A Wrinkle in Time
5/2/2026
(Dax on the left, tech bro on the right)
I have been wanting to write about Star Trek, but other than “I love this show,” I didn’t know how to bring it up until the episode "Past Tense, Part I " in season 3. This episode follows our motley crew as Commander Sisko, Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax, and Dr. Bashir get stranded in a near-future dystopian 2024 San Francisco… I love that the future, imagined by the writers, takes place in my past.
What I found unexpectedly hilarious, though, was a cocktail party scene where Dax and a few wealthy SF characters (my head canon is that they are the SF tech bro crowd) casually debate whether the Neo-Trotskyists or the Gaullists are going to sort out the student protests in France, as if by 2024 political discourse had somehow retained 20th-century ideological factions that most people today barely remember. There's something deeply funny about the writers trying to imagine plausible-sounding future politics and landing on warmed-over Cold War labels, and even funnier that the year they picked as their near-future dystopia has now come and gone with zero Gaullist discourse to speak of.
In this episode, it is vitally important that the crew not alter the past to maintain their timeline. This idea of being mindful of the “now” in order to reach a goal in the future is a thing I have been thinking about a lot recently, and runs in parallel to my enjoyment of “things from the past”. There is a YouTube channel called NASS that takes old film footage from the big cities in the 1900s and remasters it. Seeing the same places I grew up in, separated by only one human lifespan, is fascinating! Seeing how much things have changed and aged (and grown old in so many different ways) in such a relatively short time!
I like to imagine that the reason Today looks so different from 80-50 years ago is because of intentional decisions people, as a whole, have made since that time. From time to time, I like trying to reason, is the future they were imagining? How much of the blockchain, viral $20 Hailey Bieber smoothies, cars going from these huge heavy sculptural statements to smooth wet putty blobs*, or being able to clone living things was imagined ahead of time… and what just happened?
Maybe it’s my bias living in the current times, but San Francisco seems so much more charming and whimsical in the 1940s compared to 2026§. Even if the glut of SF tech bros and Kafka-esque governance wasn’t originally imagined, I have to think active steps were taken to end up how things are?... kinda like how you’d need to actively preserve the future if you are transported back in time to 2024 downtown San Francisco.
§ for all its warts, I can’t but adore that city
*shoutout to blobjects