On Gatekeepers and Nostalgia

I see the Back In MY Day crowd is at it again.

In one of David Gerrold’s books* about the original Star Trek, he points out the show was billed as humanity’s future in space, but in fact that wasn’t what it was. Trek was 1960s USA culture in space. It was political. It pushed envelopes. It was unapologetically liberal most of the time, and often had beautiful, egalitarian visions of the future.

It was also sexist, racist, patriarchal, paternalistic, and sometimes weirdly authoritarian. Whi...