Shaka, When the Walls Fell - Traction Software
Summary
In Shaka When The Walls Fell (The Atlantic, June 18, 2014) Ian Bogost poses a challenge based on Darmok, a 1991 Star Trek New Generation episode. "... after hailing the alien ship upon arrival, contact with Children of Tama proves more difficult than Picard imagined: DATHON, the Tamarian captain: Rai and Jiri at Lungha. But Picard quickly sums up the problem, “Yes, but what does it all mean?” Picard calls the Tamarians communication model metaphor, Troy calls it image, but according to Bogosts analysis theyre both wrong: "If we pretend that “Shaka, when the walls fell” is a signifier, then its signified is not the fictional mythological character Shaka, nor the myth that contains whatever calamity caused the walls to fall, but the logic by which the situation itself came about. This seems like a tall order, but consider that most of us now live in a civilization that assumes that no factual question need go unanswered for more than a few minutes, after poking or talking at pocket sized supercomputer screens meshed with an associatively addressable, world spanning corpus thats glued together by annoying commercials, a few giant companies, and unicorn dreams of VCs. "In one fascinating episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation traced the limits of human communication as we know it—and suggested a new, truer way of talking about the universe."