“Capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.”
Guy Debord
Let me take you back to January 3rd 1993 and the first Star Trek spin-off show
Star Trek was a show about a starship with a 5 year mission, and Next Generation was a reboot of that same narrative format.
Even the first animated series stuck to the formula.
But now Star Trek was about to re-write the episodic format of a strange new world per episode.
And focus on just one world. Or more precisely just one space station.
Welcome to Deep Space 9.
Watch the full video essay on YouTube
Star Trek has always been a show about exploration. But now that Trek was settling down in one place it could think about the dark side of humanity’s history of exploration.
Colonisation.
And so Deep Space 9 made the genuinely brave decision to make Star Trek a show about
Postcolonialism
Settler colonialism
and Decolonisation
Bajor is a world of peace loving spiritual seekers who follow a religion very similar to Vedic Hinduism … it’s basically the Indian sub-continent in space.
That has recently freed itself from colonisation by the Cardassians. An empire of stiff necked, emotionally repressed Imperialists who are really polite and make great witty gay space spies.
So that’s basically the English then.
And Deep Space Nine is basically postcolonialism studies in space.Â
Based on a scifi metaphor for the fall of the British Raj in India.
The money-grubbing, middle man merchant race the Ferengi are an unfortunate mash-up of Middle Eastern cultures.
And later in its development DS9 will explain the mysterious origin of the shape changing Constable Odo, when it introduces The Dominion.
A race of shape-changers who after millennia of persecution, pogroms and mass murder against them, have become an expansionist state now committing those same crimes against others.
And then there’s Starfleet.
Captain Benjamin Sisko is a traumatised widower who lost his wife Rachel in combat, who has been consigned to DS9 as a burnout, which kind of gives away that Bajor is not Starfleet’s top priority.
As is traditional in Star Trek, the Federation and Starfleet are an idealised version of America. By the 1990s that means Starfleet is the “galactic policeman”, sorting out the postcolonial messes left by other peoples empires.
Here in 2026 we know that having a Nimitz class super carrier show up means your nation is about to be bombed, have its leadership kidnapped, then get your markets forced open for McDonalds and Starbucks and all your natural resources extracted.
But back in the 90s it was much easier to still think of the US as a singular force for good, so maybe we can forgive DS9 for idealising the home team.
Because what the best ever Star Trek show does do, imperfectly and incompletely, is set-up, by the end of its 90 minute pilot episode, all the elements of its material critique.
Because that’s what Star Trek always used to be.
Materialist critique can be simplified to the statement SHOW ME THE MONEY.
Instead of getting distracted by what ideas people believe. Is socialism better than capitalism, for instance. A material critique asks : Who owns the factories? Who does the work and who gets the profits? Who has the power? Who has the MONEY?
In a feudal society it:s land owners who have all the power and money. In a capitalist society it is the owners of capital who profit.
The Federation as imagined by Gene Roddenberry has escaped feudalism and capitalism. In the Federation nobody has all the money, because there is no money. It is a society without landlords, without kings, or capitalists, or billionaires.
But the Federation is surrounded by less developed societies. Like the feudal Klingons. Or the capitalist Ferengi. To show how backwards these systems really are.
And this isn’t about technology. The Roulans and Klingons have matter converters too. But the wealth of that productive technology is still stolen by a few, not shared among all as in the Federation.
The feature pilot for DS9 sets up the most sophisticated material critique Star Trek ever achieved, then spends the next seven seasons exploring the real power dynamics of Imperialism, the profound problems of decolonisation, and the toxic ongoing costs of settler colonialism.
It was all right there on your tv screen anytime you watched Star Trek.
But not any more.
Starfleet Academy in *its* first two episodes definitely has something to say to us.
One of those things is that nobody involved with writing the latest Star Trek spinoff has any idea how to write.
It’s not just bad. It’s incompetent. Even basic technical skills like turning a scene are AWOL.
People are going to defend Starfleet 90210 by saying it’s Trek for teenagers, which seems sadly insulting to teenagers.
Starfleet Academy is brought to us by the same writers, led by Alex Kurtzman, who have been failing at writing Star Trek for over a decade.
And who somehow fail even harder at writing Starfleet Academy.
Discovery was trite. Picard was just awful. Strange New Worlds has turned into tub-thumping propaganda.
And Starfleet Academy is the worst installment of Nu-Trek yet.
How is it that Kurtzman and team keep “failing upwards” while Star Trek falls lower and lower?
Well. Let me put the idea on the table that this is because Kurtzman et al are rewarded not for the Star Trek they make.
But for the Star Trek they do not make.
Because they do not make Star Trek woke.
What? Damo? How can you say that Nu-Trek is not woke?
ONE Star Trek has always been Woke and Nu-Trek is just Woker.
And TWO look at all these reactionary pillocks screaming about how WOKE Star Trek is!
Which is true enough.
My old pals the Angry Nerdbros are screaming about all the things they usually scream about.
The cast of Star Trek 90210 are TikTok Starfleet, Looksmaxxing Instagram influencers not space cadets.
This “Academy” is less like a military academy than a liberal arts college. Those very expensive liberal arts colleges that graduate people who will never have to live without a trust fund.
Holly Hunter, who deserved better than this dog’sdogs breakfast in her late career, delivers high concept speeches on “non-hierarchical” leadership and you realise the reason the Federation is collapsing is because Captain Picard has to spend an hour consulting the crew before he can order Red Alert.
And Academy training emphasises trustbuilding and emotional safety, the kind of things liberal arts graduates with trust funds working as management consultants care about, while basically everyone else is thinking
“If you want emotional safety maybe…maybe just don’t join Starfleet?”
Go and gentrify Bajor. Go and become a management consultant. Go and be a writer for Nu-Trek.
Gene Roddenberry was a blue collar guy, a WW2 pilot who survived an air crash-in the desert, and then an LA beat cop.
Roddenberry loved scifi and he hired scifi writers, and back in the 60s scifi wasn’t written by Ivy League college grads.
But now for most of the last two decades Trek has been written by graduates from elite universities who have re-made Trek in their own image.
And in the image of the ideology they believe.
An ideology that Star Trek has been forced to emote in ever more absurd terms.
An ideology we can call Corporate Wokeness.
This is the Fearless Girl.
A small bronze statue of a young girl that appeared on International Women’s Day in 2017, facing down the famous Charging Bull on Wall Street.
Yay! You go girl!
But all was not as it seemed.
The Fearless Girl was actually an advertisement for a “feminist” investment fund by State Street Global Advisors, stock ticker SHE.
An advertisment devised by an ad agency, McCann worldgroup, the biggest and evilest marketing conglomerate in the entire fucking world.
Meanwhile, the Charging Bull is an actual subversive work of art, created by Arturo Di Modica, at his own expense, and dumped in front of the New York stock exchange as a parody of the brute machismo that drives global capitalism.
Fearless Girl vs Charging Bull is the essence of corporate wokeness.
Because Corporate Wokeness is not Woke.
Corporate Wokeness is a marketing strategy.
It’s all the symbolism of radicalism and revolution, but sterilised and sold back to you as a product.
In a process called Recuperation.
And I have to say it like that because it was theorised by this French chap.
Guy Debord.
Look, I’m English, it’s an unwritten law of our land that we aren’t allowed to pronounce French names correctly.
Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle, philosopher and Marxist theorist.
Debord was one of the first, alongside Frankfurt school theorists like Theodor Adorno, to think about how capitalism had become increasingly sophisticated at manipulating culture.
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle describes how capitalism buys up culture, hollows out the meaning, and sells it back to you as empty “spectacle”.
And it even does this to the most radical and revolutionary culture, through the process of Recuperation, which Debord described as
“the rigged game of official culture” that “sterilizes subversive acts”.
Think about that. What is a culture written by elite college grads, and owned by corporate shareholders, what is that culture but the “official culture”. And what is Nu-Trek but a “sterilized product”.
Consider the Che Guevara tshirt. A peak symbol of revolution, sterilised and sold back to you as a “fashion statement”
At this point I am going to…sell you a tshirt. Here we have Recuperated the symbolism of the Soviet Union and re-imagined Mr Spock as Trotsky and Captain Picard as Lenin and combined them with the trendy slogan Full Automated Luxury Space Communism. And we are sliding under the Fair Use for Parody to sell you this opportunity to indicate your parasocial support for this channel by buying the tshirt in the merch store linked in the comments. Thank you.
Buy the tshirt here – https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com/products/propaganda-trek-2
Think about “Black Lives Matter”. Briefly a genuine rallying cry of protest, quickly turned into a marketing slogan.
Look at the Counter Culture of the 1960s which was about dropping out of things like the Vietnam War, but by the 1970s had been “sterilized” and sold back to the world as taking drugs and fucking anyone you liked.
Or early hip-hop like Public Enemy or NWA who spoke about the political conditions of black life in America, which by the 1990s had been sterilized and sold back to you by a corporation as gangster rap.
Now. Look at Star Trek.
“But Star Trek was always woke!”
Yes. Star Trek *was* woke.
Star Trek once had a material critique. Imperfect. Incomplete. Bias to pro-American values.
But an actual critique of real power. From the iconic multi-racial screen kiss of original Trek, and much more, to Trek’s peak postcolonial critique of Imperialism in Deep Space Nine.
Star Trek *was* woke.
But now through Debord’s process of Recuperation, Star Trek has been sterilised, commodified and sold back to us as corporate wokeness.
And if we make a material critique of Star Trek itself it’s easy to see how and why.
In the opening credits of the second Star Trek reboot “Kelvinverse” movie, the fucking abysmal In To Darkness.
You will see the credit for a then little known production company Skydance Media.
Skydance had come out of nowhere to co-fund the last two reboot movies, and would soon after also buy into the Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher franchises.
Yes, the basic reason you got miniscule Tom Cruise playing giant Jack Reacher was Skydance.
Founded by David Ellison, Skydance gained a reputation through the 2010s for having deep pockets and a high appetite for risk. As Hollywood has declined, Skydance has bought up much of the old movie industry.
Made possible by leveraging the vast wealth of David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, founder of ORACLE, the company known to its many critics as One Rich A*hole Called Larry Ellison.
In 2025 Skydance completed the purchase of Paramount and the Star Trek franchise, bringing Star Trek under the direct control of one of the world’s richest families.
To be clear, Star Trek has always been a corporate product, and I chart in great detail how Trek has functioned as propaganda in this video here.
But this latest purchase moves Star Trek from corporate ownership to what is essentially private ownership.
Skydance ownership of Paramount also gave it control of CBS News. As has been widely noted, CBS was overnight transformed into a watered down FOX News, spiking high profile stories the new owners disliked.
So now Star Trek, the show where Captain Picard once lectured a frozen 20th-century banker that ‘The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives’… is now owned by a man whose driving force is the acquisition of all the wealth in the cloud.
What are the chances, do we think, that the Dominion as a critique of settler colonialism are going to re-appear in the Skydance era of Star Trek?
Zero. I’ll tell you the chances are zero.
And looking at our world in 2026, if Nu-Trek really was “Woke”, that’s all it would be about.
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Star Trek for most of its history has given us one massive radical idea.
There are no billionaires in Star Trek. Nobody is extracting and hoarding the wealth of humankind.
Instead that wealth is shared so humanity can better ourselves. There are no billionaires in Star Trek. Instead there are scientists, and explorers, and artists.
That is a radical future. That is a Woke future.
And we need Star Trek to be a vision of that future so we can see past “capitalist realism” and imagine harder.
Imagine the Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism that Star Trek always promised.
But that’s not what we have.
In place of the genuinely radical material critique Trek once gave us, we now have the Recuperated ideology of corporate wokeness.
All of the symbolism, none of the substance.
Star Trek once told us that the scourges of racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism would be over when, and only when, the productive base of civilization was no longer dominated by the few – by kings, by capitalists, by billionaires.
Now Nu-Trek has everything to say about emotional safety and nothing to say about billionaires because a billionaire is paying the writers.
And as long as this is the case. As long as Star Trek is owned by the very billionaires Star Trek told us should not exist.
Star Trek will never be woke again.
Listen to the podcast audio here :
Damien Walter 