askchapo

They're an interesting villain from a sci-fi standpoint but I don't think they fundamentally represent anything, besides the classic concept of an emotionless enemy who can't be bargained or reasoned with and doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear.

They went through some revision during production - they were originally envisioned as a hive-minded insectoid race, but the budget wouldn't allow it. That's interesting, because a hive-minded race is simply existing in its natural state, whereas the Borg allow for the possibility that they began like any other species and had collective consciousness imposed upon them.

I think the threat represented by the Borg is ubiquitous enough that any viewer can impose their own political interpretation upon them.

Look, we want you to express yourself, mkay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay, but some people choose to wear more, and we encourage that, okay?
You do want to express yourself, don’t you?

I had a non-standard interpretation of the Borg I think. I interpret them as critical of scifi fans specifically. People who don't understand nor care about any of Star Trek's philosophical or social points. In the first two instances of the Borg, they don't assimilate people. They only care about technology to build the most efficient space stuff. They steal a big chunk of the Enterprise and their scout only cares about studying the Enterprise's engines and he completely ignores the crew.

They're a satire of the type of scifi fan who gets into the tiny details of scifi technology, like how the teleporters work or how cool the spaceship is. The original Borg don't care at all about culture, or social progress, or humanity. They have no humanity. They're machine people with no will of their own who just want to tinker around with toys. Star Trek's got stuff to say, maybe sometimes in a very hamfisted or cheesy way, but it has a genuinely optimistic view on humanity and how things could progress. The Borg are a dim view of some Star Trek fans, who only care about advanced technology in spite of anything else.

I think later writers didn't go after this, but it's such a good contrast. The technologically advanced but socially absent Borg versus the less technology advanced but very humane Enterprise. Later Star Trek uses the Borg just as like evil drones or a stand in for dictatorship or something, they became a vague set of negative character traits, or just the plot device of a faceless enemy that you can't reason with. Star Trek has had a lot of writers and they don't all share ideology. Probably a few of the more lib types see the Borg as a metaphor for socialism (it's not a good one though)

When I was young and would listen to the Picard song on loop i thought "you are locutus of borg" was actually "you are the cutest of Borg". Therefore the Borg are cute

I really dig how their ships look like city-sized goth industrial nightclubs on the insides. But yeah, they do seem like a red scare capitalist projection. The Borg, when written well, are freakishly resilient in the same creepy way as capitalism, absorbing and assimilating whatever resistance they encounter, making everyone into a part of the machine. Later adding the Queen and introducing more and more wacky contradictions to the ways the Borg worked, just made them seem to have moved into later-stage capitalism.

A fitting mirror image for the Federation, which achieved communism without ever leaving the comfort zone of the liberal writers.

interesting and nuanced in TNG, absolutely fucking stupid with the addition of the borg queen

A revisionist. Marx doesn't specify what color the linen is, so the orthodox position is "natural" not grey.

I think they were primarily concieved of as an antagonist to the Federation. Here you have a civilization with hyper advanced technology, that does all of its best work when dealing with others through diplomacy, facing off against an enemy with even better technology that cannot be reasoned with.

They're the good guys