r/CharacterRant • u/Animus_Infernus • 4d ago
Films & TV (Star Trek) Authorial Intent, Genetic modifications and the polite atrocity: Why the Federation is a dystopia.
TW: Genocide
Star trek is a franchise about the future.
Specifically, a post-scarcity future revolving around Starfleet and the Federation.
The basic premise is that humans have founded a unified coalition of planets and nations, spreading human values of peace, prosperity and acceptance across the galaxy. This is the Federation
Obviously, there are cultures that aren't as progressive as humanity. Cultures who seek to erode federation values, this necessitates Starfleet, an earth-based and human-controlled military faction within the Federation.
For my first point, Authorial Intent is important here.
Star trek has gone through a lot of authors, but the eternal intent is that the federation is good. Sometime's it's space-NATO, sometimes it's space-UN, sometimes it's space-USA. But it's always been what those groups should aspire to be. A beacon of hope. (at least that's the intent)
We see it with Picard (both the show and the captain) being hyper-patriotic for the missions of peace and science. with Star Trek: Enterprise demonstrating how separate cultures came together to found the federation. with Star Trek: The Original Series being about human homesteading and a peaceful end to the space cold war.
And then the cracks begin to show, starting with the Augment Ban.
In Star Trek's human history, augmented humans led a series of bloody wars and atrocities. The natural human instinct was to ban all genetic modification. This carried on to the federation, any culture that wants to join the federation has to ban genetic modification.
Multiple species have canonically performed mass genetic augmentation without becoming tyrants, but they aren't permitted into the "beacon of hope." Because Starfleet is still mad about something humans did to each other. Curing a health condition using alien tech is considered sciencecrime, but only if that alien tech is genetic modification. This isn't even from the cynical shows, this is established in Strange New Worlds. and Enterprise which are both full of "starfleet awesome, federation awesome."
And then Star Trek: Picard comes around, and drives another nail into the coffin of "The Federation is free"
Star Trek: Picard starts with a terrorist attack being perpetrated by robots. Therefore a decision is made to ban robots. Creation of robots is forbidden, any research that involves them is forbidden (including, canonically, life-saving cybernetics) and any existing robot has to be executed.
These aren't even "robot arm and computer" robots. The ban specifically requests the "disassembly" of Asimov-style thinking machines, across the whole of the federation.
The ban is repealed fourteen years later, after which an unknown number of sapient beings have been taken apart for the sake of a human law. An entire type of person is declared illegal, even though the attack had nothing to do with the perpetrators being robotic.
That's two different data points of the federation declaring people's existence a crime. Which is textbook fascism. Star trek portrays the robot ban as a mistake, true, but you can't just say "whoopsy, we mandated genocide. Our bad."
It gets worse. Because of a concept that modern Star Trek loves:
Section 31.
Section 31 is Starfleet's martial law. A group of people who can declare "interstellar emergency." and get a pardon for anything, up to and including attempting to destroy planets. People operating under section 31 have no oversite, even from Starfleet Intelligence (starfleet's spy agency). While at the same time recieving cutting-edge tech beyond what Starfleet gives its flagship vessels.
Starfleet has managed to "solve" multiple political problems by taking a rabid group of spies and ordering them to commit atrocities. They're willing to cover up those spy's actions and very existence, even after section 31 attempts a coup on earth's government.
So the Federation is willing to ban life-saving medicine, criminalize people's existence, and fund a fascist secret police that even they can't control. All for the sake of a sick HFY attitude, that the spread of human values are worth debasing everything that humanity is supposed to mean.
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u/SpartanSpock 4d ago
Picard and Section 31 are both dumb and I refuse to recognize their canonicity.
The Kelvin timeline movies represented Starfleet better; and the entire point of those films was that that version of Starfleet was more militarized.
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u/Outrageous_Idea_6475 4d ago
Yeah I honestly feel its a difference in vision of the writers. The newer shows tend to have that sort of "dystopia is realistic" sort of view
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u/Mazinderan 3d ago
Discovery and Picard still push the awesomeness of Starfleet values, just not from a place of “We’ve already achieved utopia and will never backslide.” Like Patrick Stewart and the writers in the real world, where optimism about our prospects has been damaged by the rise of all kinds of -isms we thought were relegated to the fringes, the older Picard had to face up to the fact that his culture had betrayed its values and kicked him to the curb for calling them out. The show is still optimistic — Bruce Maddox, of all people, has the posthumous offspring he built from Data’s neurons programmed to seek out Jean-Luc Picard if they are in trouble, and Picard and his merry band of misfits resolve several crises by sticking to Starfleet values even when Starfleet itself doesn’t always.
Likewise, Discovery focuses on Starfleet’s most infamous mutineer, but she certainly makes up for her offense and even helps reestablish the Federation in the far future. The show might not be to everyone’s tastes, but it never speaks against Starfleet values even to the extent that the highly-praised DS9 sometimes considered a Picard-style attitude to be naive.
I don’t think the new shows are aiming to be dystopian, just moving away from TNG’s smugness (a lot of it mandated by Gene’s weird rules for how 24th century humanity was supposed to act that thankfully the other writers didn’t care for) and back in the TOS direction of “We’re killers, but we can say ‘I will not kill today.’” You have to work every day to keep a good system good, rather than deciding you’ve won and everything is great forever.
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago
Discovery never speaks against Starfleet values, but it says "we should pardon mass-murderer cannibal dictators b/c they look like a famous person's adoptive mother. And then we should hire them to the secret police who not even our president knows exist, after they tried to blow up a planet."
What does that tell you about Starfleet values?
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u/Mazinderan 3d ago
I’ll grant you the treatment of Emperor Megahitler was weird as hell. Michael specifically treating her as if she’d gotten Philippa back is understandable if not laudable, but the sentimental farewell dinner from everyone was just strange and undeserved.
That was an element of Disco I definitely didn’t care for. I suppose I don’t mentally count that against Starfleet as a whole because it’s just so damned bizarre.
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago edited 3d ago
My issue is that Emperor Megahilter was specifically recruited to section 31.
Which leads back to the "we have a rabid band of spies, unconnected even from starfleet intelligence, who are specifically permitted by our laws."
"Article 14, Section 31 of Starfleet charter."
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u/Swiftcheddar 4d ago
I think this is more an issue with Modern Trek rather than what Trek was meant to be.
The augment ban is at least interesting and debatable, but the way Section 31 and the robot ban are handled feel like they'd be completely against the ethos of the older series.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
oh 100%
Why I snarked that section 31 is loved by modern trek, the show went from "Section 31 is a bunch of war criminals trying to subvert the federation" to "section 31 is cool edgy black-badge agents"
Strange new worlds indicates that the augment ban extends to medical tech, Picard has the robot ban, Discovery has war crimes and "we censored the existence of a ship and everyone on it because it had a superweapon on board"
I loved DS9, ENT and ToS, it's new trek that angers me.
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u/ThePandaKnight 4d ago
I mean, of course, the federation is good, count how many times a Star Trek crew solves an epidemic or key issues for some civilisation in the cosmos, they've saved untold billions.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
they spent 14 years of requesting that their member states kill sapient beings for the crime of being robot.
It's the precedent, and the authorial intent. If the authors want to tell us that a country is good, and then they set the precedent of "we can request genocide," that's telling us what the authors think of genocide.
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u/Mazinderan 3d ago
I mean, I assume they were mainly just not making androids (the tech for which mostly seemed to have come through one guy who notably did not stop his private efforts) for 14 years, not continually having to kill them. Not to mention that, as shown multiple times by Data and Lore, deactivation is not death, so the mistake can be reversed. Also the vast majority of labor androids did not necessarily seem to be fully sapient.
Granted, putting a bunch of mentally disabled people into medically induced comas for 14 years also would not a good society make. It’s definitely a failing and a betrayal of what we thought the Federation and Starfleet were all about. Picard himself as much as says so.
Come to think of it, “army of android slave laborers” was the very prospect that lost Maddox his attempt to claim Data for experimentation back in “Measure of a Man,” so the fact that the Romulan evacuation crisis seems to have spurred the Federation to use androids for that very thing would already have made Data and Picard sad.
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago
Even if deactivation isn't death, are any of the random members of the federation going to be storing their deactivated robots?
14 years is a long time to keep a comatose robot around, especially if you don't know that the ban will be repealed.
"army of android slave laborers" has been canon since Voyager. The federation has always been okay with synthetic life being enslaved
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u/OwlOfJune 4d ago
Star Trek federation is generally good, but writers of that show have this warped view on how 'natural' paths are superior moral wise and have written them to be incredibly facist-alike towards some sapients and occasionally take very social darwinism to excuse themselves not helping out entire planets that died out.
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u/BastardofMelbourne 4d ago
With respect to androids, Starfleet is clearly presented as being in the wrong and the incident is one of many that turns Picard against Starfleet in season 1. Androids are also, to put it bluntly, terrifying in-universe. Even Data was compromised on more than one occasion, and when he was he took over the ship with little difficulty.
With respect to genetic modification, DS9 addresses the unfairness of a blanket prohibition on that kind of technology through Dr. Bashir, who was genetically modified without his consent by his parents because he was physically and mentally unimpressive at birth. Bashir nearly loses his medical license but is eventually allowed to stay in Starfleet. He later helps integrate several other augments into Starfleet's science efforts, with eventual success, showing that his example has loosened Starfleet's prohibitions on enlisting augments.
It's also stated in DS9 that genetic modification for the purposes of addressing medical defects is permitted and commonplace; only augmentation is prohibited, and it seems to be a prohibition that is publicly justified by a belief in the principle of fairness, although the true reason is obviously the Eugenics Wars. As for the author's intent, it's prohibited because Roddenberry considered eugenics a bad thing. This is the age-old Gattaca problem; do you let certain people genetically optimise themselves into supermen and leave behind whole subsets of society, or do you prohibit modification and unreasonably limit people's potential? There's no clear ethical answer.
The real burrs in Starfleet's ethics come from early instalments of TOS. In A Taste of Armageddon, Kirk quite casually states that he has instructed the Enterprise to destroy all life on the planet within two hours. He's bluffing, but the fact that this order seems to be a protocol that exists implies that the original Starfleet was much more about having a big stick rather than talking softly.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Strange New Worlds has it as a plot point across multiple episodes that they banned a species for medical gene-modding
For the whole "androids are terrifying" consider this: Vulcans have superhuman strength, psychic capabilities, and can be compromised by any sort of emotion.
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u/Kalavier 2d ago
Isn't that because they use it for everything, where federation uses it strictly on severe disabling defects during pregnancy? Bashir was healthy, just a slow learner/lower intelligence and not as physically impressive.
His parents bypassed his natural healthy state to make him better because they wanted to.
As for androids vs vulcans, androids are typically stronger and more durable.
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u/Mazinderan 3d ago
I assume General Order 24 (giving a starship captain the authority to order the sterilization of a planetary biosphere) was originally meant to be used in “otherwise what lives there will endanger the entire galaxy” situations, much like General Order 7 (whose only use that we see is to quarantine a planet inhabited by incredibly powerful telepaths who aren’t above abducting visitors, on penalty of death for anyone going there). Those are two of the anomalies of Starfleet practice that aren’t much mentioned after TOS, because they seem to go against the ethos. Though TOS was big on that Age of Sail notion of ship’s captains having plenipotentiary authority to deal with situations when the reality of distance makes contacting the higher-ups for orders impractical, so those are probably manifestations of that. “We don’t know what you’ll run into out there, so here’s a series of general orders authorizing you to do some crazy stuff if you need to. Don’t use that authority stupidly.”
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u/vadergeek 4d ago edited 4d ago
Cultures who seek to erode federation values, this necessitates Starfleet, an earth-based and human-controlled military faction within the Federation.
Starfleet HQ is on Earth, but "earth-based" is maybe a bit much. And they usually don't admit to being a military.
Don't forget that Section 31 tried to exterminate the Changelings.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Starfleet is packing antimatter weapons. They might not be a comparable to other in-setting militaries, but their ships are not civilian.
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u/vadergeek 4d ago
They claim to not be military, Roddenberry said they weren't military, it's an absurd claim but it is the way they're described.
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago
This just adds to my point.
Plenty of civilized cultures had militaries.
Very few good countries have "science vessels" packed with nuclear warheads. Which are totally not military and therefore it's not an act of war to park them above someone's planet. Despite the aforementioned nuclear warheads.
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u/Urbenmyth 4d ago
Honestly?
Even granting all of these as written, you still have a government that allows its citizens significantly more civil liberties and has been responsible for far less unjust killings of its citizens than any nation state currently existing on earth today.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Again, they had 14 years of "every member state has to kill its robotic population"
Being not worse than IRL countries doesn't hold up when you're trying to be the beacon of hope.
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u/RedDingo777 4d ago
No one is perfect
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Genocide isn't just an imperfection.
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u/RedDingo777 4d ago
Well that’s tough shit. You aren’t going to find a single power in the galaxy that doesn’t have an atrocity in their history. The difference is that the Federation has people who try to fix things instead of bury it to tout the party line.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
They're burying the existence of section 31.
Like, that's an established fact, Section 31 attempted genocide, and Starfleet hid that fact.
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u/RedDingo777 4d ago
Like I said before, no one’s perfect.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Plenty of countries haven't committed genocides.
Plenty of countries committed genocide, and then went to great lengths to make reparation
Starfleet committed genocide, and then covered it up for national security.
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u/RedDingo777 4d ago
Oh please name an actual country that doesn’t have blood on its hand…
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
post-apartheid South Africa
Switzerland
Monaco
Canada
Modern Guatemala
Ireland
None of these countries are currently and willingly covering up a genocide. Some of them have nasty histories, but none of them have a section-31 style secret police who can get away with mass-murder.
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u/Subject_Rub_6697 4d ago
Why must everything be evil why can't we just let the good galactic Empire be good.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
Because if Section 31 and the robot ban are permitted in a "good" nation, that sets some scary precidents.
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u/ThePandaKnight 4d ago
So... I did some research and the Synths on Mars? Not sentient, they're basically walking PCs, uh- well, guess the whole genocide angle is kinda gone.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
The synths on mars were walking PCs.
The synth ban targeted anything, even data-level androids and life-saving medical cybernetics.
Starfleet decided that because their PCs were acting up, they had to enforce a "destroy all synthetic life" crusade
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u/ThePandaKnight 4d ago
Yes, but they didn't destroy any data-level androids iirc (Data was already dead by then?); they stopped RESEARCH so there were no Soong-like android for a time - so there was no genocide.
Still a shitty thing, a bit different from deciding to massacre what's essentially people, it kind of shows that The Measure of a Man was taken in consideration in the Authorial Intent, avoiding making creatures like the Automated in Voyager etc.
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u/Animus_Infernus 4d ago
The ban, as it was described in Picard, included "federation societies have to kill all data-level androids."
Which is a request for textbook genocide, extended to countless cultures that weren't involved in the mars attack.
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u/Mazinderan 3d ago
But the only Data-level androids that we know to exist in the Federation at that time were the creations of Altan Soong and Bruce Maddox, most of them kept on a planet the Federation didn’t know about. There’s little indication that Data-level androids are common beyond that. Even the nonsapient ones were clearly modeled on Soong’s tech.
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago
When the robot ban was enacted, the synths on mars had just attempted active revolution. If my PC tried to seize the means of production against my will, I'd consider it self-aware.
So from the perspective of federation lawmakers, there were countless potentially self-aware androids scattered throughout their shipyards.
The moment it turned out that the mars synths weren't self-aware and that it was a hack, the robot ban was repealed.
So nobody passing the ban knew the robots weren't self-aware, the intent behind it was "we just had our slave-race revolt, lets kill them all."
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago
Also, a point you're forgetting:
The ban was enacted because of a terrorist attack supposedly planned and enacted by the "PC" synths.
When the species you're using as labourers does an action that requires self-awareness, it's generally a sign they're sapient. Deciding that they are responsible for an attack means treating them as more than just PCs.
When starfleet learned that a non-synth planned the terrorist attack, they ended the synth ban.
The point of the ban was to push back on something that, at the time, had all the hallmarks of a slave revolt. And starfleet responded to their labourers planning a revolt with "kill them all."
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u/ThePandaKnight 3d ago
Isn't the attack considered a programming error?
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u/Animus_Infernus 3d ago edited 3d ago
There's still a brainpower thing. The sheer amount of things that would have to go wrong for the synths to shut down martian security, firebomb mars, and destroy the shipyard.
If a "programming error" causes your computer to explode, that's one thing. If a "programming error" causes your computer to plan and carry out a coup then you have a conscious mind somewhere in the chain, either a hacker or a thinking synth.
When it turned out to be a hacker, starfleet rolled back the synth ban. Implying that, from the federation's perspective, the ban was targeting thinking synths.
ETA: I'm aware that nonthinking modern AIs can plan coups, that is because they are trained on the internet, which is full of conscious minds. Starfleet synths being trained on Zhat Vash anti-mars battle plans still constitutes "hacker."
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u/Serpentking04 2d ago
So i am not a trekkie but I feel like the authorial intent part is underminded by... well, the concept that it means that what what one author's Starfleet allows and does doesn't mean it is one the other's would have... like in the case of the robots.
I like Darker takes on the Federation don't get me wrong but... still.
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u/Animus_Infernus 2d ago
The point of my authorial intent remark is that the showwriters are very insistent that starfleet is good, but they write themselves into corners that make me wonder what they consider good.
The robot ban is part of Star Trek: Picard. The showwriters of Picard go to great lengths to reminisce about TNG era, and to drive in this idea of the federation as a beacon of hope. While brushing aside the ban as being "just a mistake."
Star Trek: Discovery has a season about how Starfleet ditched humanity during an apocalypse to save their own asses, and they're still the beacon of hope during that apocalypse.
Star Trek: Lower Decks has a major apocalyptic threat be solved by a no-oversight faction operating under permanent martial law.
There's a new film coming out about how the aforementioned no-oversight faction hired a cannibalistic fascist.
It's not just about having multiple authors, it's about the authors telling us "this is the post-scarcity goodguys" while showing us "cannibalistic space-Hitler gets her own film"
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u/Serpentking04 2d ago
Because that's a problem with that author not the entire concept.
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u/Animus_Infernus 2d ago
I'm not judging the concept, I'm judging the franchise.
Multiple shows, with multiple seasons and different authors, have turned the franchise into being about a dystopia.
In it's current state, my complaints are valid. Even if the "concept" would be the federation being good, the way that concept is shown leaves a lot to be desired. Judging a setting by its concept is the ultimate "tell not show." Focusing everything on a short snippet that can be as optimistic and perfect as imagination permits.
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u/dystariel 13h ago
It's pretty clear that a few of the writers are deep into the naturalistic fallacy, and that the desire to use future tech as an analogy for past/present social problems falls apart at the seams when those isolated stories become foundational lore for a multi decade franchise.
Humanity IRL is about to deal with some hard question as human embryo selection and genome editing mature.
We've been running on the "eugenics is fundamentally evil" model, based on the idea that human genetic editing equals inhumane breeding programs so far.
This simplified perspective starts to crack as we get to a point where we can eradicate/massively reduce the frequency of heaps of different health issues without messing with individual reproductive rights. It's still messy because of accessibility (there's embryo selection programs that claim to shift expected IQ up two standard deviations for ~30k USD right now iirc...)
But forcing people to endure Parkinson's/dementia/MS when we have the tech to just... Not have that happen?
The whole argument thing comes from a time when early, inhumane eugenics programs were fairly recent history.
Star Trek is old, and they were using trek tech as an analogy to show the perspective of their present on the issue.
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u/ramjetstream 4d ago
Just the fact that the Federation refuses to cure aging and causes billions to die needlessly makes them cartoonishly evil
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u/BardicLasher 4d ago
The augment ban isn't just about the tyrants. The big reason they need to ban augments is an arms race. Julian Bashir was a kid with a severe learning disability who got augmented and is now literally the best doctor of his age in the federation. They make a point that he's up for awards against people in their 50s and 60s while he's 30-ish. I don't remember what season the awards were, but he's 27-34 in the show. And if this is what augments can do, then anyone who is NOT augmented is at a significant disadvantage to those who is. If augmenting becomes allowed, it's simply the best idea for everyone to get augmented as soon as possible, because how are you supposed to be skilled in any field if there's a competitor who has a literal superpower to do it? Now, this battle a bit with multispecies multiculturalism (Vulcans are at significant advantages over humans and most other species we know in many, many ways), but the fact remains that if augments are freely allowed in Starfleet, only augments will make it through the Academy.
I'm not going to defend the other two. The robot ban was a completely terrible overreaction, and while having a secret intelligence/black ops organization like Section 31 has merits, we repeatedly see that Section 31 is completely fucked up.
All that said, I don't think this qualifies the Federation as a dystopia. While there are significant flaws, the injustice and suffering simply isn't widespread enough, and the vast majority of people are doing quite well under the UFP. The Federation has serious flaws, certainly, and there's serious corruption issues amongst the admiralty, but it's still a mostly good, mostly benevolent organization that tries to do its best and just isn't perfect about it.