• Zorque
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      3910 months ago

      Theres a good chance most of us wouldn’t be considered worthwhile drones, to be honest.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
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      10 months ago

      The only downside, really, is the retconned-in CEO with all that individuality at the top of the otherwise equal system. When she started blowing up cubes just to flex on her enemies, that was a real porky-happy moment.

    • @[email protected]
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      1710 months ago
      • physical disability: that might just get you euthanized.
      • limited resources: again, I see euthanasia as a possible Borg solution.
      • loneliness: ever heard of being lonely in a crowd?
      • mental health: again, a malfunctioning drone would likely just get euthanized.

      Some of these points assume the Borg we saw outside of Voyager, because Voyager really neutered the Borg in so many ways.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
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      1310 months ago

      Loneliness? Literally impossible

      This is my sticking point. There’s nothing better than the feeling of being alone in the house, at least for a little while.

      Now if it came with a fully customizable virtual world where I could be alone if I wanted to, then I’d be down.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          Well if I’m going to have to worry about the borg queen trying to crush Unimatrix Zero, forgettaboudit.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      Alternatively: You have no distinctiveness that will augment our own, so we’re going to liquefy you and feed you to the childborgs.

    • @[email protected]
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      210 months ago

      If I was accepted as a drone, it’d be fine by me. I’m so tired of worrying about everyday existence in the devolving hellscape of a world we now occupy.

      But, if you have a physical disability, they don’t bother assimilating you I thought?

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months 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!

  • @[email protected]
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    2610 months 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]
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      10 months 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

      • @[email protected]
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        610 months 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
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        310 months ago

        laughs in socialist furry

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

  • @[email protected]
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    2210 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      710 months 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]
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    10 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months 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]
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        610 months 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          510 months 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]
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            10 months 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.

            • @[email protected]
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              10 months ago

              Yeah, they all speak of “oneness”, but again, no one is falling over themselves to get reassimilated.

              Even Hugh accepted death over it.

              And that’s taking into account that the nanites literally rewrite their brain to make them feel that way.

  • Queen HawlSera
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    1410 months ago

    I mean… a transhumanist collective sounds like a better deal than Capitalism

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months 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!

  • Rom [he/him]
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    1210 months ago

    If it means not having to deal with capitalism anymore I’d get in line too tbh.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
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      1210 months 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months 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).

  • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    10 months ago

    I mean… What’s wrong with assimilation other than it being forced on people?

    Edit: Seriously. I’d love to see real opinions on the idea of borg assimilation, assuming that it’s not forced. Obviously forcing it is evil, but what about the inherent nature of the process, what it does, and what happens to your mind?

    • @[email protected]
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      510 months ago

      Assimilated drones immediately lose all autonomy, and can never regain it without outside influence (which they will likely be compelled to resist). It’s functionally suicide, except that your body and mind continue to be used for whatever purpose by an entity you have effectively no control over.

      I understand joking about the benefits relative to the frequently unpleasant world we live in now, but I have serious concerns about anyone who would rather be a Borg drone than an ordinary 24th century Federation citizen.

      • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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        10 months ago

        I mostly question what the collective is like from the inside. The descriptions we get in the show tend to just say it’s a constant cocophony of voices. To me, that implies the individual minds still exist within it, they just all share a collective voice. But at the same time, they have the queen and they kind of imply the queen directs the hive mind or at least is a manager of some kind. I’m a bit of a singularist, so some aspects of the Borg are just fascinating to me. I am fine with giving up physical autonomy to exist as just a mind in a collection of other minds; but I would still want my voice to matter and help shape the collective.

        Perhaps not with the Borg, but I just don’t have fears toward the merging into a collective part. The body horror is scary and really just because it looks painful as hell to be assimilated.

        Or perhaps I’m just envious of Picard and Seven who got to experience something most don’t. Even if it was a bad experience… I really gravitate toward experiences that are aren’t real or impossible for me to have. I know I am of the time Picard lived an entire lifetime in his mind because of an alien probe. That would be dope.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          The voice of an individual in the collective is roughly equivalent to a vote in a democracy: it’s real and it’s there, but there are so many other votes/minds involved that the chances of yours having any influence at are are negligible.

          I value democracy and community, but I’m not willing to put every single action I take,however small, up to a public vote.

    • muddi [he/him]
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      10 months 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

      • DroneRights [it/its]
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        510 months ago

        Also society relentlessly bullies neurodivergent people with whom they have difficulty empathizing. Neurotypicals already have a weak hivemind and they attack anyone who can’t or won’t join it. Neurotypicals are the borg, except not communist. They’re the Borg but worse.

    • Data's Cat SpotOP
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      710 months ago

      This comment made me realize that Odo’s people aren’t so different from the Borg.