• OpenStars@discuss.online
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    3 months ago

    Do we even know: does the Borg queen truly control the collective, or is she rather a manifestation of something still more deeply hidden?

    Perhaps at the core of the core, it really is a collective? I suppose this like (edit: level) of argumentation is useless, like that thought experiment of glass mountains on the moon, but still I wonder.

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It depends on who’s writing the episode. In First Contact she was implied to be an avatar of the Collective rather than an individual that controls it. Or possibly a gestalt consciousness formed as a byproduct of the Collective’s structure of interlinking minds. The VOY writers didn’t really get it, though, so she became a true individual on that show and in her future appearances.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        3 months ago

        Blah blah it’s a special case done b/c of the time travel blah - maybe something along those lines? :-)

    • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      She is very much in control. In unimatrix zero double episode, she commands self destruct of whole cubes just because one drone was not under her complete control, that’s how much she is afraid of any independent thought.

      And how much control she has over the rest.

      • “Suicide, now!”
      • “Yes, mah queen”
      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        3 months ago

        Right, so she is like a program running with sudo permissions on a Unix machine. She holds the hidden, backdoor keys to control the thoughts of the mere “drones” below her, even as each ship itself had a singular authority (iirc?) who could do similarly for those “below” them. But what I mean is, what above moving back “up” that chain - does she likewise have hidden backdoor keys to control her thoughts, which she would not necessarily (or even likely) be aware of herself?

        • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          That, and even if she has sudo perms so to speak, that doesn’t necessarily make it impossible for her to be a manifestation or byproduct of the borg collective consciousness.

          • OpenStars@discuss.online
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            3 months ago

            Exactly - this conspiracy theory could go all the way to the core, and beyond! Or not, but it’s fun to think about anyway:-).

        • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          There is/was no cube hierarchy. You have the Borg queen and then everything else. Ship sizing wasn’t an indication of anything there than use case iirc.

          Plus, a collective, as well as one ran by a leader, has no use case for a tiered authority structure. Unless compromised, Borg already always know the current plan. Thats why any ship could destroy every other ship.

          • OpenStars@discuss.online
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            3 months ago

            I dunno, that seems like a ginormous gaping security hole, if any ship containing mere drones could be compromised - even the tiniest ones with the least powerful engines (& thus shields, etc.) - and then it in turn could decide to blow up the queen… and/or literally all other ships. Any collective with such a feature baked-in sounds like it would not remain in existence for all that long, unless there were literally no other species nearby it that were even remotely close to their level of technological development.

            • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 months ago

              You’re forgetting 1. Only the Queen can blow upthe Queen/unimatrix. (Andduh she wouldn’t0 and 2. This applied to drones too essentially. They shut themeselves down when not function long correctly.

              Litterally its just “all for one”

    • tordenflesk@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Each drone is a brain-cell of the collective brain, the Queen is the personality that eventually formed.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        3 months ago

        Oh… that’s very interesting. Is that from the lore? Was it on purpose? It doesn’t matter bc either way it’s fascinating to think about how the “corruption” of the original purpose lead to the masses being controlled by a central figure with absolute authority.

        Or another way to say that is that their society itself evolved and adapted to face their external circumstances, but anyway somehow it always ends up with an elite cadre of illuminati-like figures on top, and everyone else is just an entirely disposable peon.

        Which makes me wonder now about whether the ocean of changelings themselves has things like “rulers”.