this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Someone pointed out how there's no phones in Star Trek and it's probably deliberate. I get it.
Data: Captain Picard, we are being hailed!
Picard: don't put video on
Data: but they want to video chat sir
Picard: text them "what's up"
There is an episode where a new game is brought on board. It's really enjoyable, and once people start playing, they don't want to stop. Soon, the whole crew is addicted. It turns out the creators of the game are using it for mind control.
Seems like the perfect metaphor for modern cellphone/app usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
I seen it yeah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin
I dont think that in the 60s-90s anyone would have necessarily anticipated the existence of smartphones as they are now. Rather than it being a “deliberate” choice not to have them in the show. Its just not a futuristic idea of communication that existed at the time. Theres not smartphones in The Jetsons either. Earlier ideas of what the future would be like were a lot more utopian than the dystopian hellscape induced by smartphones and social media. Their various ideas of the future were a modification of the way people actually lived then, which was simultaneously less connected but also more interpersonally social
There's a lot of newer Trek shows that seem to have stayed away from smartphones too, though.
There's not a whole lot of entertainment value in having a bunch of people sitting in silence texting other people off screen with the occasional loud video being played to nobody. Even if they are in space.
Yeah, well it sucks in real life too
Ditto for AI. Oh, sure, they played with AI, but always in an embodied holodeck character or an android, never as a disembodied computer program. Imagine a show where every major decision point on the bridge was "do what the computer says."
Well yeah, but they are based on the universe that was invented earlier. It would be pretty jarring for them to have made a change like that
Look, this is a boring conversation right? I feel mildly gaslit, can we talk about anything else?
they also didn't understand how tribal and primitive most of us are deep down.
social media plays on those instincts.
They have communicators and iPads.
Yeah I was talking about your garden variety "tiny pocket screen" type of deal