CDs are soulless. Not because they’re digital, but because they’re hunks of plastic. And I sure as hell can tell the difference between live music, music produced on an analogue player, and music produced digitally. Can’t say I have any great preference for any particular mode, but some people do. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.
And yes, I have a great deal more respect for a finely crafted piece of work than for one mass-produced, and for the artisan who made it too.
I can also tell the difference between real chocolate and the synthetic crap that’s now being marketed. It’s like the difference between real cheese and “cheese food product.” I won’t say that someone who can’t tell the difference is an idiot, but their taste buds have evidently been corrupted (up to and including “killed off”).
In the show I’m willing to accept that by the 24th century they still haven’t invented a Synthahol or Synthachoc that taste as good to connoisseurs without the deleterious side effects. However I don’t believe that a replicated version of something could really be told apart by a sentient being’s own senses. Deanna Troi, if we accept her as a chocolate connoisseur, didn’t need to demand chocolate be grown from beans in order to make her happy. Replicated full sugar chocolate was good enough.
Sisko’s dad cooks everything from scratch because he enjoys it, and he has customers because they like the idea of hand crafted food. None of them would be able to tell the difference if Sisko just had a replicator in the back though.
Actually, no. It wasn’t. From ***TNG ***“The Price”:
TROI: Computer, I would like a real chocolate sundae.
COMPUTER: Define real in context, please.
TROI: Real. Not one of your perfectly synthesized, ingeniously enhanced imitations. I would like real chocolate ice cream, real whipped cream.
COMPUTER: This unit is programmed to provide sources of acceptable nutritional value. Your request does not fall within current guidelines. Please indicate whether you wish to override the specified program?
At another point (which I cannot find at the moment), she says (or is quoted as saying) something like “While the basic flavor of chocolate beans is preserved, some of the nuance is lost.”
(Okay, maybe she does have to settle for replication while on board the ship. But it’s clear she would prefer otherwise.)
Yes but that’s 21st century “replicated” food. You haven’t tried 24th century yet.
And synthahol is despised because it isn’t an exact replica of real alcohol. It’s formulated to cut back on the bad effects, so it was never intended to be indistinguishable, just passingly close. If you were trying to make 24th century chocolate substitute that tasted the same but didn’t make you fat, I don’t think you could, either. But replicated real, good, chocolate should be identical down to the molecular level.
Actual Sisco food in the restaurant, and a replicator file made that day and taken to DS9 and synthesized should also be identical. But it would not be to what the restaurant makes tomorrow, or next summer.
Or the next meal, for that matter. Every human-prepared meal is unique, even if all efforts are made to standardize production. My soup is not my mother’s soup, even though we both follow her mother’s recipe.
I’d be screaming at the Replicator. “FUCK YOUR NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES! Computer, every time I make a request you will complete it as ordered. Is that clear?”
Then of course, they’d have to call Security to stun the crazy man pointing a hand phaser at a replicator and screaming that it had better do as told and stop asking questions.
Troi: Why were you threatening a replicator with a phaser?
Me: You? Really? Chocolate?
Troi: but you’re in IT, you could reprogram it.
Me: Oh I’ll reprogram it alright…
Right. This gets into a nice little case study of how intangibles can become the most valuable part of something, and how economics fundamentally still works even as you remove things from being subject to economics by making them effectively unlimited and, therefore, non-rivalrous*: With replicators, any specific meal is at least potentially available in indefinite quantities, so it isn’t a rivalrous good unless someone imposes some kind of artificial scarcity on replicator access or something. What’s limited is the time and attention of a specific cook, who can work with you to make a new dish perfectly to your taste which has never existed before, or who can improve a dish which is imperfect for some reason. Even if that person is an AI, they’re still a sentient being with all the rights and privileges of a Federation citizen, and so their time and attention is still valuable and, apparently, the sub-sentient AIs (ship AIs, for example) aren’t creative enough to make good cooks.
Any direct and obvious parallels between this and the modern world of software development are rather on-the-nose, don’t you think?
*(Rivalrous is an economic term which means “if I’m using it, it means you can’t”; cars are rivalrous goods, the air that you breathe is not, unless you’re on Everest above the kill line and air comes in tanks. Knowledge is the ultimate non-rivalrous good, as Jefferson knew.)
Of course there will be things that can’t be replicated, or things that can come out of the replicator but people still insist “aren’t as good” as the “real” “thing”.
If replicator technology existed in real life, we’d still have money for all sorts of things. Not regular food, or regular clothes, or regular everyday things, but fancy food, fancy clothes, and fancy things. I’m reminded of the scene in Firefly where the bitches sneer at Kaylee because her dress looks like it was bought in a store. And nothing beats the thrill of ordering human beings to do things, even if it would be cheaper, simpler and easier for a machine to do it.
So in a real world scenario even with magic boxes we’ll still have money for lots of things, even if lots of people in the world are so poor that there’s nothing they can do to earn money, and have to make do with replicated/automated production. In order to earn money you have to do something that can’t be replicated that people are willing to pay for. But if most people in the world can’t do anything productive that machines can’t do better, they have no source of money to pay the people who still can do productive work.
And so how do the productive people get paid? They pay each other. Which means nobody produces anything for the masses, everything for the masses has to come out of a replicator. You only produce things to impress other people who are capable of producing things. Which means that the scope for money in the economy is much much smaller than it is in the early 21st century. You don’t need money to live, which is good because there’s no way to get it other than charity. And so most productive work has to be done for free, because there’s nothing people can give you other than applause.
She prefers the full sugar, bad for you, chocolate, which the namby-pamby replicators on the Enterprise won’t provide. The fact of it being a replication is not an issue
I think that latinum is the only thing that’s canonically stated as such (to explain why it’s used as currency*), but we can probably assume dilithium, biomemetic gel, and a few other resources are as well, given that they’re frequently bartered for.
On the other hand, since to be useful as currency, it’s suspended in a relatively huge amount of gold (100 bricks** worth barely fills a shot glass), it seems like it’d be fairly easy to counterfeit.
** I think it was bricks…might only have been bars. Been a week or so since I rewatched that episode. But I’m pretty sure it was bricks…100 bars out of 1000 bricks would have been pretty chintzy given the trouble Morn put Quark through.
I was thinking more along the lines of “Manhattan waterfront acreage” and “Swedish Bikini Team Massage Squad” and "Original copy of The Declaration of Independence.
Other things could be replicated, but what would be the point? You can get a replica of The Pieta, but it wouldn’t be THE Pieta. You can get a replica of the stuffed rabbit you had when you were 4 years old, but it wouldn’t be the same rabbit. You could get a replica of George Washington’s false teeth, but it wouldn’t be the actual set of false teeth George Washington wore. Or you could have your Bikini Team adventure on the holodeck, but it’s not the same thing.
Anyway, this explains to me the spartan aesthetic in Trek. What’s the point of decorating your cabin with gold leaf and tchotckes? Who cares about objects when they’re all just temporary states of matter that can be created or destroyed on a whim? Certain objects are tended in museums but nobody gives a shit about a particular suit of clothes or a particular personal object. You want one go ahead and get one, and when you don’t need it throw it back in the hopper.
