down” through management of the business which would happen to be the members of their family? May not be completely likely to happen, that no one else would be part without some nepotism, but for storyline sake let’s say it happened. Would that make it work? It is a complicated business infrastructure and could be argued the housing/estate is part of the usage agreement as it leaves other properties available in the community? Rearranging a working Vinyard just to reallocate the housing portion seems like it could damage the business goods long term.
Thanks for any input, I have been learning lots of new things since joining the fediverse!
Usually communities that implement usufruct put systems in place to avoid pitfalls like nepotism. Agriculture is a very common area for usefruct or some similar system to be implemented too so we have plenty of realworld examples to draw comparison from. Lottery systems are popular, where all of the plots will be put into a pool every x amount of time (anywhere from 1-5 years usually) and randomly granted to people in the community. And there are often measures in place to make sure people aren’t given a plot that’s not too far from their house to avoid logistical/infrastructure complications.There’s plenty of other ways it’s handled as well, I’d be happy to link some stuff if you’re interested.
I’m not familiar with how this is handled with things like vineyards or other crops that are heavily dependent on certain soil and climate conditions and as such couldn’t be relocated as simply. Usufruct in its modern forms is largely considered within the scope of the degrowth movement, where local independence and sustaianability is heavily emphasized. So instead of large monocultures community members are encouraged to practice forms of subsistence farming, having more crops grown on one plot that would enable people to feed themselves and their community. Rather than a town having a vineyard, several people would have a handful of rows of grapes on their land. What they do with them after that is their prerogative. Towns could have a communal winery or perhaps those interested in making wine may just have a few barrels tucked away in their basement. It’s also worth mentioning that communities that implement a system like this would likely have very different ideas of personal and private property than you or I. Something like an estate may be consciously avoided to avoid the concentration of wealth or power within a given family.
To bring this back to star trek; they’re living in a post scarcity society that has food replicators. And as such picards home town may have done away with conceptions of usufruct in the way we know them today. They may be a-ok with family estates, perhaps with certain parameters in place to maintain equality in some manner. Land isnt intrinsically tied with wealth and power (at least on earth) at that time. I could go on for ages about axes of domination, inequality, the principles of free association and plenty of other stuff that could be involved with how picards family may have come to have a vineyard in an allegedly socialist, libertarian society but I’ll leave it here for now lol.
Thanks for commenting, it was fun being able to share some knowledge and chew on it a little!
Hey, thank you! That was super interesting. I would imagine working communities like that would be much more localized for infrastructure of daily needs. Since I do not have much to offer on the real world side of things, and I like to idealize the Star Trek future, I’ll share what my brain is using as a place holder for this one at the moment.
Maybe his family’s vineyard is so good and well liked, that not just the community but the whole region enjoys being known as the home of that wine. Since the Picard’s are good people they do not take advantage of their place as caretakers of the Vinyard. Maybe there are large gatherings and events even, that take place on the grounds. Fall festivals, weddings, Bah Mitzvah’s (sp?), etc.
Yes, all of that! If anything, Chateau Picard should be a collective of equal volunteers who just really love squashing grapes with their feet in rural France. Iain M Banks novels deal with this aspect of Utopianism much better.
Why do they need vineyards? Can’t they make any wine using replicators?
Why do people cook themselves? Can’t they just microwave something?
Probably because some people enjoy the little imperfections that but being replicated brings
Honestly I think it’s a bit of cope from the writers not wanting to deal with the ultimate consequences of the world building decisions (which is fine). I’m sure people want to make stuff in real ways but industrial size vineyards? Eh, why not replace it with a lush biologically diverse forest with some wine bushes spread about and little drones harvesting in a smart way.
Tng s4e2 shows us that the replecator doesn’t give them real booze and replicated liquor is garbage
I believe that is only on Starfleet vessels.
You don’t want drunk people performing their jobs during a crisis.
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Which is complete BS, since it’s supposed to be the same on a molecular level.
I think of it like a homemade carrot cake versus a store bought individually wrapped slice.
Technically that factory made carrot cake is perfect every time. It is the same recipe, color, and quality as the one next to it and the one you bought last year. That said I would nearly always prefer a homemade or bakery made carrot cake more. Nothing wrong with grabbing the “perfect” one in a pinch, but it is missing something that I can’t quite describe. Maybe it is a more generic recipe, or maybe it is the preservatives, but there is a difference.
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Factory made food is created differently than homemade. Replicators can, well, replicate anything perfectly.
That can be attributed to the placebo effect.
Which episode is that? I can’t remember seeing it.
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It shows up more than once, but I think the first time is shortly after the girl goes to see Picard. Probably episode 2 or 3. There were workers and machines in the fields and I remember thinking, why even have the people if the machines beam the grapes right off the vines?
No, I mean the one of the holographic pop-ups, or is that the same one?
Not sure. I only have a vague memory of it.
Because it’s a hobby for them?
It sounds to me like they we were going for more of a realistic future than a utopia. The money free utopia thing never seemed that important, I suspect it’s only used in later shows for consistency with TOS. It’s far more important to trek to criticize and reflect modern society, which is a lot harder to do if your characters are living in a utopia. I haven’t seen Picard yet though, so I’m just extrapolating from your description.
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I disagree… if anything, the opposite is true! Having “Federation utopia” makes it incredibly easy to critique modern society. Just introduce planets which have whatever element of modern society you want to comment on, and then draw a painfully obvious comparison to the perfection that is humanity in the 24th century, and boom, it’s done! Heck, you could even make an entire alien race to critique an element of modern society like capitalism, not that anybody would do something that obvious :P
I feel like TOS and TNG lived on this a little too much, especially in early TNG seasons. It was what made DS9 so interesting when the writers flipped the script. Instead of spoon feeding you the critique of modern society in the form of planet-of-the week, they throw in stuff that makes you question whether the federation utopia approach is actually right, or if it’s too naive.