Love & Capitalism: My Take on Star Trek Las Vegas
I recently attended Star Trek Las Vegas 2026, the largest convention dedicated to Star Trek. It was a series of whiplash-inducing switches between a world free of economic class and a very harsh reality.
To start off, the trip began with me boarding a plane, ready for an hour of boredom, maybe spending a little while reading my book (Single Player by Tara Tai). However, I boarded my flight to discover that my middle seat was directly next to none but my friend, coworker, and fellow former intern-converted-to-full-time-hire at my current Big Tech employer. Because alas, Star Trek Las Vegas is the exact same week as DEFCON, the largest cybersecurity convention, and I work in the cybersecurity department of a large cybersecurity company. So most of my coworkers were also on the way to Las Vegas. As a result of this coincidence, I spent an hour having a lovely time just talking with my coworker, and we shared a ride to our hotels, which were nearby to each other. Then we went our separate ways, and he didn't really have any time to see each other after that. Vegas was all I was left with. I watched DEFCON attendees flood the streets.
You would think that I, a full time employee reaching my one-year anniversary, would be offered the option to attend DEFCON (at a company where, historically, new hires are sent every year). Unfortunately, my department's new director is an ass-kisser with absolutely no meaningful investment in growing his subordinate's skills. He hasn't even had a one-on-one meeting with me in 3 months. Truthfully, I was glad they didn't encourage me to attend DEFCON nor send me there, because I'd much rather spend a week in the world of Star Trek.
Star Trek: A Crash Course in Communism
For the uninitiated, Star Trek takes place in what is essentially a communist utopian future where matter can be near-instantly replicated (including food, most tools, and consumed goods; essentially most objects) and money is essentially useless to most citizens because their needs are simply provided for. How presently scarce resources are distributed is less established; however the show tends to focus on need and equity overall, eliminating systemic barriers where they exist. Star Trek shows usually follow a militarily structured primarily exploratative and science-focused organization called Starfleet that serves as an operational branch of the government, the "United Federation of Planets", which is a democratic interstellar federation of free worlds that share resources.
Now, it certainly has its problems and limitations, and by no means represents a perfect society, but generally humans (at least, those serving in Starfleet) are established to be nonviolent, inclusive, considerate, and in general "evolved" past the need for war and hatred.
In sharp contrast, there is a fictional species called the Ferengi, who are largely explored in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine but were introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Their whole gimmick is that they're an incredibly capitalistic, profit-oriented, and bigoted patriarchal society. Their supreme leader, the Grand Nagus, is elected by nepotism, cronyism, or capitalist usurpation (being more greedy than the last and one-upping the present Grand Nagus). The Ferengi primarily are shown to engage in schemes to make more money through scams, exploitative labor practices, stealing, and deception. The most depicted Ferengi, Quark, is a bar owner who uses underpaid beautiful women to attract customers to his bar, which includes gambling games that are questionably rigged and "holo-decks" (highly advanced virtual reality simulation rooms). In one episode, he tries to sell a sex holodeck program featuring the space station's female commander by nonconsensually performing a holographic scan of her body. His bar is repeatedly depicted as unsuccessful relative to the schemes of other Ferengi, and he considers himself a failure because his cousin "owns a moon".
Las Vegas, or Ferenginar?
Las Vegas is the city of Ferengi values. Its prime directive is profit, and this is really no surprise - but the presence of a Star Trek convention in this city is quite funny. My experiences attending the convention just made the current economic crisis in the United States abundantly clear.
I spoke with many wonderful people on my trip; I encountered so much community and love among my fellow Trekkies that I could have never expected. The love for hope, the love for diversity, and the striving for a better future filled the air inside the convention center. What filled the air outside was heat - 115°F (or 46°C), to be specific. Ferenginar is described as a piping hot swamp, and while Vegas is not humid, it is so... so hot.
I try to save money where I can (although I admit the irony in attending any convention while saying that I like to save money), so I was not staying at the convention's hotel, which had exorbitantly high room prices. I was instead staying one bus stop away (approximately a 7 minute drive) at the Flamingo - situated on The Strip, while the conventions rests across a highway interchange just west of The Strip at the Rio. My first introduction to Vegas, really, was waiting for the bus. What I encountered were the hallmarks of an undervalued suburban transit system. Infrequent and inconsistent bus times (15-30 minute schedule discrepancies), bus shelters that are barely tolerable, and some unique stenches. There is something uniquely terrible about waiting for a bus while the sun beats down on you at 115°F while wearing a barely breathable Star Trek uniform, then to walk next to a hotel in which air conditioned air leaks out around you. I like taking the bus because it's more efficient, cheap, and gives people without cars more options (because ridership usually tells cities that they should value transit more). I did not like listening to the sound of the adjacent 7-lane road in the heat, sweating, without water or cool air. Nobody would, but if you don't have enough money for a car, this is what you get in Vegas.
More interesting than bus rides were the people I met while waiting for the bus. One trip, I was sitting down to wait for the bus when I was asked if I was transgender by a stranger a few feet away. I had just spent the evening being accosted by randoms on the strip who wanted me to have sex with them (or, at least, "go on one date") just because I was a "man who is also a woman", so needless to say, I was wary. What I learned is that this blessing of a human being was a stealth transgender woman, a self-described "hood girl" who went by "Big G" around her street bros and "GG" with her sisters. We discussed the hormones we were taking and their dosing methods and amounts.
Another night, I was taking the bus to the Rio to catch a nighttime party and met a guy who said he liked my uniform and hadn't seen Star Trek in quite some time. He was homeless and quite sweaty. He had spent the day busking out in the heat. We talked about Star Trek; he didn't know the convention was here, but he remembered the Star Trek Experience fondly (an "immersive experience" in Vegas that no longer exists). I felt a resounding solidarity with this random man I met on a bus because I knew we both believed in something better. That we were both striving in whatever way that we could. That we were both elements of a machine designed to exploit and harm us.
At 3AM after a long convention day, drunk and at the bus stop trying to get back to the strip to sleep, I met a man who had all but lost his voice. He had recently undergone chemotherapy. I have auditory processing issues, so I strained to understand his words, but we had a long conversation about everything - Star Trek, work, the places he'd lived, and the kids that he hadn't seen in years. The bus was 30 minutes late.
Landlords
At a bar in the convention's hotel, I was talking to some new friends when I met a landlord. I had a long discussion-slash-argument with him about how being a landlord is fundamentally quite a Ferengi thing to do. He believes that because he is nice to his residents, and his residents have abused his property before, that there is nothing wrong and he is owed the money from his tenants. To be fair, I don't think that being a landlord makes you morally reprehensible; I think it just leaves a dirty taste in my mouth when you act like it's an actual job that benefits society. My job is not an 'actual job' either.
I recently sent this message to my improv group's group chat when we were describing our jobs in their most direct fashion:
I help adult babies tell other adult babies the extent to which we are using computers in a trustworthy manner so they will pay us for computers that help them use other computers in a trustworthy manner because they are told how trustworthy our computers are with precise numbers which look good.
Fundamentally, I believe that an overwhelming majority of jobs in our society should somehow directly serve the following purposes:
- Housing
- Health
- Food
- Water
- Electricity
- Social/communal
My job enables those in such a tertiary and indirect manner that I feel it really has no impact, and the company I work for is such a consumer of these things that I honestly believe my job is a net negative to these services (shoutout Claude/Anthropic and Google Cloud Platform for being resource hungry tools that are used incredibly inefficiently by overpaid overworked engineers with misguided managers).
Most people's jobs, in fact, are not really connected to these categories. Most of my fellow Gen Z work in service and retail jobs because those are all that we can get. Many of us do not work. Making food that is sold so the franchise owner can profit while the workers who actually make food are paid minimum wage is not a "Food" service. It's just profiting. Fuck, McDonalds doesn't even make money from selling food. They make money by buying the land that franchises are placed on and selling it later. The franchise owner is probably just breaking a profit after paying corporate thousands in franchise fees.
Having an initial stake in something just automatically gives you the majority of its profits forever, and the power to decide what conditions your employees work in. Most people don't really have that much choice in their jobs, so saying "just leave" is not really a sustainable answer when not working can make you homeless.
Every friend I have made in San Jose has been stuck living with their parents, because the area is so unaffordable that only tech workers can even afford to live here. My friend, a 27-year-old who moved from Oklahoma to be closer to his stepsister was met with a miserable 5AM Walmart shift every 3 days with no car, a roommate he hates, and still not being able to make rent. He finally got a job as a bus driver and moved into his sister's garage and then due to an unfortunate incident, was fired. His sister also turned out to be verbally abusive and was not chill about him moving in. He moved back to Oklahoma. My other friend got hired at a college and is consistently overworked, and still doesn't make enough for a studio despite having a salary. Another friend of mine is an industrial designer with a degree who has found exactly zero work. He tried to make it on his own selling custom knives. Bust.
No one my age can make this place work unless they won the tech job lottery, like me.
Landlords, particularly in high-cost areas, do not serve "housing", they serve themselves with profit from land that they acquired and now "own". Property management is a job, but when the residents of a property have no say in its collective decisions, that is the "lord" part of "landlord". They have ultimate say and control over the housing, and the people living there are subject to their will as long as the lease agreement says it.
The thing about leases is that under the threat of homelessness you can get someone to sign just about anything that isn't outside the bounds of a typical lease agreement. So if most landlords say you can't do something and the price is low enough, you would be surprised what a tenant can agree to do. That doesn't mean they actually wanted that for themselves. Think about "pet-free" apartments and how many beautiful pets have to be given up to shelters because the landlord is concerned. Think about how much money has been paid to landlords for "early termination" because the tenant wanted a promise they wouldn't be evicted randomly but then realized the living situation was unsustainable. I owe $8,000 to my previous landlord because I wanted out of the lease early, and the only way they would let me out was by paying them $8,000 of unpaid future rent.
Why is my need to move and their future vacancy my financial responsibility? Because the contract says so. Morally and socially, though, what do I owe my landlord? Why is me moving so expensive? Because they won't make a profit from me living there?
They won't make a profit from me living on their property, so I have to pay them the profit they would have made. I have to pay it now, and if I don't, someone will call me every day and I won't be able to borrow money from other people because I'm "untrustworthy".
Because landlords are Ferengi subscribed to a scheme where owning land gives you the right to infinite profit from its attractiveness to tenants forever, where the market price somehow dictates how much human dignity costs - where homelessness is the threat under which you sign away a year of rent and whatever rights the landlord decides aren't yours anymore, since you live in his domain now.
Love in a hopeless place
While I could see the impacts of capitalism and economic inequality outside the convention, the inside showed me more of the same. The admission tickets to the convention range from $500 to $1,200, and the hotel, flight, and food make a total cost of around $1,400 for the most frugal and $3,000 for the less frugal. I met a content creator whose content I had a passing familiarity with. I figured they were doing well for themselves. They were funding the trip with thousands of dollars in credit card debt. I also realized that most attendees were over the age of 40, and my theory is not that Star Trek is for old people, but rather that older people are the only ones with the wealth to pay for such a trip and the ability to take a week off of work. I was a rare exception as a working 22-year-old. I only met two other people under 25. One was funded by their grandparent, and the other was attending with their mother.
That kind of wealth is not something available to the young. Even under 30, the convention was sorely lacking, because Millennials are broke too. I spoke with some Gen Xers about my age theory, and they also told me that they had many struggles with rent themselves.
Ultimately, what young person is crazy enough to spend $2,000 on going to a hellishly hot city to meet other Star Trek fans? Me. I am. I also work a tech job which pays a hefty salary. It eats at my soul and sickens me to my core, because I've realized that it is useless to the betterment of society and I am continually disrespected and dehumanized at work. Corporate culture is a scourge on my mental health. I go into work and feel like I am not allowed to be alive, that my life and my individuality and my joy are somehow sins. I can feel people looking at me sit autistically in my seat; I can feel the itchy shirt I'm wearing to fit in with my coworkers. I can feel the expectation that I silence the parts of myself that are screaming to be heard, because they aren't "professional". So yes, I'm taking a week off to live in Star Trek, and I will be ignoring my coworkers who are at DEFCON.
When I got back home, I felt more disgusted by my life than ever before. The convention had restored my faith and solidarity in humanity. When I returned, the idea of working with my flat and inconsiderate managers and seeing my blissfully content coworkers made me ill. I have this innate desire to fight for things to be better, for someone, literally anyone. My job gives me none of that, and my coworkers don't really care about this the way that I do. They would rather engage in office-political warfare and talk about "stakeholder alignment". I do not want to do that. I want to live and love and run and tell everyone how much I love them and get drunk together after work and fix problems for people and skip down the halls of the office and collect Mountain Dew together (a serious work pastime from my time in my hometown's school district IT department).
I want to love and be loved.
Nobody loves me in Tech.
I am a distraction, I am unusual, I am just another employee, and my inability to engage with things I disagree with makes me not useful for their machine where some guy decides something four management levels above me and I am supposed to just "do it" without knowing the reasons why.
At the convention, I was held by this beautiful stranger who I had spent the night dancing with. She looked into my eyes as she gently scratched the back of my neck with her nails covered in swirling orange. Her service dog rested at our feet. She wanted to kiss me, but I was too drunk to realize. We stared into each other's eyes. The morning after, she saw me and asked, "didn't we kiss last night?" I had spent that night dancing with new friends, sharing drinks, sharing love and conversation. The night with these newfound friends had been the freedom I was looking for. The night before, I had cried after becoming overstimulated at a crowded event with no friends to talk to and no one to flirt with (a wonderful distraction from overstimulating environments, when available). I had been driven back to my hotel in a shared Uber with a man who described women to me as if they were replaceable toys - his wife as having a "great ass despite her age" and told me that my luck with not meeting any potential romantic partners at the convention was going to turn around. I was glad to leave the car.
I was 'adopted' by a queer panel group at the convention, and my convention parent hugged me and provided a stability I desperately needed in an environment that was all new and overstimulating for my autistic brain. I spent an hour hiding in the family quiet room, and I came out and thanked them for their love. The night before, we had spent hours talking about our lives. They were at a bar with me. They told me that they had been clean from alcohol addiction for 5 years, and that the friends from the convention had been vital in the recovery process. That relying on this community had given them freedom and love.
I saw a queer couple get married on stage in Klingon uniforms, followed by a karaoke-dance-party. I cried and spent the night drunk, dancing, and singing along to some surprisingly fantastic karaoke performances while chatting (or, moreso shouting) with my dance partners.
I listened to a Cherokee Nation citizen tell us about indigenous representations in Star Trek and its various failures and successes. On hope for a better future. I spent the night reading as much as I could about the Cherokee Nation and Native American history and culture. I put her recommendations from the panel on my to-watch and to-read lists (I will be watching Reservation Dogs, and you should too). Later, I told her how much I valued her perspectives and thank you for the panel. I told her how I was interested in native perspectives on environmentalism and how animism can be a tool for assessing environmental impact. She was grateful that I had learned something from her panel, and told me to keep my eyes open on that topic (to the reader, I really like the work of anthropologist Dr. Hilary Agro. This video helped me at a dark time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe9tnKW_ho).
I thought of heritage, which I do not even know because it was taken from me by the lie that is Whiteness. My family tree that has been present in the United States for longer than it can remember. I do not know my heritage. Only White. What blood runs through my veins? What culture did my ancestors leave behind? What did their ancestors leave behind? Where do I belong? With the Europeans whose culture is completely based around rampant colonialism? Resource extraction and the idea of 'savagery' and 'barbarism' being scourge that must be 'civilized'? Of patriarchy? Of an America that spent two centuries dismantling, separating, and assimilating anyone already present on "their" land? Teaching us the idea that somehow the Earth can be owned?
Why is this my heritage? Why did my ancestors allow themselves to be adopted into this cultural hegemony? How can I undo it?
Several of my friends are spending time reconnecting to their heritage and, in doing so, finding community. My long-time friend from college got her Irish citizenship and is learning Gaelic. Another friend, who is an unemployed industrial designer, has grandparents who are Swedish immigrants. They forced their children to renounce their culture and forget their home. He is relearning his language, and saying goodbye to the Swedish summer camp community because his second parent has stopped working there.
I had hoped that the world would be a better place. It's not. So I scream sing in my car and go to improv and do karaoke and dance at clubs and run alone along the city street at night and lose my mind when people say the word "Chicago" around me because I have never loved a place more. I make it as good as I can for myself.
I wish I could fix it. I wish replicators were real and we could eliminate the concept of landlords and everyone could work in a co-op or union or federation. I wish that my friends had a say in their living conditions and that we could organize a society based around care. Instead, we are but slaves under Ferengi capitalists whose primary goal is infinite growth and infinite extraction.
The earth is finite. Their hunger is not. Eat the rich; love your friends and your community.
Back to Earth
Every day and night waiting for the bus, every time I had to eat the nearest yet most overpriced food, Vegas reminded me that I am powerless against the wishes of Ferengi and the "most convenient option", and the convenience always costs the world more than it gives me in time or joy. That every bite of beef emits 10x the CO2 of a plant-based meal, that beef is somehow the most available option to eat when you haven't gone to a grocery store, and why aren't public cafeterias a thing???? (No, a food court owned by a corporation is not a cafeteria... I want cheap communal healthy slop bowls prepared by workers who enjoy their life who I can get to know and have a say in their workplace, and I want them everywhere. Fuck restaurants and fuck cooking for yourself. Cooking is a communal activity and one I am not able to do multiple times a day or in bulk in my tiny ass studio kitchen.)
Every day in Vegas was filled with community and love and undiluted hope. In between, I was faced with fear, exhaustion, heat, patriarchy, and economic inequality.
As I left Vegas, the airport was a positively dreary place. I ran into my former coworker from my intern days. The week before, we had talked about my career plans. We had nothing to say to each other. He was the reason I enjoyed my internship. He left at the right time. I didn't. I also realized that corporations go against everything that I am. He can tolerate it because it gives him a nice house and money to donate to causes he cares about.
I think most charitable organizations are useless when they're not engaged in building worker solidarity and mutual aid. If they actually did that, we would have fixed a lot more problems than we have. I also think that the United States is fairly undemocratic due to the two-party system's prevalence and its continued electoral engineering at state and federal levels, and that any organization structured around electoral political advocacy is doomed to fail if it doesn't produce cultural 'work' by forming genuine connections (e.g. friendships) that involve discussion of important issues. That's why I talk so much about things I care about, which, right now, is the climate. If you know me, you know that I don't shut up about it. Please talk to me about it more.
I had a week full of love, nerdiness, and solidarity. I also had a week full of heat, profit, and debts owed to men with more than they could ever need, debt owed for the economic crime that is living.
Star Trek is not real. The world is uncomfortably so, and we only have one Earth and one life. I don't know about you, but I don't endeavor to spend it working to fill the pockets of others, melting, starving, and hating my neighbors. Spaceships and replicators are not realistically accessible and cannot save us from our own destruction. Star Trek itself has a Third World War, which kills most humans before the Federation even starts to exist. We are on a speedboat to climate collapse. With intention, we could skip the Third World War and go straight to the "evolved" humanity that doesn't hate, profiteer, colonize, and destroy. We must work towards economic liberation so that we can meaningfully drive society towards a more sustainable way of living (that is, not constantly driving gasoline cars, flying so many planes, deforesting, mismanaging water, over-farming monocultures, and misallocating resources towards profit over people). Without economic liberation, we will be continually trapped in these systems that take all of our time spent in the real world and place it into the workplace and survival. Where time is the only currency and convenient (and inefficient) ways of distributing resources become the only option for protecting our mental well-being because we have no time to cook for ourselves or help our neighbor repair their clothes. We are trapped in cycles of destruction done in the name of 'civilization' and 'growth'. These are lies that are convenient for the wealthy.
Form a worker cooperative, unionize your workplace, and repeal the goddamn Taft-Hartley Act so unions can actually engage in collective bargaining work that grows labor power. Decolonize your mind. If we can meaningfully replace sectors of the economy with worker-owned cooperatives then individuals can stop feeding the capitalist machine which rigs elections through lobbying, campaign donations, and by shifting what gets talked about on major news outlets and political debates towards inconsequential bullshit (because it makes more money).