Synopsis
Remember back in "The Naked Time," the Enterprise was thrown back in time a bit by excessive warp speed. This was used (by my count) three more times: "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," "Assignment: Earth" (TOS 2x26), and The Voyage Home.
On this occasion, time travel was unintentional, and the Enterprise is spotted on Air Force radar. A jet is scrambled to investigate, and the Enterprise accidentally destroys it with its tractor. They beam the pilot aboard, and get caught in a conundrum: do they send USAF Captain John Christopher back to Earth, knowing he knows the future? Worse, it turns out Christopher's son will be an astronaut himself, so they can't bring Christopher back to the future.
They decide they need to destroy all physical evidence of their presence, so Kirk and Sulu snoop around an Air Force base looking for computer tapes and film negatives. They get caught by an MP, who also gets accidentally beamed up to the Enterprise. Then Kirk is captured by the base commander. That one's quickly resolved, as Christopher, Spock, and Sulu beam down and rescue him.
At this point the episode's logic gets a bit fuzzy. Spock decides they can use the high-warp slingshot business to go forward in time too, and while time traveling, they use the transporter to swap Christopher and the MP for their past selves. Maybe this is its own little time loop, but I can't quite figure how. Regardless, the Enterprise makes it back to their present and Starfleet still exists, so whatever.
Commentary
I'm actually glad Star Trek opened the time travel box by appreciating its absurdity. This episode doesn't hold a candle to "Time's Arrow" (TNG 5x26/6x01) or "Trials and Tribble-ations" (DS9 5x06)—or The Voyage Home for that matter—but I still liked it.
Time travel is a strange narrative conceit. We'll get to look at a lot of different angles on it, from the deadly serious ("The City on the Edge of Forever," TOS 1x28), to pointed social commentary ("Past Tense," DS9 3x11/3x12), to the fascinating ("Year of Hell," VOY 4x08/4x09), to the heart-wrenching ("The Visitor," DS9 4x03), to just taking a long look at the road before and the road beyond ("All Good Things," TNG 7x25/7x26).
But right now we're having fun. So sit back and revel in it.
I will pose one question for you, though: Would the average zoomer recognize cellulose tape as computer memory or photographic film? What about people two hundred years in the future?
Well... They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don't have a lot of privacy. It's necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.
So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can't be stopped.
It seems to me, the dangers are more like...
Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.
It'll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Then yes there's EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I'm pretty confident the Lemmy developers won't give them the time of day.