It's Okay to Be a Trekkie Again. And That Matters More Than You Think.
- Rich Washburn
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Star Trek premiered in 1966. Sixty years ago. It has outlasted empires, survived cancellations, spawned films and series and books and games and entire academic disciplines. NASA has documented its influence on scientists, engineers, and astronauts across five decades. The show didn't just entertain people — it recruited them. It told a generation of kids that the future was worth building, that intelligence was heroic, that humanity's destiny was to leave the cradle and go find out what's out there.
Every IT guy has a moment. Every engineer has an episode. Every founder who ever stared at a problem and refused to accept the no-win scenario has a little Kirk in them, whether they admit it or not. The communicator became the cell phone. The tricorder became the smartphone sensor array. The universal translator became GPT-4. The replicator is a 3D printer. The warp drive is the thing physicists argue about at conferences when they think no one serious is listening.
Star Trek wasn't just predicting technology. It was setting the cultural coordinates for what humanity was supposed to be reaching toward. Then Alex Kurtzman happened.
The Mythology Gets Broken
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the specifics because they speak for themselves. Gay Klingons. Starfleet Academy as a progressive lecture series. A protagonist defined entirely by trauma and identity rather than competence and curiosity. A universe stripped of optimism and replaced with the aesthetic vocabulary of prestige television: dark, gritty, emotionally heavy, politically legible.
Here's the thing about that approach: it's not Star Trek. It's not even close to Star Trek. And the audience knew it. Ratings collapsed. Show after show was cancelled. Starfleet Academy was axed before its second season even aired — an 85% rejection rate from the people it was supposed to serve. The fanbase didn't just drift away. They were embarrassed. You couldn't tell someone you watched Star Trek without a qualifier. "Oh, I mean, the old stuff. Not the new garbage."
That's not a small thing. That's a mythology being broken. And here's why that matters beyond the television industry: Star Trek has always been the shared cultural framework for the people who actually build the future. The engineers. The coders. The infrastructure architects. The people who think about energy grids and compute density and what happens when you cross the first Kardashev threshold. Those people grew up on Picard and Spock and Data. They didn't grow up on whatever Kurtzman was making.
When you break the mythology, you break the signal. You take the thing that said "this is what we're building toward" and you replace it with a thing that says "here are our grievances, rendered in space." And a generation of builders quietly stopped watching. The Correction Arrives. Not From Ideology. From the Spreadsheet.
David Ellison bought Paramount and did what any serious operator does when they inherit a broken asset: he looked at the numbers, ignored the narratives, and made decisions. Starfleet Academy cancelled within months. Kurtzman's contract allowed to expire. Simon Kinberg — the man who produced Deadpool, Logan, and The Martian — brought in to architect a new franchise from scratch. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly hired to direct — the same team that just rescued Dungeons & Dragons from a decade of mismanagement and made it into something audiences loved again.
The mandate, according to multiple Hollywood sources: zero connection to anything Kurtzman touched. Not a soft reboot. Not a legacy sequel. A hard reset. Year zero. The Romulan Supernova never happened. Discovery's jump to the 32nd century never happened. The entire decade — erased.
And here's what matters most: this wasn't ideology defeating ideology. The woke era of Star Trek didn't lose an argument. It lost an audience. And when you lose the audience, you lose the business. And when you lose the business, the new boss walks in and makes the call.
Woke didn't get argued out of the room. It got spreadsheet'd out of the room. That's how cultural corrections actually work in market economies. Nobody wins the debate. The market enforces the truth that the audience was communicating all along. Star Trek is the bellwether. What's happening here is happening everywhere.
The Civilization-Scale Stakes
The conversations worth having right now — the ones that actually matter for the trajectory of civilization — are not small conversations.
We are closing in on the first Kardashev threshold. A Type I civilization is one that can harness and direct all the energy available on its home planet. We are not there yet. But the infrastructure being built right now — the data centers, the power grids, the compute density required to run AI systems that are remaking every industry — is the physical architecture of that transition. Data centers in orbit. Fusion power as a realistic timeline item. Global compute networks that dwarf anything we've built before. These are real conversations. These are the conversations that the engineers and architects and infrastructure people who grew up on Star Trek are supposed to be having.
Star Trek, at its best, was the mythology that held those conversations together. It gave builders a shared language for thinking about the future — not as utopian fantasy, but as a serious project that serious people were working on. The Federation wasn't a wish. It was a design goal.
Kurtzman took that mythology and turned it inward. Instead of pointing at the stars, it pointed at the mirror. Instead of asking what humanity could build, it asked what humanity should feel guilty about. Instead of expansion, contraction. Instead of optimism, grievance. And the people who build things — the ones designing compute infrastructure for AGI, engineering power systems for a civilization that doesn't exist yet, putting data centers in orbit — those people quietly turned it off.
The Reset Is Cultural Permission
What Ellison and Kinberg and Goldstein and Daly are doing isn't just fixing a TV franchise. They're restoring a cultural permission structure.
They're saying: it's okay to believe in the future again. It's okay to be optimistic about where humanity is going. It's okay to think that intelligence and competence and curiosity are heroic. It's okay to tell stories where the point is the adventure, not the lesson.
It's okay to be a Trekkie again.
The people who've been embarrassed to say they watched Star Trek for the last nine years — those are the engineers, the founders, the technologists, the infrastructure architects. The exact people whose imaginations need to be pointed at the right horizon. Because we are literally building the Star Trek future right now. Data centers with the compute density to run artificial general intelligence. Power grids being redesigned from the ground up for civilization-scale energy demand. Space infrastructure that would have seemed like science fiction when the original series aired in 1966.
The mythology matters. Stories tell people what to reach for. And for sixty years, Star Trek told the builders of the world that the stars were the destination. The woke era didn't just make bad television. It pointed the mythology in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong moment — right when humanity needed the signal most. It's good to have it back.
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