• aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    “Listen. Strange women, hanging from the ceiling, distributing skin, is no basis for a system of government.”

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      I kind of hope they retcon that at some point.

      In my head the justification for all of that is that the queen arose as a necessity to have a single individual for the crew of the Enterprise to interact with. This required her to have a certain amount of autonomy from the collective consciousness, the end result was that she turned into a bit of a dictator and because she had control over the collective she essentially took over without much fight. This would have been obvious to anyone else that this was a possibility, but the Borg had no experience of individuality in the collective before that, so the concern never occurred to them.

      Eventually she died and the collective were released from her, and now they are back to being a hive mind. A hive mind that has learned not to do that again.

      The reason seven of nine did not become like that was because the queen knew that that was a possibility, and so kept her largely connected so she could to a large extent control her.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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          Yes, but it works best with the original BORG concept, before they introduced the queen.
          The BORG was originally described as a collective, and a collective doesn’t have rulers like a queen.
          So I must admit I was a bit disappointed in the introduction of a BORG queen.
          Still the BORG remain a very cool part of Star Trek.

          • OpenStars@discuss.online
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            2 days ago

            Do we even know: does the Borg queen truly control the collective, or is she rather a manifestation of something still more deeply hidden?

            Perhaps at the core of the core, it really is a collective? I suppose this like (edit: level) of argumentation is useless, like that thought experiment of glass mountains on the moon, but still I wonder.

            • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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              It depends on who’s writing the episode. In First Contact she was implied to be an avatar of the Collective rather than an individual that controls it. Or possibly a gestalt consciousness formed as a byproduct of the Collective’s structure of interlinking minds. The VOY writers didn’t really get it, though, so she became a true individual on that show and in her future appearances.

              • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                2 days ago

                Blah blah it’s a special case done b/c of the time travel blah - maybe something along those lines? :-)

            • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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              2 days ago

              She is very much in control. In unimatrix zero double episode, she commands self destruct of whole cubes just because one drone was not under her complete control, that’s how much she is afraid of any independent thought.

              And how much control she has over the rest.

              • “Suicide, now!”
              • “Yes, mah queen”
              • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                2 days ago

                Right, so she is like a program running with sudo permissions on a Unix machine. She holds the hidden, backdoor keys to control the thoughts of the mere “drones” below her, even as each ship itself had a singular authority (iirc?) who could do similarly for those “below” them. But what I mean is, what above moving back “up” that chain - does she likewise have hidden backdoor keys to control her thoughts, which she would not necessarily (or even likely) be aware of herself?

                • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  That, and even if she has sudo perms so to speak, that doesn’t necessarily make it impossible for her to be a manifestation or byproduct of the borg collective consciousness.

                • KillingAndKindess@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  2 days ago

                  There is/was no cube hierarchy. You have the Borg queen and then everything else. Ship sizing wasn’t an indication of anything there than use case iirc.

                  Plus, a collective, as well as one ran by a leader, has no use case for a tiered authority structure. Unless compromised, Borg already always know the current plan. Thats why any ship could destroy every other ship.

              • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                2 days ago

                Oh… that’s very interesting. Is that from the lore? Was it on purpose? It doesn’t matter bc either way it’s fascinating to think about how the “corruption” of the original purpose lead to the masses being controlled by a central figure with absolute authority.

                Or another way to say that is that their society itself evolved and adapted to face their external circumstances, but anyway somehow it always ends up with an elite cadre of illuminati-like figures on top, and everyone else is just an entirely disposable peon.

                Which makes me wonder now about whether the ocean of changelings themselves has things like “rulers”.

    • Hugin@lemmy.world
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      To show that hack writers didn’t get what made the borg cool and scary. They turned then into normal boring bad guys.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPM
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      You may have noticed there is more than one Borg queen. They take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major decisions.

  • s_s@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    “Must be a king!”

    “Why do you say that?”

    “Well, he doesn’t have shit all over him.”

  • OpenStars@discuss.online
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    2 days ago

    The workers actually think they’re in charge… even while they are not allowed by the GroupThink to have a single thought that runs counter to the collective will.